Celebrim
Legend
It’s also about playing smart. About not just relying on what’s written down on your character sheet. As a DM, I kinda love being outwitted. In a 1e game I ran a few years back, I put a big window in the BBEG chamber, to give a more scenic view to the fight. When the battle turned against the PCs, the paladin grabbed the BBEG and jumped out the window, saving the party.
With respect, if we are talking about a game like 1e AD&D or BECMI that's not playing smart.
That's simply entertaining your DM. You weren't outwitted. You just enjoyed the scene and so allowed it.
It would only be smart if the game had good rules for grappling and moving a grapple. The PC wasn't relying on their wit in the described action because old school games had little, no, or terrible rules for grabbing, tackling, or bullrushing a foe out of the window. Ultimately, the PC was relying on their knowledge of you, their knowledge of what you enjoyed in a scene, and their ability to convince you the action was reasonable. But ultimately the scene depended wholly on you. You liked the outcome, so you allowed it with perhaps some minimal fortune test chosen so that there was at least a reasonable chance of the action succeeding.
And everyone had fun. But, I think it is important to really understand what happened. The player played you, not the game. And you were the sort of DM that loves that sort of thing, so it worked.
But if the player had rules, he might not have even needed to hold on - the BBEG could have just been shoved or tossed out of the window. And the player wouldn't have needed to play you: he could have succeeded perhaps even if you didn't want such an inglorious and stereotypical Disney death for your campaign's BBEG.
Thieves...take a while to become even just competent.
At some point I did the math and realized thieves never become competent. I can tell a lot from an OSR rules set by what if anything they did with the thief. If they didn't do anything, they didn't play enough 1e AD&D to start to get tired of it and they are nostalgic for a game that never really existed - a game that they didn't get to play but want to play now.
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