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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...

Yes. I suspect its an artifact of them, essentially, looking at how things need to be in the system they're designing while being bluntly unwilling to share too much about that system. It turns a certain amount of what they post into a voice from the void.

Its like my note that the combat capability in the Hero System is acquired being distinct from the way other kinds of skills are is an evolutionary artifact; it didn't have to be that way, as the redesign in Fuzion showed.

Well, some of that gets back to how you're structuring characters in your system. In a purely skill based system, or one with skills and special abilities bought seperately, the answer of course is "You don't." A lot of it turns on how, if you have them, special abilities are acquired in the...

One of the things often embedded in bad faith arguments is both the assumption and the insistence that the other party share all the same basic premises you do, and unwillingness to cede any of those premises or step back and consider them first (admittedly, sometimes that gets so into the weeds...

Yeah, the gamifying of their arguments is what gets tiresome right quick.

My old boss was talking more about brittleness than softness. As you say, a scratch is one thing, having the whole stone shatter or at least have a massive chip off of it was something else. Yeah, that's an intrinsic issue with stones with siginificant metallic content (though the beryls have...

I suspect "skill monkey" is not what they're talking about, but you're not wrong that what exactly counts in the archetype is a pretty moving target.

Well, the problem is that the class originally called "Thief" has changed in both name and function over time in D&D multiple times, and who some third party used as their inspiration has changed with it. The farther you go back, the less distinct "Thief" was other than in having certain...

I was just curious. I backed SotWW, but it may well be that I'll never play/run it, and I did play a whole campaign of SotDL so I wondered.

Except I was around when the thief came into existance, and other that whatever they called secret strike back then, it was nothing but skills. Seriously. There was nothing else distinct about it, and it was, when if first arrived, unique in that way. Basically, I don't see your...

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

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...