What is your favorite OSR Thief skill system?

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Necrozius

Necrozius

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Just curious, as this comes up pretty often.

What is your favorite approach to Thief skills in a OSR game system? Or is the original (e.g. B/X) your favorite and why?
 
Of the official, widely known OSR type games I like, I'd say Castles and Crusades might have done it first and best. Honestly, 5E does it pretty well. What I really dislike is the 'classic' 1E, 2E, B/X approach.
 
Moonglum said:
Of the official, widely known OSR type games I like, I'd say Castles and Crusades might have done it first and best. Honestly, 5E does it pretty well. What I really dislike is the 'classic' 1E, 2E, B/X approach.
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My curiosity is piqued. Can you please share what you like about C&C’s approach to the Thief skill system?
 
Simlasa said:
If I'm not playing DCC then I like the Specialist class from LotFP... which has more options vs. the straight B/X Thief.
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I also liked LotFP’s approach more than other, similar games. I liked how it was a unified mechanic, and that the Thief had better chances of success than I’d otherwise expect from the genre.
 
One of the few things I liked about 2e AD&D over 1e AD&D is the way thieves' skills worked. You receive a pile of points to distribute as you like each level. At lower levels is made sense for thieves to "specialize" (one would be the lock picker, the other the sneak/scout).

If I were running 1e AD&D (OSRIC) or B/X D&D (LL/OSE) I'd probably just adopt something like 2e's system (add together the points at each level and let the players distribute them as they like).

But the 5e system for thieves (er, rogues) is better.
 
My apologies, could people in this thread summarize the rules they are talking about? I don't own a lot of the books anymore and I find it hard to remember the specifics.
 
One of the many things that attracted me to White Box: FMAG is it’s Thief class, which uses a single Thievery score that starts at 2 and increases once every 3 levels, up to 5. Whenever you need to do something thief-y, roll a d6 and if it is less than or equal to your Thievery score, you succeed.

Its admittedly overly simplistic but so is White Box. An alternative I’ve considered that would be similar statistically would be to start with a Thievery of 15 and reduce by one each level. To use a skill, roll that number or higher on a d20. This would allow more flexible situational bonuses or penalties, allow ability score bonus/penalty to apply without being too powerful, and give a more gradual improvement.
 
I always disliked that the thief basically brought their own skill system into the mix and would either see that reduced to an absolute minimum or everyone getting at least some of those skills. For the latter, I think Hackmaster 4E isn't too far off (and still OSR), where everyone has percentage skills, just not the same as the thief. Unmitigated 3.0 surprisingly isn't that far off, but definitely not OSR.

As for the "no-skill" variants, apparently the old "Warlock" had all kinds of abilities that you could take and they were more an absolute than an increasing chance. So "Pick Most Locks" or "Evaluate Treasure", but also "Throw Short Sword" or "See in Dark". A lot of them, a few building on each other, so almost a 1:1 replacement of spells, just without Vancian Casting.

The B/X Rogue supplement has a similar approach, a bit more streamlined. Something I'd consider when running a OSE game these days.

Frank Mentzer's "Jack" looks quite usable, too. d20-based skill resolution with some very generic categories ("Tradecraft", "Networking"). The latter type of abilities would be nice if used within a city setting, so for a Lankhmarian game, I'd give it a try.

I often wondered about stealing stuff from GUMSHOE for thieves and the like, something like a OSR "Lorefinder".
 
Shipyard Locked said:
My apologies, could people in this thread summarize the rules they are talking about? I don't own a lot of the books anymore and I find it hard to remember the specifics.
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The basic gist of my system

Characters Abilities

Outside of combat, any character can attempt any action. A Magic-User can attempt to stealth, a Fighter can attempt to pick locks, etc. However various classes are better at certain abilities. While a Fighter can pick locks, the Burglar will be the best at unlocking the doors.

Ability Roll

In order to succeed with an ability check, roll 1d20. Add your attribute modifier, your ability modifier, and any situational modifiers. If you roll higher than a 15, you succeed. A natural 20 always succeeds and a natural 1 always fails. The referee may choose to require a 10 or better or a 20 or better if the task is considerably easier or more difficult than average.

If a task is exceptionally easy and the character is not in combat, then roll 1d20. The character fails, often amusingly, only if a natural 1 is rolled.

Individual Abilities

Athletics (STR)
Climbing (DEX or STR)
Eavesdrop (INT)
Haggling (INT or CHA)
Herblore (INT)
History (INT)
Intimidation (CHA)
Legerdemain (DEX)
Locution (CHA)
Mathematics (INT)
Natural Philosophy (INT)
Perception (WIS)
Physician (INT)
Professional (type) (varies)
Research (INT)
Stealth (DEX)
Survival (CON)
Strategy (INT)
Thaumatology (INT)
Weapon Proficiency

Burglar (Rogue)

Burglars are trained in abilities used by secret societies, thieves’ guilds, and gangs. They learn these abilities at the expense of combat expertise. Burglars must possess a Dexterity score of 10 or better.

Level
Experience​
Hit Dice+ HitSave
1
0​
1d6-1+015
2
1,750​
2d6-2+014
3
3,500​
3d6-3+013
4
7,000​
4d6-4+112
5
15,000​
5d6-5+111

LevelBurglary BonusFree Bonus
1+8+2
2+9+3
3+10+3
4+12+4
5+13+5

  • A Burglar starts with eight ability bonuses that are distributed among the following Burglar abilities: Climbing, Eavesdrop, Legerdemain, Perception, and Stealth. The Burglar earns four additional Burglary bonuses for every three levels.
  • A Burglar starts with two free ability bonuses that can be applied to any other ability and gains two free bonuses every three levels.
  • At all levels, no more than half of a character’s ability bonuses can be spent on a single ability.
Hope this clarifies my point.
 
I like Necrotic Gnomes B/X Rogue but also think 2e's approach to Thief skills helped improve the class markedly. (Quick summary: the player has a pool of percentage skill points they get to distribute as they see fit, with a few exceptions, and they get more as they progress.)

It has been so long since I played 2e so I can't say how much of a total fix it is but I do recall it improving things a lot and being a popular change to the rules at our table.
 
I think games like LotFP have the right idea in having thief skills use the same mechanic as all other skills. I'm even ok with thief skills being lumped into one single "thievery" skill. What I can't tolerate is rolling a single d6 for skills. It lacks the granularity I want. I plug simple d20-rollover skill systems into all my OSR gaming. This includes thief skills.
 
That was one of my biggest bugbears with the early D&D stuff. I hated the way thieves could do virtually nothing until they were very high level.

C&C's approach was pretty cool. You had a decent chance at doing stuff because it was your profession. LOTFP was better but didn't feel granular enough for me.

I like it when the relevant 'stat' plays into the equation.
 
Vidgrip said:
I think games like LotFP have the right idea in having thief skills use the same mechanic as all other skills. I'm even ok with thief skills being lumped into one single "thievery" skill. What I can't tolerate is rolling a single d6 for skills. It lacks the granularity I want. I plug simple d20-rollover skill systems into all my OSR gaming. This includes thief skills.
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I can empathize with this; I was excited about the unified mechanic back in the day when 3e first came out. Now I think a variety of mechanics and "rulings, not rules" attitude adds more flavor than the "one roll to rule them all" approach.
 
Necrozius said:
My curiosity is piqued. Can you please share what you like about C&C’s approach to the Thief skill system?
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It treats the thief skills through its unified skill roll mechanic, whereby you roll vs. a task number that differs depending upon whether you are using a primary attribute for your character or not (presumably you would usually be using the more favorable target number of 12 vs. the less favorable of 18 for non primary stats), with a bonus based on your attribute bonus plus your level. The reason I prefer it is not anything about the specific mechanics, which I consider basically arbitrary. I like it because the baseline target chance is decent and then odds improve with experience in a way that feels 'fair' on balance. In contrast, traditional thief skill scales of success are so bad that a thief is almost unplayable below 5th level, unless you concoct a bunch of house rules of weird interpretation of other rules to patch over how craptastic they are.
 
If had to use such systems, C&C would also be my choice for the unified nature, and it treats skill like tasks without glomming on a skill systems or feats is my recollection. I assume by OSR we mean recent D&D emulators/copyist.

If wanted old school d20 based with classes and no skills I'd go with Dragon Warriors, but I don't think that is generally lumped in with OSR. Perhaps anything that competed with D&D in the day is not "OSR."
 
To be honest, while there have been some decent alternates, the one that always worked well for my groups was the original B/X version. But we've always played that those are special abilities, not general abilities.

I don't think that any character should be able to pick locks. In real life, picking a lock is actually pretty difficult to do without a bunch of practice, decent tools, and some knowledge of how locks work. Other characters can always smash a lock, of course, but that makes noise, and could damage fragile contents inside a container. But that's what happens when you don't bring a thief. Same with removing a trap.

Finding a trap is something any character can do if they describe their search in such a manner that it would naturally result in the trap being found. A thief's ability is more than that - they can find a trap that's completely hidden or otherwise not detectable with a general search.

We always took Move Silently to be that, on a successful roll, the thief is literally silent. The monsters/NPCs have no chance to hear the thief. If the roll fails, it doesn't mean the thief automatically makes noise and is heard - it just means the thief wasn't completely silent, so the monsters have a chance to hear the approaching thief if they're listening and not making any noise themselves. For this, I use the Listening rules on page B21 (1 in 6 chance to hear, 1-2 in 6 chance for demi-humans).

Any character can attempt to climb. My rule of thumb is that a wall is either rough enough to free-climb, or is too smooth and the character must use pitons and rope (and hammering pitons into a wall takes time and causes noise). A thief has a chance to climb a wall without the rope and pitons, even if it's too smooth for other characters.

Any character can attempt to hide. If a room is completely dark (and your opponent doesn't have darkvision) or you are standing behind a pillar or crouched behind a desk, then you are hidden. But a thief can hide in shadows, so it doesn't need to be completely dark, and the thief doesn't need to be behind an object.

And, of course, any character can try to hear noise (as mentioned above, the Listening rules on page B21). But a thief gets better at it as they grow in levels.

This approach doesn't remove the ability for other characters to do some of the same things as the thief, but it gives the thief some special things they can do above and beyond the other characters. Yes, the percentages aren't very high, especially at low levels, but these are special abilities, and they don't preclude the thief from using the same abilities that other characters have.

For example, at low levels, a thief may risk climbing a 10' high wall (because they wouldn't take damage from a 5' fall), but might decide that they are going to use pitons and rope to climb a 50' wall since falling from 25' would inflict 2d6 damage. But as they get higher in level (and get more hit points as well as having a better chance to climb), they'll be able to risk climbing to higher heights.

To be honest, I don't see this as much different from a 1st-level magic-user only having 1 spell per day.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
Any character can attempt to hide. If a room is completely dark (and your opponent doesn't have darkvision) or you are standing behind a pillar or crouched behind a desk, then you are hidden. But a thief can hide in shadows, so it doesn't need to be completely dark, and the thief doesn't need to be behind an object.
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Makes sense to me, however don’t most dungeon denizens in B/X have dark vision? Is it assumed that Thieves can hide from then anyway? Or was it a common occurrence for nasty GMs to say: “sorry thief, the Drow can see in the dark and finds you anyway”?
 
I think it's called "attribute checks" these days:shade:.
 
Necrozius said:
Makes sense to me, however don’t most dungeon denizens in B/X have dark vision? Is it assumed that Thieves can hide from then anyway? Or was it a common occurrence for nasty GMs to say: “sorry thief, the Drow can see in the dark and finds you anyway”?
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Well, back in B/X it's infravision instead of darkvision. So a successful Hide in Shadows check means you tuck yourself near a warm part of a wall, or turn your head so that your face doesn't show up as a heat source, or something similar. Though I'm sure some (many?) DMs ruled that you can't hide from creatures with infravision. Personally, I think that's just nerfing a key character ability (like if a DM ruled that most dungeon levels prevent arcane spellcasting or a crypt automatically prevents turning of undead). Might be a challenge to do it on rare occasions to make the players come up with a different strategy on the fly, but to me it shouldn't be the norm.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
Well, back in B/X it's infravision instead of darkvision. So a successful Hide in Shadows check means you tuck yourself near a warm part of a wall, or turn your head so that your face doesn't show up as a heat source, or something similar. Though I'm sure some (many?) DMs ruled that you can't hide from creatures with infravision. Personally, I think that's just nerfing a key character ability (like if a DM ruled that most dungeon levels prevent arcane spellcasting or a crypt automatically prevents turning of undead). Might be a challenge to do it on rare occasions to make the players come up with a different strategy on the fly, but to me it shouldn't be the norm.
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Now I'm wondering if this an oversight from the changeover from OD&D, where monsters can "see in the dark" but without further elaboration on the idea, except that they lose the ability if the PCs convince or force the monsters to work for them.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
Well, back in B/X it's infravision instead of darkvision. So a successful Hide in Shadows check means you tuck yourself near a warm part of a wall, or turn your head so that your face doesn't show up as a heat source, or something similar. Though I'm sure some (many?) DMs ruled that you can't hide from creatures with infravision. Personally, I think that's just nerfing a key character ability (like if a DM ruled that most dungeon levels prevent arcane spellcasting or a crypt automatically prevents turning of undead). Might be a challenge to do it on rare occasions to make the players come up with a different strategy on the fly, but to me it shouldn't be the norm.
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So to drift.... some. I prefer it when the vision is tied to physics, like infravision. It provides limitations and exploits and geeky kids can learn some science to get it right. We were all science geeks as well as D&D players so we had infravision and ultravision "down" based on real world info...which back then meant library.

"Darkvision" way too meta, narrative and hand wavvy for me...
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
To be honest, while there have been some decent alternates, the one that always worked well for my groups was the original B/X version. But we've always played that those are special abilities, not general abilities.

I don't think that any character should be able to pick locks. In real life, picking a lock is actually pretty difficult to do without a bunch of practice, decent tools, and some knowledge of how locks work. Other characters can always smash a lock, of course, but that makes noise, and could damage fragile contents inside a container. But that's what happens when you don't bring a thief. Same with removing a trap.

Finding a trap is something any character can do if they describe their search in such a manner that it would naturally result in the trap being found. A thief's ability is more than that - they can find a trap that's completely hidden or otherwise not detectable with a general search.

We always took Move Silently to be that, on a successful roll, the thief is literally silent. The monsters/NPCs have no chance to hear the thief. If the roll fails, it doesn't mean the thief automatically makes noise and is heard - it just means the thief wasn't completely silent, so the monsters have a chance to hear the approaching thief if they're listening and not making any noise themselves. For this, I use the Listening rules on page B21 (1 in 6 chance to hear, 1-2 in 6 chance for demi-humans).

Any character can attempt to climb. My rule of thumb is that a wall is either rough enough to free-climb, or is too smooth and the character must use pitons and rope (and hammering pitons into a wall takes time and causes noise). A thief has a chance to climb a wall without the rope and pitons, even if it's too smooth for other characters.

Any character can attempt to hide. If a room is completely dark (and your opponent doesn't have darkvision) or you are standing behind a pillar or crouched behind a desk, then you are hidden. But a thief can hide in shadows, so it doesn't need to be completely dark, and the thief doesn't need to be behind an object.

And, of course, any character can try to hear noise (as mentioned above, the Listening rules on page B21). But a thief gets better at it as they grow in levels.

This approach doesn't remove the ability for other characters to do some of the same things as the thief, but it gives the thief some special things they can do above and beyond the other characters. Yes, the percentages aren't very high, especially at low levels, but these are special abilities, and they don't preclude the thief from using the same abilities that other characters have.

For example, at low levels, a thief may risk climbing a 10' high wall (because they wouldn't take damage from a 5' fall), but might decide that they are going to use pitons and rope to climb a 50' wall since falling from 25' would inflict 2d6 damage. But as they get higher in level (and get more hit points as well as having a better chance to climb), they'll be able to risk climbing to higher heights.

To be honest, I don't see this as much different from a 1st-level magic-user only having 1 spell per day.
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As per usual whenever this is brought up, this approach completely ignores the existence of "Pick Pockets", which should be the 'meat and potatoes' of most thieves and still has abysmal chances of success in all systems up until AD&D 2e.

Personally, I like AD&D 2e's approach of the old percentile skills but the player gets a pool of points to place in the various skills (60 to start, then 30 per level and no more than half can be put into a single skill), thus being able to either spread out and be pretty bad at everything, or specialize and be good at some things to start. This has the added advantage of different Thief characters being very different, especially with the racial modifiers. So you might have a Dwarf expert in traps and locks, a half-elf second story man and a human scout and skulk, rather than all three being equally kind of bad at all their special abilities.

This is also why I like the Lamentations of the Flame Princess specialist class, which replaces the Thief, and mentioned earlier. For those who don't know the system, it has a bunch of skills which every character has a 1 in 6 chance of success at. Specialists get a pool of 4 points at level one and then 2 points per level after that to place into those skills to increase their chances of succes. These are things like tinkering (for opening doors and removing small traps), stealth and climbing, but also bushcraft, architecture, languages etc. The playtest rules in the supplement Eldritch Cock adds four more skills (leadership, luck, medicine and seamanship) and lets every character get a few points in random skills at character creation, and then Specialists get 4 extra points and the 2 per level.

These two systems let players customize their characters and makes having more than one thief in a party more than an exercise in redundancy (which in itself can be important in a lethal game world), letting each contribute in their own way.
 
Even though 1e is my favorite edition, when I play it, we use 2e's thief skill profession. However my preferred system is this:

Everything is an ability check. Roll under your ability score and succeed. Every ability score value counts, unlike 5e. Some things that are more difficult would impose a penalty. Classes like thieves get a pool of points every level to add a permanent bonus to a few of the chosen skills.

So let's say you're a 4th level thief, and every level you get a pool of 4 points, and each level you use one of those points to add to your stealth skill, giving it a permanent +4 bonus. That means to succeed, you have to roll equal to or lower than your DEX score +4. Keep in mind that more difficult tasks would also have a penalty, based on GM discretion (with guidelines provided). For example, trying to sneak past an alert guard might be at a -4 penalty. Wearing heavy armor might also grant a -4 penalty. Sneaking past a dog or other creature with enhanced senses might be -8.
 
Yes!!! The use of ability checks has always struck me as the obvious approach for things like Thief skills, and anything else broadly relevant (like, surprise saves and spotting secret doors, etc.). What are these stupid ability scores doing, just sitting there on our character sheets, if we don't actually use them for anything?!?
 
raniE said:
As per usual whenever this is brought up, this approach completely ignores the existence of "Pick Pockets", which should be the 'meat and potatoes' of most thieves and still has abysmal chances of success in all systems up until AD&D 2e.
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I generally ignore the existence of Pick Pockets because it would only be the 'meat and potatoes' of thieves who spend most of their time in urban areas. But pretty much all B/X campaigns I've ever run or played in spent about 80% of the time exploring dungeons or wilderness areas where Pick Pockets is utterly irrelevant to the thief character. And most of the time spent in towns and villages are used to rest up and heal from injuries, get items identified, and so forth.

All thief characters I've seen across many campaigns are smart enough to not shit where they sleep, and so they don't ply their trade in locations where they need to buy services.

Having said that, I do like the 2E method of allowing thieves to adjust their percentages with a discretionary points allowance, because it's a way that players can customize their character. But I find that people often dump on the B/X thief due to the influence of 3E, which enforced the "you can't do anything not explicitly on your character sheet because there's a skill/feat for that some other character might have taken." So I'm just pointing out that the B/X thief skills don't necessarily prevent other characters from sneaking, hiding, climbing, etc., and still work pretty well when looked at as something special the character can do above and beyond the typical adventuring abilities that everyone has.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
I generally ignore the existence of Pick Pockets because it would only be the 'meat and potatoes' of thieves who spend most of their time in urban areas. But pretty much all B/X campaigns I've ever run or played in spent about 80% of the time exploring dungeons or wilderness areas where Pick Pockets is utterly irrelevant to the thief character. And most of the time spent in towns and villages are used to rest up and heal from injuries, get items identified, and so forth.

All thief characters I've seen across many campaigns are smart enough to not shit where they sleep, and so they don't ply their trade in locations where they need to buy services.

Having said that, I do like the 2E method of allowing thieves to adjust their percentages with a discretionary points allowance, because it's a way that players can customize their character. But I find that people often dump on the B/X thief due to the influence of 3E, which enforced the "you can't do anything not explicitly on your character sheet because there's a skill/feat for that some other character might have taken." So I'm just pointing out that the B/X thief skills don't necessarily prevent other characters from sneaking, hiding, climbing, etc., and still work pretty well when looked at as something special the character can do above and beyond the typical adventuring abilities that everyone has.
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I don't know, even in a dungeon I can definitely see wanting to sneak in and pick the pocket of the bugbear jailer to get the keys to the cells, or what have you. Bilbo tried picking the pocket of a troll in The Hobbit, and though it did not go as planned, the purse he tried to lift contained the key to a secret cave with no less than three magic weapons and a lot of regular treasure too. Probably enough to level everyone in the party.
 
raniE said:
I don't know, even in a dungeon I can definitely see wanting to sneak in and pick the pocket of the bugbear jailer to get the keys to the cells, or what have you. Bilbo tried picking the pocket of a troll in The Hobbit, and though it did not go as planned, the purse he tried to lift contained the key to a secret cave with no less than three magic weapons and a lot of regular treasure too. Probably enough to level everyone in the party.
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Well, apart from the fact that the wizard acted up as the skill monkey, this scene was a great example of a party pulling off from dire predicament by guile and thinking on their feet...:shade:
 
Sacrosanct said:
...

Everything is an ability check. Roll under your ability score and succeed. Every ability score value counts, unlike 5e. Some things that are more difficult would impose a penalty. Classes like thieves get a pool of points every level to add a permanent bonus to a few of the chosen skills.

...
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In large measure sounds a lot like C&C, where level gives you a bonus.
 
Andrew J. Luther said:
I generally ignore the existence of Pick Pockets because it would only be the 'meat and potatoes' of thieves who spend most of their time in urban areas. But pretty much all B/X campaigns I've ever run or played in spent about 80% of the time exploring dungeons or wilderness areas where Pick Pockets is utterly irrelevant to the thief character. And most of the time spent in towns and villages are used to rest up and heal from injuries, get items identified, and so forth....
Click to expand...
I always let pick pockets function as any task where need to delicately remove something and also to hide something small from a search.
 
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