Tonight I’m going to be playing AD&D 1st ed. 😀 For now, I’m drinking green tea.
Thieves? People are still thinking about thieves? I am.
In 2008 I argued that if you wanted to be a thief, steal something. No extra class required.
Sadly, at the time my wife was playing a thief and she thought the idea of removing the thief class preposterous. Now way, she said. The thief remained in my Halberds and Helmets rules. I just added a warning: picking a thief means playing the game at the “hurt me plenty” level.
In 2015 I wrote about the thief skills and how I use a d6 for all of them, combining them with the special features of elves, dwarves and halflings.
Anyway. Why am I thinking about thieves? On Mastodon, I just had a short conversation about magic users and thieves with @gunnar…
I think I’d like it if magic users were better spies and assassins. I love playing magic users that can join fights and often do as a player, but we’re using house rules where a bodyguard can take the hit that’s aimed at you. Either something like that (be cool but endanger other people), or be more like a rogue, or allow wizards to wear armour and wield swords with a penalty when they’re not casting (fight as a level 0 normal person).
My magic user Klea is bossy and headstrong and she bashes zombies with her staff and forces open doors in the dungeon and all of that – but all of it always in the shadow of friends that protect her. I like playing her! My other magic user Kahina has 7 daggers and her backstory is “she grew up in one of those coastal villages where the *Nuns of the Flying Dagger Coast* taught her the art of throwing knives…” My AD&D illusionist Esker Wil carries 4 daggers. And @frotz’s late Xavier carried 12 daggers! I mean, this is the Flying Dagger Coast. I still love the idea. 🙂
I find that players like different classes for different purposes and I like them all. Fighters are simple to run. Thieves and magic users are hard to run for different reasons, but the difficulty of bringing the special ability to bear is what makes it challenging. If this ends up antagonizing a player, I might tell them to play a fighter next time. That’s why I added that warning about playing thieves. The magic user class carries a different warning: “you may be weak at first but if you survive, you will be very powerful.” Players have to buy into these conceits if they pick the class. Perhaps player unhappiness is a failure of the rules to name these conceits.
I’ll acknowledge the tendency for wish fulfilment where players want to have an easy time playing a class that is harder to play, just as there are people who want to play other things that they aren’t good at. Like I want to be good at Go but I’m not. To those players I say that they need to find a different table, or maybe they can convince the table to play using different rules – but also maybe I won’t be part of that.
I feel that the constraint of a class being harder to play is not the same as the a silly constraint that all knights have to be men (there is no extra joy to be gained by having the world by misogynist), or having to act out conversations but not having to act out fights, thus implicitly limiting charismatic roles to charismatic players (since I do want to be entertained at the table by charismatic players).
And then of course there are always those people who are my friends even if we cannot play at the same table. I don’t share all my hobbies with all my friends, and that has to be OK as well. That’s why I think it’s OK for me to at least make a strong stand and perhaps play with other people if they don’t agree (and many do not agree with my taste of games). I mean, they also don’t join my Aikido training, right? There’s symmetry in that.
Anyway, long story short: magic users having a hard time at first and it gets progressively easier is OK by me; thieves having a hard time at first and it gets progressively harder is OK by me too, I guess. Yikes! 😅
#RPG
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I’m with you - I think thieves are unnecessary. Want to fight and sneak? Play a fighter with no or light armor. Want to play an assassin? Play a wizard with a poison dagger and sleep or charm magic (I have played a lot of OD&D wizards in just this way).
I liked clerics, because I think in some games heavily armored and armed bossy characters who “answer to a higher authority” and have their own goals they promote at every opportunity are a good fit, but truthfully those types of characters can be played by another class as well (Klea!!) so I think the cleric can also be superfluous.
If it’s important in a game to have some skills outside of fighting and magic, then a skill system can be added and advancement in that can be worked out. We don’t need a specific class just for that.
We can save the complex rules for all of the offline stuff (fort management and settlement establishment and resupply and so on), but simple character classes and rules are a blessing for short sessions, and something I hadn’t thought about before I started playing and running 2-hour games.
– Frotz 2022-05-03 13:41 UTC
