Recent content by Thomas Shey

I don't know about bands (that is to say groups), but I get the feeling a fair number of individual musicians make their money fron Patreon and its kin.

He used D&D, I suspect, because its the first game to consider "thief" a class unto itself (and honestly, once you get out of the D&D sphere, one of the few, even in classed games) and as such has set some expectations. (If you want to argue your last part, that's at least an argument since...

It could be fun for a while, but after a bit it didn't feel good to know if you were taking some of the races as you main race it was masochistic (warlocks and halfing slingers could be pretty OP, but in the late game paladins were just OP as could be because so much started turning on magical...

Maybe not the entire hobby, but it certainly doesn't need to be a defined character structure in a lot of games. Even some classed games (in True20 it was a particular construct of the Expert class, but wasn't a complete standalone thing). In a lot of games its just on archetype build among...

Again, what about either the first post in this thread or where the thread is located makes you think this is about D&D specifically, let alone 5e? Its about whether a dedicated thief role serves a purpose in general.

Got delivery yesterday on the Curseborne PDF from Onyx Path.

i've got to say, @Staffan, that by the time you've gotten down to that much wiggle in classes I don't really see the point in them (since the character end-result is going to be so widely varied anyway) but I'm not going to tell someone what works for them. I just have trouble picturing that...

That seems more like wanting a system with professions than classes. I'm not actually sure I understand the point with still having classes once you get down to that sort of sprawl.

It was probably an extrapolation from the various suprise and secret door checks that were applied in various situation. I would not be at all surprised if that sort of approach was used for some of the less expected things people would have probably tried to have characters do prior to the...

Just as a side note, the first version of the ranger I saw (admittedly in the SR rather than an actual book, but the TSR people seemed to treat those as at least semi-official classes at the time) had Tracking done as a thief style percentage skill too. (I also seriously, seriously doubt most...

You can make a distinction between things that simply "work" (in that if there is a resolution roll associated with them, they are modifiers to how the situation resolves rather than whether it resolves at all). The early thief backstab was actually a pretty good example here; you had to still...

Just wanted you to know, @Baron Opal II that I had a somewhat longish response to your post (agreeing with a few things, disagreeing with some others) that somehow got nuked by a combination of the board software and some sort of misclick that I lack the werewithal to try and reconstruct. I'll...

You really feel like opening the can again about whether that's an informed prefence in most people? Because that's where this kind of claim goes.

Well, at the end, because a lot of people like class systems with their baked in niche protection. Whether you prefer a class system approach, an individual skill approach, or some hybrid thereof can't, in the end, be anything but preference informed by your priorities.

At the very least, I'd expect that to make some of the "talking past each other" arguments less common. (There's a complex argument about whether someone can participate in a discussion based on premises they don't share. I suspect how useful/productive that is turns on A) Can they avoid...