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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8749030" data-attributes="member: 4937">I again don't think you are disagreeing with me much.  Whether we have a rule or a ruling, that rule or ruling can create a silo effect where the answer to something is "no" if it is a bad rule or ruling.  Let's not forget that the thief itself started as a house rule.  I put it to you that if the rulings at that table by the DM were as generous as "roll under your DEX on a D20" when someone wanted to climb a while no one would have considered a set of rules like the thief.  Certainly Gygax didn't see the thief rules as creating restrictions on how he would rule the game or he might have written it up differently.There may have been tables out there that were extremely forward looking where players proposed to pick pockets, pick locks, free climb dungeon walls, hide in shadows and the DM said, "Ok, let's invent a thing I'll call an ability check where if you roll under your ability score on a D20 you'll succeed.  Now, let's make a DEX check to see if you can pick the merchant's pocket", but I doubt that was the typical ruling.  Ability checks were always unofficial even when they started showing up in the text of published official adventures, it took a while I think before most tables evolved to using them.  More likely the rulings were typically "No, you can't do that", or down to DM whim (whether or not he wanted that to happen) so that metagame wheedling was the process of play and de facto rule, or the chances were set very low by the DM.  Certainly the first guy who wanted to play a Thief wasn't at a table where the rulings were not restrictive and he was able to play a Thief without rules, and presumably he didn't feel the rules for the Thief made it harder for him to play one.I think there is a lot of retroactive claims about how the game played in the early days that strike me as probably romanticizing that era.  I doubt that ability checks were used uniformly by a lot of tables until the late '80's at best, at which point those tables might have realized that the thief was creating a silo effect.  Where it mostly comes up is when you want the players to climb a wall to keep the narrative going and you don't have rules for the non-thief, something that shows up for example in DL1.  I suspect most tables initially found the thief non-restrictive and allowing things that they weren't allowing before, and it took considerable time for most tables to realize the rules around thieves were less than optimal.Rules definitely CAN restrict the game, but they don't have to.   It would have been quite possible as a starting point of the thief to write the rules in such a way that the thief was X better at all the things a thief does than the average person.  So we aren't really distinguishing rules and rulings here.  We are only saying that there are bad rules and bad rulings.  The thief itself started out as a ruling before Gygax officially endorsed it.</blockquote>

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