Procedural Lockpicking

Arkhein asked how to make lockpicking interesting.  Here's my attempt:

Your thief knows four ways to manipulate locks:

• Bump
• Probe
• Rake
• Twist

And that's it.  She knows the wrong actions might Jam the lock permanently preventing it from being picked or opened with a key.  She also knows some locks have a Trap with bad things happening to those that set it off by failing to pick properly.

But maybe she also knows you never Bump a Dwarven lock, ever.  And you never start a brass lock with a Twist.  And maybe as she gains experience (levels) she can Bump and still recompose herself when she realizes that was the wrong thing to do.

In this picture, a correct choice will move along the grey track to the next choice.  A wrong choice will result in the lock feeling stiff (a warning) and the thief can either choose the correct action from there or face the consequences.

A DM might have a whole folder full of locks-- different difficulties, different makes. The players would not see these images, but hear a description-- "It is a heavy brass lock, with a D inscribed on it."


Update: I got all excited this morning because I woke up with what I thought was a solution to generating these easily and then I realized Zak had already proposed it in his comment. Anyway, yeah, assign a number to each of the lockpicking verbs, the "moves," roll 3d4 and the results tell you which the thief has to use.  Use dice in a color progression and you know the order the lock requires them in:

So, for that roll, starting from white we get Rake, Probe, Bump, Bump.  But that just gives us a very simple (and unforgiving) lock that assumes it jams if the thief uses the wrong verb.  To complicate this, it seems like it depends on how common you want traps to be.  On a wrong move by the player, we might then roll a 1d6 and a 5=jammed, a 6=trapped, and the other numbers indicate a move to avoid jamming: "Oh, she was supposed to Bump and didn't, now she can salvage this attempt with a Rake otherwise it Jams."

But, all this fiddling is not getting us much for the player above just rolling a 25 on d%, so it would be essential that you as DM:

• Have locks of certain types, that players can gain expertise on.  This is contradictory to our method of generation, but if you say that all brass locks start with Probe, you could then just randomly determine the other tumblers for that lock.
•  Give some kind of advantages with level, that would allow for some skill at the game.  Like "one free get out of a Jam," or "Reveal the move on one tumbler in any lock."

Zombiecowboy asked about Bump and Rake.  The verbs here are just abstractions, but abstractions that are conceivably related to lockpicking so you can hang your roleplaying on them (those two provisions bulletpointed above.  You could use any verbs that would help you do this in your world.  I actually needed a fourth verb and just looked at the lockpicking page on Wikipedia to find "rake." But Pry, Tap, and Spin could work just as well.