Non thieves and Thieving Skills

Thieves have Thieving Skill Base Scores.
All other characters have Detect Noise 20% (+race modifiers) and use 40% for limited Climb Walls (+race modifiers and simplified armor penalties). They also use Surprise rules to resolve stealth. I'm ok with that.

How should i rule sutuations where non-thieves try to find/disarm traps, open locks, pick pockets or escape bonds? Is there any official answer or FAQ? I can't find it in books. As i understand i need to use thieving skill base scores with dex and racial modifiers. Am i right?

I think officially, they just fail. I suppose you could do something like 1/2 the 1st level average score adjusted for racial and dex modifiers, but I don't think this is official. I do have the 2e thieves handbook at home though, so I'll take a look when I get the chance.

The failure to have a unified skill system was one of the biggest problems with 1e/2e, and if you play much you'll run into all sorts of attempts to fix this. One of the most common was to ad hoc a special set of rules for every room. Thus, if a room had a climbable wall or discernible trap, the room itself would explain how non-thieves interacted with the room. Every instance was treated as a special snowflake. Each cliff face got its own set of rules.

Another interpretation is that for normal situations, you as the DM should rule on the basis of what was reasonable and the thieves skills represented pseudo-magical ability to accomplish the impossible. Thus, anyone could hide behind a curtain, but a thief could also hide in mere shadows. Anyone could sneak about, but the thief had a chance to move in perfect silence. Anyone could climb a vertical surface that provided some handholds, but a thief could climb a sheer wall. And so forth.

But of course, none of this was very consistent.

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They fail. In those additions it's assumed that they aren't skilled in those kinds of things. To put in 3rd edition terms, those are all skills that require training to attempt. I know the pick pockets is stretching it, but there you go in terms of early days mentality.

Psyblade said:

Thieves have Thieving Skill Base Scores.
All other characters have Detect Noise 20% (+race modifiers) and use 40% for limited Climb Walls (+race modifiers and simplified armor penalties). They also use Surprise rules to resolve stealth. I'm ok with that.

How should i rule sutuations where non-thieves try to find/disarm traps, open locks, pick pockets or escape bonds? Is there any official answer or FAQ? I can't find it in books. As i understand i need to use thieving skill base scores with dex and racial modifiers. Am i right?

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The assumption had been when I played that thief skills were for only the points beyond what a normal person could do. Everyone could hide in a room, thieves could disappear in shadows. Everyone could sneak, thieves could be perfectly silent. Likewise with climbing sheer walls vs climbing, etc etc. This is a 1e holdover in early 2e material and the mindset of the writers and players.

10 years later as 3e was approaching they took a very different mindset, that to climb walls you needed a climb walls %, same with disarming traps etc. So in late 2e material it becomes a bit of a mess with lots of different and ad-hoc suggestions. One book was that everyone had a % chance of opening a lock or disarming a trap equal to its bonus. So if a simple lock gave a thief +10%, everyone had 0+10% and the thief was the only one who could open tricky locks with no bonus or a penalty but this seemed only to be for that adventure which I want to say was an Al-Qadim one? It was different all over the place (or seemed to be).

In early 2e though, the assumption was (like 1e) you just described your actions. To disarm a trap you described how, to pick a lock you just needed a lock pick and stupid amounts of time (ie, only a thief could do it in a dungeon scenario).

So, take your pick.

I give non-thieves the 1st level thief base abilities, except for open locks and remove traps because these should be auto-fails without some training. Give me 10 minutes or 10 hours, doesn't make a difference because I couldn't pick a lock no matter how much time you gave me.