Wondering :)

The answer is... it depends. It depends on whether your thief is wearing armour or not. Armour reduces thieving skills, so that boost above 100% will come in handy in certain circumstances.

Are you sure about this? In IWD2 this happened but I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about IWD1. In IWD1 if you had a fighter/thief wearing plate armour, they could only use the search skill. Pickpocket, hide, disarm trap and open lock were all disabled until you removed the armour.

@OP

I did and IWD1 walkthrough and my only thief was a triple class fighter/thief/mage. Every time I got a level in thief, i would put 10 points in search, the other 10 in open lock and I never had a problem with traps or locks throughout the game. Like 10 years ago when I played my disc version of the game, I vaguely remember my dual classed fighter/thief had trouble with some locks when I was putting 5 points into the 4 skills every level, but when you don't need to boost it further, I'm not sure what the cut off is. Now, I tend to max out search and open lock and dump the rest of the points into hide, pickpocket I never use cos I hate savescumming.
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My personal feelings on this are they implemented the consequences of a failed pick pocket so poorly that I have no issue save-scumming when I pick pocket. If I'm in a real 'roleplay' mood, I'll reload after a failure but no longer attempt to PP the NPC. But where they implemented a straight up NPC-goes-hostile when you fail, and this can sometimes lead to being a game ender, I don't really have too many issues with save-scumming for the pick pocket win most of the time.

Totally agree with you and IWD isn't the only game that had this problem. Ever had this experience in Fallout? An NPC pickpockets you, tough luck, you pickpocket an NPC and everyone in the vicinity is after your blood. Really is ridiculous.

In this case, I understand why people save-scum but I just don't find it fun and in IWD's case, Money is no problem in the game so anything can be bought. I'm not sure if there's any point in the game where you need to pickpocket to get a special item. I know you can get a ring of protection from orrick or the innkeeper while it helps with the early game, it really isn't necessary. If I really want a specific item, I'd rather use a code than constant reloads through pickpocket.

NOTE: I did save-scum to get the returning bullet of flame from Lord Pyros in IWD2

This OP has a history of NOT being clear on which game he/she is talking about over many questions, so I don't see how you can be sure. You may be right, but you cannot be sure.

The OP's original question was about thieving skills being at 100%. IWD2 has a skill point system but it isn't expressed in percentages (only points allocated) whereas IWD1's is so I assumed he/she was talking about IWD1.

But yeah, it would help if the OP told us which game they were referring to :P

So yeah I just own IWD1 atm :)

I did some experimenting on my fighter/thief. I noticed i cant detect traps or open locks with armor higher than studded leather. Havent got any elven chain yet.

I also noticed my detect traps and pick locks skills are the same regardless or wearing leather vs. studded leather.

Yeah, that's the vanilla game. With mods you can choose the default behavior or the 3rd edition rules behavior, which gives you an increasing penalty to the skills with increasingly heavy armor.

*edit* Similarly, if memory serves, mages can use shields without penalty in the default game, but cast in armor. With mods you can change that to (again) a 3rd edition approximation in which heavier armor will incur an increasingly large chance of casting failure (as will shields).

Cool, thanks. I'm going with very basic mods for first play through but thanks for the tip. Fixes, wide screen, combat sounds, improved sound quality, stuff like that is the mods i'm using.

That's a great way to go about it. I've played through IWD more than 2 dozen times, so I heavily mod the game now to keep it fresh and interesting (and also for ease of use and to avid the more tedious aspects).

Excuse me: how did you create a multiclassed character in IWD1? Did you just dual class him twice? It was my understanding that there was no multi-classing in IWD.

Human characters cannot multiclass. They can only dual class (and some combinations are not allowed). And you can only have a maximum of two classes: no dual classing twice. You can choose to dual class any time, but once you do you can never advance in the original class again.

Demi-human characters can only multiclass. They cannot dual class (and depending on the race, they're restricted to only certain multiclass combinations). You choose to be a multiclass character at character creation and you divide your XP between all classes for the entire career of the character.

Coelocanth said it perfectly. Just pick any race other than human for multi-class characters. In IWD2 there's no multi-classes, just class levels. IWD and IWD2 have different rules so you may have mixed them up.