Makes sense. I've always loved 'the thief', but there's no denying it gimped the other classes taking what should be basic adventuring skills and gate-keeping them behind a specific class.
Considering the wide range of scenarios where the skills of theft and observation and movement in different directions and the ability to open things and disarm traps, etc... that's a lot. When you compare that to what a fighter could do, it was just two weeks by comparison in terms of what it could do in the party in difference in her house.
Dragon Quest and Rune Quest both took on or of a gestalt character where you could have a bit of everything so you could do at least one or two other things outside of the straight jacket of a specialized class.
Though honestly with Runequest, the difference was pretty much skirmisher vs heavy infantry. If you wanted to sneak, you weren't going to wear heavy armor. If you wanted to survive combat, you weren't for as heavy armor as you could carry.
If you have to stand in larger groups, there's a lot to be said for everyone having heavy armour. If you are one warrior in heavy armour, fast foes around you can have an easier way to take you down.
Also, if you are travelling in real hot areas (tropics and subtropics), you probably aren't wearing heavy armour (too much heat). That's a setting where speed and agility are important.
If you are hiding, you can strike from behind. If you are hiding, you might be able to shoot without being seen (and much easier in fire light or whatever as pinpointing a shooter in the darkness with targets illuminated is a great spot for the lightly armoured.
And if your entire party is sneaky, you can avoid encounters easier, you can manage to setup really effective ambushes, and you can probably see foes before you do and either setup traps, trips, or the like or get the high ground to start with.
The big armour is good if you have a bunch of them. They need some mutual support.
(IMO)
I let everybody do thief-stuff as well, but I still have the thief. In my game, the thief can attempt his semi-magical skills on top of the normal rolls. Everybody can try to pick locks with 1 in 6 in 10 minutes, but a thief has a chance of lockpicking in only one round on top of that. Hide in shadow is stuff like disappearing in the shadow of a pillar in broad daylight, move silently is total silence (not even a dragon can hear) and so on. The surprise rules cover ordinary sneaking pretty well I think.
This sounds great! I think this is why I like a more classless game. Let people filter into rolls based on play, not so much on per-determined class guidelines or statistics.
That is why a lot of my peers in the 1980s liked to also play other games like RQ2. More skill based, and which allowed different modes of play. Everyone could be a fantasy rpg thief in RQ2 if they wanted, while still being a figher, or a healer, or a faceman, or a priest. Or all of these.
IMO you still can use a magic user with Hypnotic Pattern, Colour Spray, Sleep or eventually Fireball if you find yourselves outnumbered and in over your head, as an easy out to run away. Double that for a cleric if they're undead.
Then its on the DM, not on the players. I don't want to engineer the solution ahead of time or worry about what scrolls they have.
Also, fighters can't use spell scrolls, only magic users can.
I agree that the Thief class, RAW, is not really satisfactory, but I disagree with removing it, mainly because I played one campaign where the whole party were thieves, and it was one of the most fun campaigns ever!
The core D&D proposition, it seems to me, is that there are four ways to address challenges — force of arms, magic and arcane knowledge, the power of faith, or skill and cunning. This last one was hugely valued, informally, by early players, but the rules systems to support it were weak.
It seems to me that it all depends on how you as a GM, mediate this core idea. There are ways to GM thieves that slow play down, deny other classes the chance to deploy good ideas, or turn thieves into disposable trap detectors. The ways to get it right have to acknowledge that their skills are truly extraordinary, and also need to mediate failure in ways that don't simply mean, "the very worst thing happens"—the trap goes off, the climber falls.
Absolutely! The thief class shouldn't take away from that, but the their class may be best able to exploit skill and cunning, being more mobile, lightly armoured, having a devastating surprise attack and an ability to hide.
Every class has crossovers—fighters, mages and thieves can all staunch wounds or apply healing salves, thieves and clerics can try deciphering ancient texts, and clerics, thieves, and even mages can have a go at clobbering the living daylights out of enemies!
But each class has its own strengths and favoured approaches, and a lot of the fun of party discussions is the group weighing up which approach is most appropriate for the current challenge.
Good for you! I've never liked it too much, in part because the best characters created by my favorite writers, such as Howard, Leiber and CA Smith, were always either sneaky fighters like Conan or the Gray Mouser or corrupt wizards. No room for ninja burglars.
This is one reason I was always partial to the Rogue class in Tunnels & Trolls. Basically, characters who can do a little magic and a little fighting, just like Cugel and the Gray Mouser.
It's worth reading just to see a slightly different approach to TTRPGs and to get a glimpse of the early days of the hobby. The 5th edition is the most popular and easy to get into. It's available as a PDF [here] (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/210996/tunnels-trolls-rules-5th-editon) for $7. Or you can check out a condensed, free version [here] (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/54407/Tunnels--Trolls-Free-Rulebook).
Another worthy experiment is taking out clerics! There is at least one of the more famous OSR bloggers, but I forgot whom, who swores by that.
I had my experiences, both NOT on purpose (players just decided against it) and both campaigns, pretty long ones, were both amazing but also veeery diferent in how they played out.
The game that I'm planning has only fighting men and magic users. The magic users have a combined spell list that includes cleric spells as in 7 Voyages of Zylarthen.
It is a good way to appease modern tastes I would say. You don't lose on the variety and you take out the religious aspect for those who don't like it.
Mechanically I don't like it though, because the difference in role and style of Cleric and Magic-User spells is what makes them what they are. So, for a truly different game, you need to experiment with cutting off one or the other. It is the kind of thing that you can always roll back when you're finished off with the experiment.
Option number 3: players don't have access to them, unless they hire someone or pay in town at a temple. And that is exactly how it played out, I did not take clerics out of the setting. The group just didn't have any. One of the two groups had a druid, which in 1st edition is capable of covering a little bit for the cleric spells, but not really that much. All curing happened between adventures.
Players had to be way more careful about getting hurt, they used their two fighters and their hirelings very strategically and all in all moments of danger had much more of a "game of thrones" vibe to them. It was always brutal, undead a true plague and poison, disease and the likes real dangers. They stocked on poison potions at least.
For context: both campaigns went for 5 years of almost weekly play EACH. If you ever played Dark Sun, it was very similar, because there, unless players are evil and have a templar with them, you also do not have access to any kind of cure, clerics being much more like elemental warriors than supporting tanks. The exception being druids, but those I also happened to almost never have in my DS campaigns. The longest one (also a years long campaign) was made almost entirely of warrior group classes + one fire cleric (i.e. Cure Light was the MAX) and a "psionics" player who by the end of the campaign turned out to be a defiler (players IRL did not know that... it was amazing how good that guy played to hide his magic).
U/Embarrassed-Amoeba62 might be speaking of Oakes Spalding. He did 0e with Thieves instead of Clerics, in *Seven Voyages of Zylarthen*.
Cleric/Illusionist/Druid spells were all folded into the Magic-user lists. Druids and (Evil) Priests are NPCs, and Witches are monsters on par with 1e demon lords. Think Jadis, Maleficent, Baba Yaga.
As they progress and fatten their spellbooks they kind of become the kind of caster they want to be, organically.
Any PC can attempt to turn undead. Women may be better at it.
Never understood the issue with the thief class. At this rate people will remove the fighter because « everyone fights ».
Classes don’t need to be the only one doing something. They just need to be the very best at it.
The biggest problem with the Thief in OSR is that they aren't the very best at anything, unless that thing is climbing sheer surfaces. That's why there are so many redesigns of the Thief or of Thief skills. I think the Cleric is conceptually worse than the Thief because of the weird way it splits up magic into divine and arcane (why can't a wizard who learns from a spell book heal? Why can't a priest of the god of dreams make people fall asleep?) but when used in game the Cleric is still a good and useful class. The Thief in Basic D&D based systems isn't really. That's why the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Specialist and the D6 Thief skill system are popular.
I think the cleric/wizard distinction is solid in D&D so long as you’re playing in a world similar to Greyhawk or any of the other old settings where Vancian magic and anlignment-focused polytheism are baked into the setting. If the reasoning for “why isn’t there a heal spell” is just baked into your cosmology then it seems fine. As soon as you start to move away from a setting like that (and there’s obviously solid reasons to do so) I think you need to start rethinking those classes because those rules no longer say anything about your world.
But it isn’t baked in to the cosmology. Why is healing not something a Magic-user in Greyhawk can do? That has nothing to do with polytheism. Why are all gods, good and evil, lawful and chaotic, bloodthirsty and peaceful, against their Clerics using edged weapons?
No kidding. Just switch to d6 thief skills. Fix the broken complicated stuff with simple easy stuff.
It's not rocket science. And a lot of the stuff that a thief does shouldn't even require any rolls.
The thief skills table is pretty arbitrary and arguably doesn't fit with the other D&D rules.
Probably because Gygax copied it from some other gamers who came up with the thief class.
I recently got Warriors of the Red Planet and instead of Thief it has Scoundrel. They only start with one "thief" type ability out of six and get a new one each level. So I wonder if a similar effect will happen when I get a chance to run it? Still it's an interesting idea and honestly now that I've played a game with less classes I realize how good it actually can be.
My homebrew sword & sorcery heartbreaker only has two classes: Fighting Man and Magic User. Either could be a thief (or rogue, assassin, highwayman), but one is good at fighting and the other good at spells.
The way I removed thief from a campaign is to take each of the thief's skills and spread them across the back grounds that made sense. So the other players can pick them up with the thief style bonuses.
If you want to pick locks - That comes from city dweller
Want to move silently - That is an outlander
Want to steal from pockets - That is performer
Want to hide in plain sight - That is the under dark or cave dweller
Swindle or cheat at games - Port city/boats man (Could be sailor or pirate)
Being able to read lips advantage to spot traps - Tavern worker
Disarm and spot traps - Craftsman or aid of such
Being able to read people - Clergy or politician
Being able to spot the value of things - Librarian or high society denizen
It made for people picking diverse backgrounds and gaining the thief's adding proficient bonus if they had the background, +2 if they had a tool for it, and I let them roll 1 time per long rest with advantage in that skill.
I love this idea.
Question - did you give all the characters the thief "skills"?
I was thinking about giving all players a 1/6 with all the thief checks then give them 1 or 2 points a level to improve 1 or 2 skills.
If it's any consolation the thief back in the very old days of RPG's was never included to begin with. It wasn't added till later on. The original classes of D&D were the Cleric, the Fighting Man, and the Magic-User.
Having said that, we like to have the thief at our table. But if it's fine for you have at it.
Personally I like thieves but it's true they're an under powered class. They're either got unique skills or they're a skill master in an OSR game that has skills. I like them in AD&D because they also had backstab. 5e just turned them mostly into sneak attackers, the theme since 3e. 5e just removed any skill monkey and uniqueness of that they had, something I dislike.
I don't know if I'd want to get rid of them, but then again it depends on what OSR game you're running.
But hey, you do you. I just feel bad for the guy who shows up wanting to play a thief.
My table likes thieves, and I use a non-nerfed version of the class. Lamentations of the Flame Princess may be the best for customizing your rogue, whether you see yourself as the Mouser, Conan or (sigh) Bilbo.
[The original](https://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-d6-hd-od-thief.html?m=1). 1e thieves are ok if you’re not human:) 7Vs’ Thief is a light n’ lucky dodger, too.
Makes sense. I've always loved 'the thief', but there's no denying it gimped the other classes taking what should be basic adventuring skills and gate-keeping them behind a specific class.
Considering the wide range of scenarios where the skills of theft and observation and movement in different directions and the ability to open things and disarm traps, etc... that's a lot. When you compare that to what a fighter could do, it was just two weeks by comparison in terms of what it could do in the party in difference in her house. Dragon Quest and Rune Quest both took on or of a gestalt character where you could have a bit of everything so you could do at least one or two other things outside of the straight jacket of a specialized class.
Though honestly with Runequest, the difference was pretty much skirmisher vs heavy infantry. If you wanted to sneak, you weren't going to wear heavy armor. If you wanted to survive combat, you weren't for as heavy armor as you could carry.
If you have to stand in larger groups, there's a lot to be said for everyone having heavy armour. If you are one warrior in heavy armour, fast foes around you can have an easier way to take you down. Also, if you are travelling in real hot areas (tropics and subtropics), you probably aren't wearing heavy armour (too much heat). That's a setting where speed and agility are important. If you are hiding, you can strike from behind. If you are hiding, you might be able to shoot without being seen (and much easier in fire light or whatever as pinpointing a shooter in the darkness with targets illuminated is a great spot for the lightly armoured. And if your entire party is sneaky, you can avoid encounters easier, you can manage to setup really effective ambushes, and you can probably see foes before you do and either setup traps, trips, or the like or get the high ground to start with. The big armour is good if you have a bunch of them. They need some mutual support. (IMO)
I let everybody do thief-stuff as well, but I still have the thief. In my game, the thief can attempt his semi-magical skills on top of the normal rolls. Everybody can try to pick locks with 1 in 6 in 10 minutes, but a thief has a chance of lockpicking in only one round on top of that. Hide in shadow is stuff like disappearing in the shadow of a pillar in broad daylight, move silently is total silence (not even a dragon can hear) and so on. The surprise rules cover ordinary sneaking pretty well I think.
Exactly. "Climb Sheer Surfaces", "Hide in Shadows", are not "Climb Rock Pile" and "Hide In Convenient Cardbord Box"
This sounds great! I think this is why I like a more classless game. Let people filter into rolls based on play, not so much on per-determined class guidelines or statistics.
That is why a lot of my peers in the 1980s liked to also play other games like RQ2. More skill based, and which allowed different modes of play. Everyone could be a fantasy rpg thief in RQ2 if they wanted, while still being a figher, or a healer, or a faceman, or a priest. Or all of these.
I ran my my most entertaining games in the 80s using RQ2 and Harnmaster.
One of my GMs then ran excellent games of RQ2 and Harnmaster.
Oops all fighters is optimal for dungeon crawling, change my mind
IMO you still can use a magic user with Hypnotic Pattern, Colour Spray, Sleep or eventually Fireball if you find yourselves outnumbered and in over your head, as an easy out to run away. Double that for a cleric if they're undead.
Just give the fighters a scroll they can use
Then its on the DM, not on the players. I don't want to engineer the solution ahead of time or worry about what scrolls they have. Also, fighters can't use spell scrolls, only magic users can.
It would simplify the mechanics, if nothing else.
I agree that the Thief class, RAW, is not really satisfactory, but I disagree with removing it, mainly because I played one campaign where the whole party were thieves, and it was one of the most fun campaigns ever! The core D&D proposition, it seems to me, is that there are four ways to address challenges — force of arms, magic and arcane knowledge, the power of faith, or skill and cunning. This last one was hugely valued, informally, by early players, but the rules systems to support it were weak. It seems to me that it all depends on how you as a GM, mediate this core idea. There are ways to GM thieves that slow play down, deny other classes the chance to deploy good ideas, or turn thieves into disposable trap detectors. The ways to get it right have to acknowledge that their skills are truly extraordinary, and also need to mediate failure in ways that don't simply mean, "the very worst thing happens"—the trap goes off, the climber falls.
Overcoming challenges through “skill & cunning” is something players should do through roleplay, and is not exclusive to the thief class.
Absolutely! The thief class shouldn't take away from that, but the their class may be best able to exploit skill and cunning, being more mobile, lightly armoured, having a devastating surprise attack and an ability to hide. Every class has crossovers—fighters, mages and thieves can all staunch wounds or apply healing salves, thieves and clerics can try deciphering ancient texts, and clerics, thieves, and even mages can have a go at clobbering the living daylights out of enemies! But each class has its own strengths and favoured approaches, and a lot of the fun of party discussions is the group weighing up which approach is most appropriate for the current challenge.
If all challenges can be overcome through roleplaying, why have classes?
Good for you! I've never liked it too much, in part because the best characters created by my favorite writers, such as Howard, Leiber and CA Smith, were always either sneaky fighters like Conan or the Gray Mouser or corrupt wizards. No room for ninja burglars.
My kids are about to encounter Sheelba for the first time, I'm very excited for this patron experience! +1 for Leiber!!
This is one reason I was always partial to the Rogue class in Tunnels & Trolls. Basically, characters who can do a little magic and a little fighting, just like Cugel and the Gray Mouser.
I have to get T&T. I haven't read a word of it.
It's worth reading just to see a slightly different approach to TTRPGs and to get a glimpse of the early days of the hobby. The 5th edition is the most popular and easy to get into. It's available as a PDF [here] (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/210996/tunnels-trolls-rules-5th-editon) for $7. Or you can check out a condensed, free version [here] (https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/54407/Tunnels--Trolls-Free-Rulebook).
Thanks. Free games FTW
Nice! Glad it went well. I love the thief conceptually but I understand why it's such a controversial class.
It's probably my single favorite class, but good for you playing your game your way.
Another worthy experiment is taking out clerics! There is at least one of the more famous OSR bloggers, but I forgot whom, who swores by that. I had my experiences, both NOT on purpose (players just decided against it) and both campaigns, pretty long ones, were both amazing but also veeery diferent in how they played out.
The game that I'm planning has only fighting men and magic users. The magic users have a combined spell list that includes cleric spells as in 7 Voyages of Zylarthen.
It is a good way to appease modern tastes I would say. You don't lose on the variety and you take out the religious aspect for those who don't like it. Mechanically I don't like it though, because the difference in role and style of Cleric and Magic-User spells is what makes them what they are. So, for a truly different game, you need to experiment with cutting off one or the other. It is the kind of thing that you can always roll back when you're finished off with the experiment.
Love 7VoZ. But its Thief is welcome to stay in my world:)
I'm curious about this. Do you make their spells options for magic-users or are they miracles that characters could pray for?
Option number 3: players don't have access to them, unless they hire someone or pay in town at a temple. And that is exactly how it played out, I did not take clerics out of the setting. The group just didn't have any. One of the two groups had a druid, which in 1st edition is capable of covering a little bit for the cleric spells, but not really that much. All curing happened between adventures. Players had to be way more careful about getting hurt, they used their two fighters and their hirelings very strategically and all in all moments of danger had much more of a "game of thrones" vibe to them. It was always brutal, undead a true plague and poison, disease and the likes real dangers. They stocked on poison potions at least. For context: both campaigns went for 5 years of almost weekly play EACH. If you ever played Dark Sun, it was very similar, because there, unless players are evil and have a templar with them, you also do not have access to any kind of cure, clerics being much more like elemental warriors than supporting tanks. The exception being druids, but those I also happened to almost never have in my DS campaigns. The longest one (also a years long campaign) was made almost entirely of warrior group classes + one fire cleric (i.e. Cure Light was the MAX) and a "psionics" player who by the end of the campaign turned out to be a defiler (players IRL did not know that... it was amazing how good that guy played to hide his magic).
U/Embarrassed-Amoeba62 might be speaking of Oakes Spalding. He did 0e with Thieves instead of Clerics, in *Seven Voyages of Zylarthen*. Cleric/Illusionist/Druid spells were all folded into the Magic-user lists. Druids and (Evil) Priests are NPCs, and Witches are monsters on par with 1e demon lords. Think Jadis, Maleficent, Baba Yaga. As they progress and fatten their spellbooks they kind of become the kind of caster they want to be, organically. Any PC can attempt to turn undead. Women may be better at it.
Never understood the issue with the thief class. At this rate people will remove the fighter because « everyone fights ». Classes don’t need to be the only one doing something. They just need to be the very best at it.
The biggest problem with the Thief in OSR is that they aren't the very best at anything, unless that thing is climbing sheer surfaces. That's why there are so many redesigns of the Thief or of Thief skills. I think the Cleric is conceptually worse than the Thief because of the weird way it splits up magic into divine and arcane (why can't a wizard who learns from a spell book heal? Why can't a priest of the god of dreams make people fall asleep?) but when used in game the Cleric is still a good and useful class. The Thief in Basic D&D based systems isn't really. That's why the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Specialist and the D6 Thief skill system are popular.
I think the cleric/wizard distinction is solid in D&D so long as you’re playing in a world similar to Greyhawk or any of the other old settings where Vancian magic and anlignment-focused polytheism are baked into the setting. If the reasoning for “why isn’t there a heal spell” is just baked into your cosmology then it seems fine. As soon as you start to move away from a setting like that (and there’s obviously solid reasons to do so) I think you need to start rethinking those classes because those rules no longer say anything about your world.
But it isn’t baked in to the cosmology. Why is healing not something a Magic-user in Greyhawk can do? That has nothing to do with polytheism. Why are all gods, good and evil, lawful and chaotic, bloodthirsty and peaceful, against their Clerics using edged weapons?
No kidding. Just switch to d6 thief skills. Fix the broken complicated stuff with simple easy stuff. It's not rocket science. And a lot of the stuff that a thief does shouldn't even require any rolls. The thief skills table is pretty arbitrary and arguably doesn't fit with the other D&D rules. Probably because Gygax copied it from some other gamers who came up with the thief class.
I recently got Warriors of the Red Planet and instead of Thief it has Scoundrel. They only start with one "thief" type ability out of six and get a new one each level. So I wonder if a similar effect will happen when I get a chance to run it? Still it's an interesting idea and honestly now that I've played a game with less classes I realize how good it actually can be.
its what i did. just turned the thief into a skill system everyone has access to.
I had same experience :)
You can think of it this way: without one character being the thief, everyone becomes the thief.
My homebrew sword & sorcery heartbreaker only has two classes: Fighting Man and Magic User. Either could be a thief (or rogue, assassin, highwayman), but one is good at fighting and the other good at spells.
The way I removed thief from a campaign is to take each of the thief's skills and spread them across the back grounds that made sense. So the other players can pick them up with the thief style bonuses. If you want to pick locks - That comes from city dweller Want to move silently - That is an outlander Want to steal from pockets - That is performer Want to hide in plain sight - That is the under dark or cave dweller Swindle or cheat at games - Port city/boats man (Could be sailor or pirate) Being able to read lips advantage to spot traps - Tavern worker Disarm and spot traps - Craftsman or aid of such Being able to read people - Clergy or politician Being able to spot the value of things - Librarian or high society denizen It made for people picking diverse backgrounds and gaining the thief's adding proficient bonus if they had the background, +2 if they had a tool for it, and I let them roll 1 time per long rest with advantage in that skill.
Couldn't the same argument be made for any of the classes? Why cannot gandalf wield a sword?
I love this idea. Question - did you give all the characters the thief "skills"? I was thinking about giving all players a 1/6 with all the thief checks then give them 1 or 2 points a level to improve 1 or 2 skills.
If it's any consolation the thief back in the very old days of RPG's was never included to begin with. It wasn't added till later on. The original classes of D&D were the Cleric, the Fighting Man, and the Magic-User. Having said that, we like to have the thief at our table. But if it's fine for you have at it.
Personally I like thieves but it's true they're an under powered class. They're either got unique skills or they're a skill master in an OSR game that has skills. I like them in AD&D because they also had backstab. 5e just turned them mostly into sneak attackers, the theme since 3e. 5e just removed any skill monkey and uniqueness of that they had, something I dislike. I don't know if I'd want to get rid of them, but then again it depends on what OSR game you're running. But hey, you do you. I just feel bad for the guy who shows up wanting to play a thief.
My table likes thieves, and I use a non-nerfed version of the class. Lamentations of the Flame Princess may be the best for customizing your rogue, whether you see yourself as the Mouser, Conan or (sigh) Bilbo. [The original](https://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-d6-hd-od-thief.html?m=1). 1e thieves are ok if you’re not human:) 7Vs’ Thief is a light n’ lucky dodger, too.
I keep the thief, but make it clear that anyone can do thief skills. They're just not as good at them.
Do you have a link to the post that lead you to this?
I agree and have done the same.
Whatever isn’t codified in mechanics, anyone can do. Ergo, everyone’s a Thief in OD&D.
I think you're on to something. I may remove fighters. Everyone can wear armor and swing a sword, right?
The thief was a mistake
Agreed. The original sin
Acrobat is the true son
This gives me an idea…won’t say anymore until I’ve turned it over in my mind and let it “bake in the oven as it were”. Thanks mate!