after playing through the normal game with my thief, i started going through TOB. To my surprise, something is buggy with my thief as he cannot steal from stores and merchants any more. The merchants have a stealing option, my thief is maxed with pickpocket at his level 285, and not wearing armor, and i cannot steal from any merchants or stores where stealing is allowed. 100% detected when trying to steal any item.

Not sure if his skill was bugged out when starting TOB or not, it shows fine, but he just cannot steal from stores and merchants any more, has 100% chance to be caught.

Certain shops are flagged as "unstealable" using an internal flag (e.g. Ribald's shop). These shops cannot be stolen from, regardless of the thief's skill level.

unstealable shops don't let you steal, period, there isnt any steal mechanism or icon that will let you do it, so yes, you can't steal from certain shops because you aren't able to steal from them. That isn't my problem. My problem was stealing from shops that you CAN steal from.

Turns out, your stealing gets buggy after you hit like 250 stealing when it resets and carries over starting at 0, so my 280 stealing is actually 30 stealing, which isn't letting me steal from shops. So had to do a work around and make up a quick duplicate character and set my stealing to 220ish so it doesn't go over the 250 reset mark., or 255 mark, what ever it is.

Now i can steal again.

For those with the original game, don't raise your pickpicket over 220ish or you'll run into this problem. None of your other thief skills either. Keep them max at about 220ish.

Is this Throne of Bhaal (2001) or the Throne of Bhaal accessible as one of three choices in BG2: Enhanced Edition? Your last sentence could be read to mean this is only in the 2001 release, but I'd like to be clear whether this problem is present in the Enhanced Editions too.

from other posts this isn't a problem in the EE edition due to the different programming language of the game. The original game and TOB had old programming code language that had that old 255 limit problem that old games and programming language had. From what people have said EE edition doesn't have this old restriction so it should be perfectly fine in EE edition with this problem.

Trust me. "Old programming languages" can handle numbers greater than 255.

The issue isn't a programming language, but rather a coding mistake (though the nature of this bug suggests that the game was coded in assembly, C, or C++). What's happening here is that, for whatever reason, the game only looks at the least significant byte (which, on a little-endian CPU like x86, is stored first) of the character's pickpocket skill when checking to see if a pickpocket attempt succeeds.

In assembly language, the code might look like:
mov AL, pickpocket_chance ; should be AX, not AL

In C/C++, it would look something like
unsigned char temp = pickpocked chance // should be at least a short, not a char

(Although, for the C/C++ example, it might be hidden in some complex expression with an unexpected automatic type conversion somewhere.)

For the Enhanced Edition, Beamdog probably just found this line of code and fixed it; no need to rewrite the entire game in a different language to fix this bug.

I've got BG and BG2 on Switch and been eager to try them, but life's been crazy. It's about to start slowing down a lot for the summer, so many I'll get into it again. Always interested to see old code vs new code and how it shakes out.