I think you are taking my confusion as complaining. Like the title of the thread says, I am referring to the 3rd level archetypes provided to the class. Thief/assassin/arcanetrickster. Skills such as second-story work go against the character iam trying to build. Do I just ignore that part of the archetype? The character is supposed to be a geeky lockpicker who really enjoys the problem solving of traps, not a wall scaling, pocket picking thief who just happens to be good at locks/traps. A lot of great insight here.
I would consider The New Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron
Mark of warding dwarf race which is House Kundarak with
smith tools proficiency + "Master of Locks" ability (When you make an Intelligence (History), Intelligence (Investigation), or Thieves’ Tools check involving lock and trap mechanisms, you can roll one Intuition die, a d4, and add the number rolled to the ability check.) and possibly double down on that with the
background House Agent (Kundarak) ->
thieves tools and tinker’s tools. Then House Kundarak is just what ever guild you and your GM agree it is.
This
frees up your actual class to be what ever makes since to you and not need to be a "rogue" unless you so chose. With a primary Archetype of dwarf locksmith you could easily be
Forge Domain Cleric, Champion Fighter as dwarf being a dwarf and having the locksmith part covered,
Rogue Inquisitive rooting out secret and traps keeping eye out both for safety but also out of prelesional curiosity (if you want to keep the "rogue" style play), a
Drunken Master Monk (because as much as dwarfs drink you could have just learned to fight in bars in your natural state, and this means your an unarmored fighter instead of a locksmith in armor with combat skill for some reason. This is my favorite based on your first description the race and background cover your locksmith goals and essentially your class is your usually drunk and better fighter than people expect. lol it also has access to many rogue abilities, some identical, for a similar type of play trading martial arts attack die and multiple attacks instead of backstab.)