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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9621644" data-attributes="member: 7026594">This is an exaggeration. Being a level or two behind is pretty equivalent in all editions. More than a level or two definitely gets bad in 3e-5e, but in the TSR editions if you were more than that behind you were generally hiding in the back anyway.  The HP difference mattered and sometimes plain level/HD (see stuff like Death Spell, or Dragonfear in 2E).What the old XP charts +XP for treasure were better for was getting new low level characters caught up faster.Yup.  The original Thief design was super fragile and incompetent, and TSR never gave good instructions to the DM on how to run the game in a way to make them useful and functional.  The opposite, sadly.  Gary kicking them while they were down over and over again in his advice in the 1E DMG (and by making Find Trap a skill in the PH), and 2E being not much better.  Allowing point distribution by player choice let the Thief start out decent at a couple of skills, but their AC, HP, and Saves remained bad even with the faster advancement factored in, and the restrictions on Backstab meant that if the DM adjudicated it by the rules you'd get it at best once a fight, and that's assuming the DM never used monsters which couldn't be backstabbed.  Which would be a weird campaign indeed given how many monsters were immune.I am still a bit torn, philosophically, on the point of the Thief.  I've played them and seen people play them in old school, but they always need some help.  I'm not 100% convinced that turning them into a reliable "Striker" as WotC did was the best course of action, but I do think it's more in the spirit of the original 1974 rules than the actual TSR Thief implementation was.</blockquote>

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