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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?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.
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.If I'm not playing DCC then I like the Specialist class from LotFP... which has more options vs. the straight B/X Thief.
The one I made (see burglar)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?
The basic gist of my systemMy 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.
Level | Experience | Hit Dice | + Hit | Save |
1 | 0 | 1d6-1 | +0 | 15 |
2 | 1,750 | 2d6-2 | +0 | 14 |
3 | 3,500 | 3d6-3 | +0 | 13 |
4 | 7,000 | 4d6-4 | +1 | 12 |
5 | 15,000 | 5d6-5 | +1 | 11 |
Level | Burglary Bonus | Free Bonus |
1 | +8 | +2 |
2 | +9 | +3 |
3 | +10 | +3 |
4 | +12 | +4 |
5 | +13 | +5 |
If I had thieves in my B/X game I would use these rules.The B/X Rogue supplement has a similar approach, a bit more streamlined. Something I'd consider when running a OSE game these days.
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.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.
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.My curiosity is piqued. Can you please share what you like about C&C’s approach to the Thief skill system?
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”?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.
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.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”?
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.
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...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.
In large measure sounds a lot like C&C, where level gives you a bonus....
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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I always let pick pockets function as any task where need to delicately remove something and also to hide something small from a search.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....