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  1. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    Yet they clearly do in a lot of places. Ask why the D&D magic system has propagated so many places.
  2. Thomas Shey

    Your top 5 sci-fi movies (and why)

    I'm theoretically a boomer, but never really associated with them.
  3. Thomas Shey

    Your top 5 sci-fi movies (and why)

    Ironically, as a movie, I think Rocketship X-M was the better movie. Destination Moon was arguably better as science fiction since it cared a whole lot more about the science actually resembling what we knew at the time (though XM was better in this regard than it gets credit for) but the...
  4. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    The oddity of the thief as it originally was created was it was the first skill oriented class, but was only going to really be good for that or something really close to it. Unlike some later things such as the True20 Expert, you couldn't build an outdoorsman or a scholar with it.
  5. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    I suspect their point is the dedicated class/role called "thief" is largely a D&D artifact that, to the degree its elsewhere is because of the shadow D&D casts, you don't have to have a dedicated mechanical hook for that to have that ground covered. I'd argue the only reason D&D even had one...
  6. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    I can see an argument for a general purpose skill monkey in a class system where most other classes are focused on special abilities and the like, its just that neither "thief" nor "rogue" seems to necessarily describe those, and "thief" at least could fairly describe a character with a more...
  7. Thomas Shey

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    Back when I was training to become a lapidary specialist for a jeweler a long, long time ago (it didn't stick), one of the first things he told me was to let people know that some stones were simply more durable than others, and while the others might be okay for earrings or necklaces, you...
  8. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    Well, you can set up your class system so it chokes off much skill access to everyone but the skill monkey, but that usually ends up creating its own problems (the difficulty with getting enough skill points for a 3e era fighter to be able to climb, jump and ride competently being the poster boy...
  9. Thomas Shey

    [General Discussion Q&A] Shadow of the Weird Wizard [+]

    Out of curiosity, have you played Shadow of the Demon Lord in that range? If so how different (if at all) did the two games feel to you?
  10. Thomas Shey

    Your top 5 sci-fi movies (and why)

    Its notable that as a fan of what's often called "50's SF movies" that the look-and-feel there doesn't quite start to trail off until 1964. On the other hand, Rocketship XM came out in 1950 proper, and likely has much more the feel of that than most movies of the prior half-decade I can find...
  11. Thomas Shey

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    Trying to keep supplies coming in without interacting with computers at all would be a heck of a challenge.
  12. Thomas Shey

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    Maybe some self-owned craft, but it'd be hard to market your services.
  13. Thomas Shey

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    As a cancer survivor myself, and someone who lost a beloved dog to it sooner than he had to go, I'm entirely with you there.
  14. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    The problem is once you've got skill separation, you don't necessarily need the whole package of thief skills, and a high-skill class can invest in the ones you do. Maybe all you need is the stealth or the trap handling.
  15. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    Well, my own feeling is that if you are baking roles into your game system you're either doing so to do niche protection, or you're probably making your character construction system narrower than it necessarily needs to be anyway.
  16. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    That's kind of my point, though. You have to almost actively patch things like class features onto a class for thieves as soon as the class system has an otherwise generally accessible skill system (note I'm using thief, not rogue quite carefully). That's because the core concept doesn't need...
  17. Thomas Shey

    Why do we need thieves??

    At the very least you need to acknowledge there are games that land well in a muddy ground in between. Any class based game with a skill system may well have no useful niche for thieves since most of what defines a thief is just specific skills. Its notable that they had to carve out spots for...
  18. Thomas Shey

    What are you reading in 2025?

    You can make an argument that's also what almost all Patricia Briggs urban fantasy books are, too.
  19. Thomas Shey

    What are you reading in 2025?

    You seem to have assumed I was suggesting they were Westerns. I was not. I was noting this was a case of a crossover between the otherwise normally distinct Western and Victorian genres. And yet, action-horror is commonly listed as a horror subgenre. Not the first place subgenres tend to...
  20. Thomas Shey

    What are you reading in 2025?

    Two examples I had in mind, in fact, though the Resident Evil movies land there, too.
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