D&D General Are lockpicking tools legal in your fantasy world?

[pogre]

Depends if your PC looks rich enough for the guard catching you to gain a sizable bribe! Otherwise, the guard just takes the tools to use later.

 

[tetrasodium]

Medieval Keys tended to look like picks and Medieval Locks were mostly of the ward type, where the key has a specific configuration to fit the wards. Those locks are of course made by hand by Locksmiths who probably know their own designs and know who they sold the key to.

Its likely that the relevant laws would be about protecting the ward and key patterns of Master Locksmiths rather than outlawing lock picks, the Watch would be suspicious if someone was carrying around a set of lock picks to doorsa that they did not have permission to access

I know in modern legal codes while lockpicks are not illegal per se possessing any item for the purpose of commiting a crime is

Warded picks look very different from the normal ones you tend to see from hollywood or a simple search for lockpicks. We don't use warded locks for much these days (with good reason) but here is a picture of a (very) cheap modern warded lock with its key & a set of warded picks

Spoiler

Keys got much more crude to the point that a lot of the very simple but decorative keys google will show for skeleton key are probably just old keys or copies of them. That simplicity also made it possible to do things like carve a copy of a key after eyeballing it at a distance.

 

[BrassDragon]

Until recent advances, locks didn't have perfectly engineered tight fitting microscopic components so I imagine thieves would just carry tools that looked like carpenters, iron workers or maybe clockmaker tools. That would suffice to attack most locks, hinges, bolts or even mountings effectively (remember, the lock is just one weak point to exploit) and if the reeve looks at your bag, it might not register as anything suspicious.