Okay, lockpicking is rather simple once you get the hang of it here's what you do. you put the pick under the tumblers and then lightly but hard enough they actually move, you hit them so they go up once they are at the top press the action button. TIMING IS THE KEY. If you press the action button to soon or too late, the tumbler will come down and smash the pick. you can change strengths of hitting the tumbler depending on how quickly you move the pick up. Now, if this all seems difficult here is a much easier but rather expensive technique, buy a lot of lock picks and repeatedly press the auto pick button this will be located during the lockpick mini game it should say at the bottom what button to press to do it. Simply keep pressing the button until it works, however, every time it doesnt the pick will break so keep a lot of picks on you. When you are a high enough level you can do Nocturnal's mission and get the skeleton key (im sorry i dont remeber the level you have to be) once you get that like Skyrim the pick is unbreakable so you can just auto pick whenever you want and it wont break. doing that saved me a lot of frustration.
Persuasion, it's easy once you know what to do. You simply find out what the person likes and hates, to do this simply move the selection icon around the wheel and the things that give the person a smile, the person likes. The bigger of the 2 smiles is what he/she likes best, the smaller is a sorta like. A small scowl is something they dislike and the look they give you that makes it seem like you brutally killed their family and then raped his/her dog to death is what they hate. Inside the wheel segments there will be yellow fillings. These move each time you make a selection. The biggest one does the most so it's best to get this is one of the smile segements as it will do a lot of good instead of take away. It's the same thing with the second biggest. Then the little ones do the least so it's best to try and get those to the disliked things. It'll take some time but eventually you will manage to master the wheel as I did. I'm not sure if you have to have a high enough persuasion level, but sometimes there is a thing under the wheel that says push a certain button and the fillings will shift, i think the exact wording is move wheel. that'll be beneficial because it can help you if you messed up and if you use it right it helps strategically. Once you get them to a high enough dispositon or diposition, or whatever the word is, then the game will stop and it'll say disposition maxed. and then you've fully persuaded them and can get any info you want. or whatever the game will let you get.
Hope this helps, Oblivion frustrated me at first also, but now i'm a pretty bad ass leader of everything.
