I'd suggest allowing the creation of locks and keys for doors and chests, and let people duplicate keys to give to their friends, and have the crafter's stats affect the lock's complexity (to make it harder on thieves trying to duplicate keys), but also letting thieves somehow try to duplicate keys. The way AD&D 2, for example, did it, was by letting thieves make wax pads out of beeswax with daggers, and then press a key into that to get an impression of it. Then it let them use a keymaking set to try to make a cheap knockoff key based on the impression. (Wax pads and keymaking sets were in the AD&D 2 Complete Thief's Handbook, I don't know if they're in later editions of AD&D)
Presumably players could keep keys on a keyring (and label them) and thieves could try to stealthily get an impression of a key with a wax pad without being noticed, comparing stats and rolling random numbers. I wouldn't let keys get stolen though, that would be even worse than what we have now, since it'd let the thieves lock everyone out of their houses.
That's all I'll say since I figure you'd probably want to design the system yourself anyways (even though I had written out an entire post with a design for it), if you even go this route.
by Trafalgar » Fri Jun 12, 2009 5:50 am 
