D&D General Nostalgia : Thief Percentages

[atanakar]

I think all classes should have used the same percentage system, with just thief getting higher percentages.

I had a DM that made a set of theif, ranger, fighter, mage,priest, assassin, and bard skills for 2e. It took up a new sheet. It worked fine but the proto-skills just added some much paper and slowed up leveling.

Nice hybrid system. All skills use 100% and the rest d20.

 

[atanakar]

It was quite diverse, but take into quotation that 2e used %dice quite a lot, also for other things. For the quickness of 5e it would not fit that well, also for things like stealth vs. perception

Never understood why Perception (senses) was not an Attribute. Much more useful than Comeliness!

 

[Fanaelialae]

I remember it with a sense of nostalgia. Apart from cleric, thief was my favorite class to play (because it had the lowest XP requirements and leveled very fast).

That said, I wasn't actually a huge fan of the % system. As someone pointed out, you could specialize you thief by focusing hard on certain skills early on (and this was, IMO, the way to go). However, it was still a roll under system. IOW, if a check was easier than the baseline, the DM had to remember to give you a bonus to your check, whereas if it was harder they had to give you a penalty. I can't remember any of my DMs ever bothering, though I admit it's been a long time and I may simply have forgotten.

In my opinion, the DC and roll over system used since 3e is much preferable.

 

[Dormammu]

The Thief skills may well have been the direct inspiration for many early percentile-based RPGs, like Basic Role-Playing and Rolemaster.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

For example, in AD&D 2e, your lv1 half-elf thief with a Dex of, say, 16 could have a Pick Pocket skill of 60% (15 base + 10 HE + 5 DEX + 30 optionally distributable (of the 60 available, of which you could assign 30 to a given skill.))

This guy 2Es!

My mind leapt to a similar example. But I think it's fair to say Thieves tended to be pretty bad at their jobs overall initially, but by level 10 were pretty great at most things.

I don't think it was really a good system. I do remember it nostalgically, but it's not something I'd want to return to.

The Thief skills may well have been the direct inspiration for many early percentile-based RPGs, like Basic Role-Playing and Rolemaster.

I'd be surprised if it really was the direct inspiration - percentile resolution was extremely common in wargames and the like of the era.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

One of the big problems was with skills that you'd expect other classes to be able to at least try. "Climb Walls", "Detect Noise", "Move Silently": how do you resolve those if a non-Thief (or non-Ranger) wants to do a bit of scouting? Mostly it ended up with ability checks, and then it turns out that your Fighter with a decent STR (or DEX, whichever ability you chose) is better at climbing walls than your supposedly skilled Thief.

If you consult the chapter on Time and Movement, you'll get a base climbing chance for every character. As a 2e DM (yes, I still run AD&D 2e to this date), I consider thieving skills to be a special ability that runs apart from the base system. For example, every character can try to sneak past a guard, rolling a Dexterity check against the guard's Wisdom check. A thief, though, has a base chance of moving silently past that same guard, no matter how high his Wisdom score is because that's a special ability of the thief class. The same goes for stuff like hiding in shadows.

Obviously, this explanation does not work for all thieving skills, and sometimes I see people complain that other classes cannot learn to open locks or find traps. I think those complaints are unfounded as long as you're not also complaining that thieves cannot specialize in weapons or learn to cast spells. At that point, you'd better find a classless system to play.

 

[atanakar]

I'd be surprised if it really was the direct inspiration - percentile resolution was extremely common in wargames and the like of the era.

Do you have names of these wargames? I only recall d6 resolution for that period. d100 feels weird for combat resolution for a wargame. d10 maybe.

 

[Minigiant]

Obviously, this explanation does not work for all thieving skills, and sometimes I see people complain that other classes cannot learn to open locks or find traps. I think those complaints are unfounded as long as you're not also complaining that thieves cannot specialize in weapons or learn to cast spells. At that point, you'd better find a classless system to play.

I think part of this dealt with the race, class,and ability score limitations of 2e.

I think people would be fine with only thiefs being able to pick locks or rangers being able to track if being a theif or whatever wasn't such a major slotin the party. Especially for smaller groups.

My AD&D DM had tons of houserules. One of his more popular ones was that some races counted as members of a class for skills or magic items no matter what classes they really were. So all halflings had the thief skill percentile table and felt a bit cooler.

 

[Voadam]

I hated the thief skills in practice for the low percentages which made them failure monkeys instead of skill monkeys. 2e was better in my view because after a few levels you could be the skilled dwarven trapspringer if you specialized your point spends.

I would have much preferred it was something like a choose some abilities/feats/talents every couple levels and you just succeed in those areas so the thieves just are awesome at the areas they specialize in. A rogue who can consistently hide is better for the group dynamics IMO.

 

[Voadam]

Also in some of the definitions it is things like Climb Sheer Walls instead of Climb Walls (which implies ordinary climbing) which is a more superhero way to run the abilities.