I think the thief is hated because he got way better in 3E.

So, in essence, to the OSR antithief lobby, I guess they seem like collaborators ? 

Really, although I dislike the way they did it (the skill system is a bolt on kludge, and very finicky to keep track of), 3E does make useful thieves that are about as usefully unrealistic/heroically exaggerated as the other classes from level one; which, as I've noted, is one hell of an improvement. 

In fact, I like playing thieves in 3E (and 3.5); but then, I also think that in many ways, 3E is the logical goal of the style of gaming that D&D got its base from:  hard core miniature and board gaming players; which includes me...and Gygax and arneson, FWIW.  My main complaint is that unless one plays it all the time, the rules get foggy in ones head, and rules spotting and searching really starts to get in the way of play.  Kind of like Star fleet battles, advanced squad leader, and vi. ( I pretty much had to give up playing SFB when I went into grad school, because there wasn't room for both.....not time, room. As in, my hard drive was over full. )

That said, the best parts of 3E for the thief are really twofold: feats, and not starting off as a bumbling fool.  The implementation of skills is lacking, but on the whole, it makes thieves (excuse me: Rogues) quite effective out the gate -sure they have corresponding gaps, but that's what being a specialist is all about.   And feats are one of the big things I like best about 3E. Really, I think that but for feat bloat, the feat system could absorb the skill system, and give a very nice system for  customizing classes. Wonder what that could offer to a rules lite or )D&D sensibility style set of rules.

Okay, that's enough for tonight.  BTW, hello to the new readers and commenters !  Nice to get an anonymous comment that isn't tying to sell me viagra.... ;)

The thief is, however, incompetent

So, what is the problem with the thief ?  Well, simply put, except for climbing, they suck at about everything thiefy. Which meant, under ODD&ADD1, to have any hope of not getting your hand cut off the first time you try to pick a pocket, and get caught, you end up needing to play a non-human thief with an 18 dex.  They do excell at backstabbing, true, but just try and get into position by being bold....or moving.  No, you pretty much have to mail yourself to your intended victim and hope that he is facing the other way when you burst out.  You could climb a wall, and wait for someone to walk below you, I suppose (piercer costume optional), and hope that they aren't looking up, cause with a 10% success chance, you are not going to be hidden; and with 1d6 hit points, you ain't gonna get as second chance.

See, the problem isn't that the thief broke D&D, it's that the thief is broken.  Its a great addition to D&D conceptually, and in keeping with a start small grow tall approach to character development, but it seems like it is the only class that got saddled with a truly untrained first level. Look....the fighter can hit a random peasant 50% of the time, right ?  The Mage can put him to sleep.....the cleric ...well, strictly speaking the cleric can't cast a spell, but he still has a good chance of smashing his head in or, even better, if its an undead peasant, making him run away. The thief ? He can...ummmm....hide from him one time in ten; or alternately, sneak past or pick his pocket one time in five.   He could, to be fair, hear him pretty well.

So, the solution we used back in the day was this: a first level thief started with a base chance equal to 30% +/- 5% per dex point above 14 or below 7.  Then, simply add the greyhawk percentages at each level, incldung the first.  A non-thief could try any of them, but only using one half the base number.  A thief using the wrong armor simply lost all this level bonuses. Done. 

It gave a nimble thief about a 50/50 chance of success for most thiefy things - not great, but way more in line with the other classes, who are moderately pathetic at level 1, as well. 

Nowadays, for the basic thief skills* I use a modified quickNez stat check:
4d6 roll<=dex+level to succeed. 
Works great, and the 4d6 bell curve is a nice change that allows higher level or more nimble thieves less variability than (say) a d20 roll.  I still use 1d4 for HP  - one should be able to clean the slimy little sneak's clock, after all  - possibly what made him turn to theft in the first place....and so the great circle of life continues.



* picklock, disarm trap, pick pocket, sneak, hide.  I exclude climb  as a no fail with the right tools; and search as it makes for lazy players -which I note isn't something a thief does in OD&D anyhow.

The Thief is not guilty, part 3

So, I wanted to post some reviews, and I noticed that a common theme was: "great, except for the idiosyncratic refusal to include the Thief class".  So, heres my final(ish) thoughts on that.

This belief in the neccessoity for exclusion of the thief is puzzling, and it seems to be part of the OSR zeitgeist; the reasons range from the thief not being in the original three books, through them being a self referential class that creates the challeneges it is supposed to deal with, through being responsible for the glut of skills and feats of later editions.  Support or rejection of this idea seems foundational to the whole bubbling stew of the OSR.  So, since the thief excluders are wrong,  guess which side I'm on?


I've discussed (ranted about) these arguments before, expressing my opinion that they are, indeed, quantifiable as the merest hooie*. To sum up:

1. the number of people who started D&D with only the original 3 book set and not greyhawk either at the same time or immediately thereafter is vanishingly small and as such, it doesn;t represent a change of direction with regard to D&D as an RPG.
2. Gary wrote Greyhawk (well, yes with others) and obviously included the thief intentionally in his campaign, and thus the gygaxian vision of D&D; QED for the purists, I think . 
3. Fighters and the attempt to de-vanilla-ize them via weapon proficiencies and skill based subclasses is, in my obviously self inflated opinion, the real cause of the skillsystems and sorcery style of play, not thieves.  Note that GG resisted weapon proficiencies for quite a while as a bad idea that would lead to skill systems.
3. Its soooooooo swords and sorcery. Plus, Bilbo.

So, anything new ?  Well, yes, and here is my core argument.  
The thief is what made D&D more than just a skirmish miniatures game. 

We all know that it began as one -and that now it isn't just one.  A main difference between a skirmish wargame and the ur-RPG is this: Skirmish games  often are at the scale of the one figure = one man, but the player is still a disembodied commander moving pieces around, and all pieces are judged by their resource value in winning the game; an RPG changes the scale to one figure = you, and you alone. Playing a single fighter was still something that one could do in a skirmish game.  Fighters killed other units, Mages were artillery, and clerics were either recovery units or specialized anti -undead killers.
The thief was a big deal because as a class it had no useful place on the battlefield of a skirmish wargame, whatsover.

Really ?  Well, almost none of the thief skillset is useful in a skirmish -playing one is a waste of time.  Scouting is irrelevant on a real sand table, especially given the rules of that time period, and swiping was even less useful. Climbing and sneaking are options, but since one cannot do anything useful, so what ? Reading scrolls ?  Play an apprentice wizard. Possibly they could eliminate commanders and such, but that was really the role of assassins, a type specifically included in the original skirmish model of D&D.

Why then, amidst all the other detail of Greyhawk, most of which could simply be additions to a skirmish game is a useless unit specifically included ?

Because the thief had every utility in the dungeon game,  and the dungeon game created the role playing experience; and also, the thief in many ways defined the nature of the adventurer.  Remember, 1973.  Fantasy models are  not what they are today.  Heroes were sneaks as much as brawlers, often antiheroesm and in many ways, that is what made them a literary character, rather than the subject of a soldierly autobiography.  They solved puzzles, got into tight scrapes and conflicts by themselves; this I see as the real genesis of roleplaying.

So, given that, we see that the thief is the character of the dungeon crawl, and from there the Urban adventure or the indoor raid.  And those are the types of settings that set D&D apart from the skirmish game.  And thus...the father of the RPG, the causus bellum, the missing link -the neccessary part of the final result. 

No thieves =no role playing games. 

So, suck it up*, Grognardia and all you reactionary revisionists* ! Apologise to the thief right now ! Take him to lunch and make it your treat; you may as well, you'll be paying for it either way .





* I say this in the most loving caring  and compassionate manner possible..;)

The Thief Is NOT Guilty ! (part 2)

So, after a surprising amount of thought, and even more unsurprising amounts of dawdling (and working), I’ve decided to sum up my long hanging discussion on thieves.

In my imperial manner, I will ignore almost all of the arguments I previously said I’d discuss, and focus on two points: a discussion of one particular complaint, and one argument in favor not advanced before. Here goes the first part.

No, 'twas proficiency that killed the beast……

It is said that Thieves introduced D&D to the long painful slide into skill systems, and thus roll-playing rather than role playing, and , to those of us who care, this is a most damming accusation, for the heinousness of skillsystems in D&D  is true, to the extent that skills in almost all later editions are a train wreck, and promote the “roll to resolve” mindset for play. And when I say “train wreck", I mean it. Skills from 1E onwards just didn't work or were too clumsy for words.
Skills are and always were a bolt-on that really didn't add much. So, this, then, is what the thief stands accused of: nothing less than striking a  conceptual backstab to the rules of D&D at their  very birth birth in Greyhawk. A wound that has ulcerated and bled more each edition, until the entire structure of the game seems to be half intended to support it, as with some terrible parasite.  Were the thiefs abilities truly the wound that could not heal ?  A dolorous stroke to the system? No good readers, I say it is not. For while the skill systems of D&D are an abomination, they are not the thieves fault. No! Not the thief, I say. It was NOT the humble thief that struck the blow which we see now killing the colossus.  Then Who?  There ! He stands before you brazenly showing his known weapon proficiencies and specializations! The Fighter! THE FIGHTER !(Gasps from the crowd).

 How is this so ?  I will say, it was the lust for weapons and proficiency and clarification that birthed the blood-sucking tabeworm of dispair and confusion that is has grown, leviathan like, into the current skill systems.  But how you ask ?  Surely the thief brought skills into being, not the fighter ? No, lean close and I'll tell you the truth. (san loss =1/3-18)

Put aside the argument that the thieves “skills” are in fact class talents, and poorly explained at birth – and rather consider that the skill system as it exists, grew directly from the perceived need for weapons proficiency in D&D. See, back in the day, the argument was something like this;

• 1. We have limits of weapon use by class, but not within fighters
• 2. A fighter can thus use any imaginable weapon at all
• 3. The limits on non-fighters are assumed to be due to lack of training
• 4. If so, non-class weapons aren't impossible to use (do they burn us?) but rather usable poorly and at a penalty and
• 5. Fighters should have limits on weapons use, too, since knowledge of all weapons is clearly unbalancing or (your pick) unrealistic.

Now, I can't recall the exact source, but it might have been in the dragon, where EGG argued against weapon proficiencies for the exact reasons stated above: fighters should be able to grab anything, and class limits were no wonkier than armor limits or spell casting.

 “Weapon proficiency” was, however a constant source of variants everywhere, and at some point, EGG himself caved , insofar as it became official in the PH. Then came the cries for specialization –surely we need the ability to be insanely (here it is) SKILLED with less weapons if we are willing to limit the total number of slots. So, unfortunately, UA included weapons specialization that allowed trading slots for bonuses. At some point, I think it was the dragon in the AD&D era; we have “non-weapon proficiencies” which allow trading weapon slots for …other….skills! And by 2E it was a huge hodgepodge of variants and semi-official rulings accreted on the PH weapon proficiencies. So it was “improved” and regularized, and made completely core book official; and, it sucked, too. (Truth in advertising: I never liked 2E all that much)

Now, at some point, and I think it must have been just prior to 2E, or early on, at least, some clever Nelly came along and said some fateful words: “Hey, look, since thieves use skills and proficiencies, and now so does everyone, perhaps we should make them all work together  ? “; or at least that what it sounded like. And thus, when 3E came along with its rules heavy agenda we discovered that what the clever Nelly said was actually:

"I have an unresolved need for order and symmetry in my life, which is far more important than any consideration of rules intent or play, so I’m going to bollux up the thieves because they make me itch. And, I’m going to claim it’s more modern and advanced to have a defined skills system just to make it superficially acceptable , but mainly I want to do this to make DocGrognard's head explode in frustration ten years from now when he tries to play a 3.5 edition Thief" 

So, yes, Skills have been one of the banes of later edition D&D, but it isn't the thieves fault. It’s those damned “non-weapon Proficiencies.” And the bean counter fighter players who just HAD to know if they could use a three headed Battle parang, and if they used it in both hands, did it hit harder? Thanks dudes.

NEXT: Why the thief defined and created D&D as a role playing game. No, really.

Postscript, because I can.
I really don't know where the idea came from that if thieves could sneak, and then no-one else could. At least in the LBBGHBMEW games, we seemed to have assumed that sneak (for example) was ninja style sneaking, and hiding in shadows was batmanesque.

Actually, what we also assumed was that first level thieves suck and are unplayable as anything but muggers (backstab + loot); except for climb, every other “skill” was absurdly low. Which usually meant house rules to make them useful, which invariably included some notice of what they meant?

Why one old fart thinks another bunch of old farts are Wrong about the Thief in OD&D, part 1

Okay, Thieves. For Jeff and James, at the very least.
So, when I first started reading OSR blogs –long before I jumped in, I gradually realized that there was some sort of bias against thieves as part of original D&D. This was absolutely surprising, so I delved and found some reasoning behind this mean awful persecutory bias against the poor humble thief. Which, in case you haven’t realized, Is Wrong, and I say this having played back then. Which pretty much proves my point.
I was tempted to just end the post there, but it did occur to me that some of you very skeptical types may not be convinced by my all too persuasive appeal to my authority, so for you, I’ll continue.
Several arguments against the thief have been put forth, and these I think are the core:
1. It wasn’t in the first LBB(little brown books, Oe D&D) set

2. Something about not being true to the S&S roots of D&D

3. They are self justifying as a class

4. They caused the monstrosity that is the skill system that has been bolted on to D&D, and thus destroyed at least two generations of gamers by not letting them act like adventurers and instead just roll dice and add skill numbers to solve problems. (Yes, I have opinions about the 3/3.5 skill system, did you notice ?)

So, I’ll take these in some kind of order, across several posts. Then I’ll probably finish with a screed about how important the thief is to D&D. By which point, I expect that everyone will be converted to my opinion, right ? Jeff ? James ? Hello?

Okay, first: Thieves weren’t in the original D&D. I note in advance that this is all probably largely a straw man argument, as I really don't see the “wasn’t in LBB” argument being passed around very much and seldom more than casually. However, since this is my Blog, and my lunch hour, I’ll cop the low hanging fruit if I want to…
Yes, they weren’t in the LBB –not showing up until Greyhawk, as we all know. So they fail the Ur-test, which is a test of…..well, purity. Is it the original vision or not. the thief is not doctrinally pure, in other words. NO, I think that this is a bit of an error, and part of that is that it does set the OSR (Old School Revival/Renaissance/whatever) to look like a bit of a purity patrol; please note that I don't agree that OSR=Purity patrol, at all. But, this kind of appeal doesn’t help things. That's a tangent, though, so onward.

I think the argument of inclusion (or not) is meaningless for several reasons. First, GH(Greyhawk) showed up pretty much concurrently with the LBB set for at least 90% of the post 1st print players (me); I got LBB after I had already skimmed thru GH at the local store –and I went back and bought it at the first possible opportunity. (interestingly, BM(Blackmoor) was almost impossible to get for quite a while. I think I finally got a copy after GD&H came out). It fit hand in glove with the LBB rules – I bought LBB because I was a miniature gamer, but I bought GH because of the potential for it to make a minis supplement something more. And that was D&D the RPG.

Also, and I think this is important, I think its pretty clear that EGG always intended these rules to be part of D&D – but they are one of the areas of detail that he and DA differed on; so, the two additional campaign supplements. I’d also note that DA’s campaign specifically had thief types in its BM the Ur-campaign incarnation; that they weren’t included in Blackmoor the supplement is probably more due to avoiding repetition than anything else. I’d also argue (and I’ll do so later at more length), that D&D wasn’t differentiated from a miniatures game before Greyhawk…and the thief.

So, next. Probably the self justification issue and why It Is Wrong; or maybe the S&S angle. Or maybe another Traveller rant. Stay tuned….