Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5539255" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 231: July 1996part 2/8The master thief: Hmm. Thieves were always one of the weaker classes, although they do balance that out somewhat with lower xp costs to advance. But given the rate spellcasters have got new stuff, and even warriors have stocked up on the kickass magical weapons and armor, they're the ones that have gained the least from the ever piling splatbooks of recent years. This is a problem. Also an issue is the way their powers max out at a relatively low level. How do you keep a 20+ level thief interesting? Unless you invent new rogue skills, you can't really. Hmm. No, they wouldn't. Actually, they would! After all, they already did in Dark Sun. And it opened up issues there. This is one of the articles that made this issue my last. Along with the recent Players Option material, it felt to me like they were making changes that weren't needed, and which would cause trouble if integrated. In hindsight, my opinion is a little different. This becomes more an indicator that having thief skills and nonweapon proficiencies artificially separated, and every rogue having the same skills was the main problem that needed to be addressed. You can't fix an inherent system problem by piling ever more patches onto it, especially when things worked better kept simple. So this is also a reminder that early AD&D may have worked at what it's aimed for, and 3e core may have worked, but pile on the supplements, and things go to crap eventually. It's a real pain in the ass. The thief who came in from the cold: The thief as disruption to the party is something they've tried to tackle from several angles before. Most notable from a mechanical PoV was the Scout, which kept most of the regular abilities, but by casting them as a member of an organisation using those skills for quite different ends. Here we have an approach which isn't quite as interesting mechanically, but comes pretty close flavourwise. Use a thief to catch a thief. Make the PC's members of a government counterintelligence organisation that trains rogues for the purpose of sniffing out troublemakers, infiltrating their organisations and surreptitiously obtaining all the evidence they need to put these scumbags away for good. It might well be more effective than having big stompy guys trying to stop crime, and it'll make for tons of easy adventures. With another extra thief skill, this did add to my trepidation about spreading your points too thin at the time, but now seems a pretty cool article. It both solves problems and presents new opportunities, which is a nice double whammy. The spying game: We continue the whole spying theme by letting in other classes on the action. After all, anyone can pass on information, and if you're to be a convincing agent, it's often best to get someone who genuinely knows the job, and leave them in deep cover for years. That or hire a diviner, who can frequently short-circuit the whole information gathering process by scrying and mind-reading their way through the whole problem. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Course, every trick has a countermeasure. Diviners can be foiled by abjurers and illusionists, spies can be captured and bribed or brainwashed into becoming double-agents, and spying organisations can be subverted themselves and torn apart from the inside with false info and spurious diversion missions. This is a reasonably entertaining and informative article, that makes it relatively easy for the whole party to get in on the action. Just as with assassins, one class not getting all the action in an area is a good thing about 2e.</blockquote>

Verification