OSR OSR Gripes

[Arilyn]

I have to agree with the very original grognards, who were upset at the introduction of the thief, back in the day.
In OD&D, it was assumed players used their own wits to solve traps and obstacles, but along came the thief with skills. It was assumed that all characters could sneak, hide and climb. Every table had a different system for resolving the rolls, but nobody argued there shouldn't be any of these checks. Along came the thief. He had these skills, and he was very bad at them, so now where did that leave the other characters? I believe the official word was only thieves could do these things, and even if that wasn't true, or tables ignored this rule, if a thief has a 15% chance to hide, then the fighter has to be noticeably worse. This did not go over well with many players. Back in the original game, it was assumed that characters were all thieves, at heart, looting and slipping into dangerous places to gather treasure. The introduction of the thief meant there was now a class for these activities, but the poor thief couldn't do his job. Those chances were pathetic.

Have to agree with Celebrim. The thief was not a viable class.

 

[Celebrim]

And yet he was a front line character much of the time and managed to live to old age and retirement.

Hold that thought.

Often, but not always. And the cleric didn't always have enough resources to prevent save or dies- imagine the (not uncommon) scenario of poison gas that gets the whole party (of 8ish!).

So we always sort of treated the entire party dynamic as the party exists to keep the cleric alive, and in turn the cleric exists to keep the party alive. Only a supremely powerful character could go anywhere without a cleric along and not expect to have a very short lifespan, and even then that was usually a combination of 'cleric in a bottle' in the form of healing magic items and healing that opens up with higher level paladins, druids, etc. That is because, as you noted, the only good answers to poison and disease were magical, and without clerics you are going to eventually die to one bad situation.

But then you ask me to imagine the "not uncommon" scenario of a save or die gas cloud, which would have then and does now strike me as an extremely bloody minded challenge for a DM to pit against a party. There are in fact no save or die gas clouds in Tomb of Horrors for example (that I recall), and the most bloody minded challenge in the whole dungeon is the sleep gas. If you consider save or die gas clouds "not uncommon" it's not a wonder to me that your impression of the game is one of completely random and unavoidable deaths and so the character you play is basically as good as any other. I think I'd gravitate to only playing Dwarves in a game like that.

Which gets to the idea of how you managed to get a melee fighter to high level without a CON bonus to speak of, and apparently not a lot of clerics. You mentioned early DM fudging, but I'm wondering even more about the mix of challenges involved. You're clearly not trying to face anything like the G series with its loads of giants trying to squish you flat, or anything like DL with its save or die dragon breath weapons. (I'm not necessarily saying everyone played those modules, but remember my assumption was that homebrew games resembled modules or campaigns to some extent.) The real sort of fudging that I think is going on here is more like what I talked about with making a character useful through campaign and encounter design. Then again, this is apparently a game where despite not throwing a lot of difficult combat challenges at the party - few 16HD hydras or yagnodaemons for example - the DMs feel perfectly free to hit the whole party with regular save or die gas traps...

We didn't use henchmen much. With ony pcs and porters, one bad roll was indeed enough.

We had tons of henchmen. In fact, it was possible on a game night where most of the group wasn't showing up, to do ensemble or troupe play where one or two PC's went off on their own and any player that showed up who didn't have a main PC available could play one of the henchmen. Henchmen were essential for providing valuable skills like healing, magic, tanking when key PC's weren't around or were down or out of resources or whatever. The could also guard the baggage/camp if you were going into a dungeon.

Anyway, we're still stuck on my assertion of 'viable', despite my lengthy attempt to explain it and despite the fact that you don't dispute my analysis of the rules.

What I'm not sure of from my end of the conversation is why you think a statement like "There is more to D&D than your ability scores" or "I had fun playing a thief and saw others have fun playing a thief." is a refutation. We agree on both of those concepts, and I don't think either harms my assertion about viability. There is more to D&D than your ability scores, and though you don't define what you think that "more" is, it still remains true that even if your goal is narrative ability scores help that goal by ensuring character survival which in turn ensures continuity of the narrative. There may be more to D&D than ability scores, but the structure of AD&D and to a lesser but still large extent BECMI weighted all the viability of a character to having one or more scores of 16 or higher because it was only at that point that you got advantages in play and those advantages while they seem small were in fact enormous when you start doing the math. Consider that the fighter's most powerful and impactful class ability before weapon specialization showed up and broke the game was the massive advantage they got from 18 STR or 17 or higher CON.

My numbers don't go away just because we both agree you could have fun despite them, nor do they go away just because we both agree that skillful play (by the player) and the attitude of the group could overcome bad design. My point is, even so, "despite" and "bad design".

This is in contrast to say 3e which had advantages start at 12 and linearly increase and had well defined advantages for all ability scores that applied to all classes, so that while pure optimization still might go for Jack One Big Hammer, a broad range of comparatively low scores (12's and 14's) was still plenty viable.

In the context of the "OSR Gripes" what I'm essentially asking is, "Why would you try to have fidelity to older editions exponential and very top loaded ability scores and not utilize the obvious improvements of 3e's ability score bonuses"? I mean, yes I can agree we all had fun in the '80s, but do we not all agree that there were bad design elements? Why are we building games that sell themselves as faithfully recreating the bad design elements?

 

[Celebrim]

I have to agree with the very original grognards, who were upset at the introduction of the thief, back in the day.

Ironically, I don't.

In OD&D, it was assumed players used their own wits to solve traps and obstacles, but along came the thief with skills. It was assumed that all characters could sneak, hide and climb.

OD&D players are fond of saying this, but they are just wrong. OD&D made no effort to suggest anyone could sneak, hide or climb and if it had have done so no one would have been inspired to create the thief class or if they had have done so they would have been inspired to create a very different class.

The grognards grumbling about the thief are being very disingenuous. The introduction of the thief in no fashion (in and of itself) asserted that any character could no longer climb any wall that the DM said he could. Every character could continue to climb walls that the DM said were climbable, and such climbable walls continued to appear in published materials. What the thief did was allow the player to climb a wall that the DM had not explicitly called out as climbable, and that was something no PC could otherwise do and that was the impetus around the creation of the class.

Now, I obviously agree that the thief was very badly designed and exactly why it is badly designed is a long topic, but I could probably shorten it to the problem that D&D had no notion of the idea of difficulty and without a notion of difficulty its every attempt to deal with the problem of skills was doomed to failure.

Every table had a different system for resolving the rolls, but nobody argued there shouldn't be any of these checks.

Obviously someone must have or else no one would have ever wanted a thief class to exist. I'm much less sanguine about how wide open and free the games were in OD&D based on the self-reporting of people of the era (for the same reason that I take with a grain of salt people talking about the 'good old days'), and I think there are clues in AD&D as to what things were really like. For example, in Gygax's example of play in the DMG, the party has to climb a wall. And they do it by forming a human pyramid and boosting a PC up to the top of the wall. Now this is not something that the AD&D thief stops and it's a good example of open ended problem solving, but it's also equally clear that neither could they climb a wall - even one with handholds in it - and that the writer (Gygax) so takes this for granted that no one in the example of play even asks to try.

So sure, back in the day you could climb, sneak or hide if you convinced the DM that the wall was climbable, or if you convinced the DM that the enemy was far enough away and unalert enough to allow it, or if you could convince the DM that you had something to hide behind. And after the thief was introduced you could still do all of those things. But what the player who wanted the thief class wanted that class to be and what the class was intended to be was a class that could climb more or less sheer walls that previously the DM wouldn't have considered climbable (no resorting to human pyramids), and which could move silently right past a guard at close range, and who could hide without having anything to hide behind but merely 'in shadows'. You didn't have to convince the DM that this wall was of the climbable sort, you could climb walls. The DM's role was then reversed - he had to explicitly mark walls as non-climbable by making them out of glass or ice or polished marble something. You didn't have to convince the DM you could move quietly enough to not be notice - you could move silently. That's a huge increase in the player's agency.

And if some DMs out there couldn't deal with that, then that is on them and not on the thief class.

Have to agree with Celebrim. The thief was not a viable class.

You don't agree with me at all. You have a very different complaint, one that I disagree with in every way except that fundamentally all of the attempts to add the idea of character skillfulness to D&D prior to 3e were bad design.

 

[Garthanos]

Along came the thief. He had these skills, and he was very bad at them, so now where did that leave the other characters? I believe the official word was only thieves could do these things, and even if that wasn't true, or tables ignored this rule, if a thief has a 15% chance to hide, then the fighter has to be noticeably worse.

From what has been explained to me the 15 percent thief technique was only supposed to be needed if the task was impossible for other methods. Now I do not think that was well presented if that was actually the intent and it feels a little weird how does that work you make a d20 vs dexterity check and if that fails then roll the thief percentages?

Anyone else here of that thinking?

 

[Tony Vargas]

From what has been explained to me the 15 percent thief technique was only supposed to be needed if the task was impossible for other methods. Now I do not think that was well presented if that was actually the intent and it feels a little weird how does that work you make a d20 vs dexterity check and if that fails then roll the thief percentages?
Anyone else here of that thinking?

I never got that impression that the Thief's special abilities were to perform tasks that fit the description, but were otherwise impossible. Quite the opposite, it seemed like the existence of the Thief made those other tasks impossible for everyone else (or what was the point). Especially given that there weren't a lot of systems for performing those tasks. The closest thing I can think of was the ability of certain characters to surprise more often under certain circumstances, which /implied/ moving silently/hiding, and used entirely different mechanics.

The problem I see with the Thief, in retrospect, is that it started a trend of hyper-specializing non-casters, in a game where casters rapidly expanded both the power & versatility of their abilities. That is, the Thief, along with Vance, indirectly, was responsible for casters growing into the Tier 1 campaign-stomping-Kaiju of 3e.

And no edition has every pulled completely free of that. 4e, as much flack as it gets for daring to be somewhat balanced, left Rogues & Rangers as exploration specialists relative to the incompetent-out-of-combat Fighter, while giving Clerics & especially, Wizards, more & more versatile out-of-combat options - both more skills /and/ free rituals. 5e restored LFQW, and largely reduced skill-based contributions to 'warm body' anyone-might-randomly-succeed BA - with the traditional exception of the Rogue, this time specialized via Expertise.

 

[Celebrim]

From what has been explained to me the 15 percent thief technique was only supposed to be needed if the task was impossible for other methods. Now I do not think that was well presented if that was actually the intent and it feels a little weird how does that work you make a d20 vs dexterity check and if that fails then roll the thief percentages?

Anyone else here of that thinking?

Your assumption that there were many or any tables out there which let you climb a wall after make D20 under dexterity check is what I think is entirely wrong here. I don't think that existed as a consistent methodology more or less anywhere. There may have been some tables doing that before or after the introduction of the thief because anything is possible, but if I had to bet based on the evidence I'd say, "Nope."

The evidence I would cite is the complete lack of submissions to Dragon or any attempt by TSR itself to fix the skills problem with that methodology. No one ever even thought of it, and I knew people writing into dragon trying to get published and certainly no one at TSR was going, "Hey, you wouldn't happen to have a fix to the skills problem would you?" We mentioned Len Lakofka earlier, and he was one of the best most self-aware critics of the D&D system of the era and he addressed the problem with the thief design and it's intent, but not in the way or context you are imagining which is I think a very anachronistic and very modern view that assumes the existence of a fortune test.

Even when NWP did consistently get to make a D20 or under roll, it was still a silo'd skill or ability granted to you and not something that worked off the assumption of a broad system available to all.

My suspicion is that before the thief there was no system. And after all, this is EXACTLY what the OD&D people most often trumpet as why it was better. So the 'system' such as it was for climbing a wall is you described your approach for doing so to the DM and he gave you a pass/fail on whether it worked. That is to say, prior to the thief, no one was rolling the dice as part of a fortune check for hiding or climbing at all. They just asked the DM to describe the wall, and if it was rough and uneven then they tried to convince the DM that they had a successful approach for climbing the wall, and if they succeeded in that they just had climbed the wall. I think based on everything I've read and first hand testimony that was in fact how OD&D was played.

And you could still play AD&D that way and in fact I think it was intended to play that way after the introduction of the thief. What the thief let you do for the first time is get a roll to succeed even if you couldn't talk the DM into letting you automatically succeed. And in a way that was revolutionary. We were moving away from a pure Braunstein resolution methodology where everything was about convincing the referee your plan would work.

In point of fact, I doubt very many walls were climbed in OD&D unless before the session the DM wrote up, "The north wall if closely inspected is rough enough that handholds can be used to climb it." And again, the reason is that I knew players from that era (a cousin for example) and I also joined just after that era and I know how DMs tended to approach the problem. For example, for wall climbing if a fighter proposed climbing a wall, the DM would probably point out the wall was of brick or closely fitted stone or carved stone and that would be it. You couldn't climb it. If a table argument erupted (because no rules!) it would focus on 'realism', and the DM would probably say something like, "You put on plate mail and a 40lb backpack and climb yonder cinderblock or brick wall, and I'll let your character climb this wall. Climbing a brick/stone wall is not realistic." In practice, the only walls that would have been climbed were ones the DM blessed as climbable for reasons of their own.

 

[Celebrim]

The problem I see with the Thief, in retrospect, is that it started a trend of hyper-specializing non-casters, in a game where casters rapidly expanded both the power & versatility of their abilities.

I pretty much agree with this.

That is, the Thief, along with Vance, indirectly, was responsible for casters growing into the Tier 1 campaign-stomping-Kaiju of 3e.

I don't fully agree with that. My take is that casters hit tier 1 in 3e because a) they made the decision to remove a lot of the fiddly restrictions on when you could cast so that getting casting interrupted became unreasonably hard and b) because when they finally invented difficulty they made the mistake of applying it to the magic system as well as the skills system in a way that was extremely over aggressive and c) because they from experience in 1e they erroneously thought the only real balance problems with magic was probably things like fireball.

I never got that impression that the Thief's special abilities were to perform tasks that fit the description, but were otherwise impossible.

I need to dig up Len Lakofka's write up on the thief, but the its somewhere between what you are thinking and what Garthanos is thinking. In brief, yes the thief is meant to give you abilities that are otherwise impossible. But it's not meant to make impossible what is an act of ordinary skill. So for example, the fact that the thief can hide in shadows isn't meant to imply that no one can hide or even that only thieves could hide in darkness. It's coming from the sort of resolution methodology that I think applied to OD&D, where in order to hide you'd normally need full concealment of some sort in order to get the DM to say you automatically hide, or else if you don't have full concealment you automatically would fail. The thief skills are meant to live in that ambiguous space between obvious success and obvious failure.

Quite the opposite, it seemed like the existence of the Thief made those other tasks impossible for everyone else (or what was the point). Especially given that there weren't a lot of systems for performing those tasks. The closest thing I can think of was the ability of certain characters to surprise more often under certain circumstances, which /implied/ moving silently/hiding, and used entirely different mechanics.

I think that in practice before the thief mostly everyone did find those tasks impossible. That is to say walls weren't normally climbed. Players never normally convinced the DM that they could move silently. I'm sure some player out there convinced some DM that if he took his boots and armor off and crept across the floor slowly that he could do so quietly, but in general I don't get the impression that non-magical stealth was really much a part of OD&D play before the thief. Again, I can just imagine the argument about realism, with the DM holding the trump card as to what works. This would have been even more unreliable than the notoriously unreliable thief skills, and in my head I imagine the designer of the thief must have imagined that at least a 25% chance of success was a big step up in reliability - 1 in 4 chance to actually move silently across the room.

And no edition has every pulled completely free of that. 4e, as much flack as it gets for daring to be somewhat balanced, left Rogues & Rangers as exploration specialists relative to the incompetent-out-of-combat Fighter, while giving Clerics & especially, Wizards, more & more versatile out-of-combat options - both more skills /and/ free rituals. 5e restored LFQW, and largely reduced skill-based contributions to 'warm body' anyone-might-randomly-succeed BA - with the traditional exception of the Rogue, this time specialized via Expertise.

The fighter is the biggest victim in all of this, in part because we are still locked into a thief skills defined list of what is a skill.

 

[Sacrosanct]

From what has been explained to me the 15 percent thief technique was only supposed to be needed if the task was impossible for other methods. Now I do not think that was well presented if that was actually the intent and it feels a little weird how does that work you make a d20 vs dexterity check and if that fails then roll the thief percentages?

Anyone else here of that thinking?

Yes. And the 1e PHB implies this as well. Things like how hiding in shadows essentially makes one invisible, even to infravision (if a heat source is nearby). And how move silently makes you totally silent even across squeaky boards. I.e., the thief progression %s are above and beyond what normal PCs could do just by narrating their actions. Any non thief can try to be sneaky, but if there is something like squeaky boards, they will automatically fail. Or anyone can hide, but they won't be invisible like a thief can be.

 

[Garthanos]

Your assumption that there were many or any tables out there which let you climb a wall after make D20 under dexterity check is what I think is entirely wrong here. I don't think that existed as a consistent methodology more or less anywhere. There may have been some tables doing that before or after the introduction of the thief because anything is possible, but if I had to bet based on the evidence I'd say, "Nope."

The evidence I would cite is the complete lack of submissions to Dragon or any attempt by TSR itself to fix the skills problem with that methodology. No one ever even thought of it, and I knew people writing into dragon trying to get published and certainly no one at TSR was going, "Hey, you wouldn't happen to have a fix to the skills problem would you?" We mentioned Len Lakofka earlier, and he was one of the best most self-aware critics of the D&D system of the era and he addressed the problem with the thief design and it's intent, but not in the way or context you are imagining which is I think a very anachronistic and very modern view that assumes the existence of a fortune test.

Even when NWP did consistently get to make a D20 or under roll, it was still a silo'd skill or ability granted to you and not something that worked off the assumption of a broad system available to all.

My suspicion is that before the thief there was no system. And after all, this is EXACTLY what the OD&D people most often trumpet as why it was better. So the 'system' such as it was for climbing a wall is you described your approach for doing so to the DM and he gave you a pass/fail on whether it worked. That is to say, prior to the thief, no one was rolling the dice as part of a fortune check for hiding or climbing at all. They just asked the DM to describe the wall, and if it was rough and uneven then they tried to convince the DM that they had a successful approach for climbing the wall, and if they succeeded in that they just had climbed the wall. I think based on everything I've read and first hand testimony that was in fact how OD&D was played.

And you could still play AD&D that way and in fact I think it was intended to play that way after the introduction of the thief. What the thief let you do for the first time is get a roll to succeed even if you couldn't talk the DM into letting you automatically succeed. And in a way that was revolutionary. We were moving away from a pure Braunstein resolution methodology where everything was about convincing the referee your plan would work.

In point of fact, I doubt very many walls were climbed in OD&D unless before the session the DM wrote up, "The north wall if closely inspected is rough enough that handholds can be used to climb it." And again, the reason is that I knew players from that era (a cousin for example) and I also joined just after that era and I know how DMs tended to approach the problem. For example, for wall climbing if a fighter proposed climbing a wall, the DM would probably point out the wall was of brick or closely fitted stone or carved stone and that would be it. You couldn't climb it. If a table argument erupted (because no rules!) it would focus on 'realism', and the DM would probably say something like, "You put on plate mail and a 40lb backpack and climb yonder cinderblock or brick wall, and I'll let your character climb this wall. Climbing a brick/stone wall is not realistic." In practice, the only walls that would have been climbed were ones the DM blessed as climbable for reasons of their own.

I definitely do not think it was consistent it may have become a "fix" someone came up with later and was being "rationalized" in defense of the thief.

Definitely focus on realism yup. I have seen people in plate do obstacle courses (its way better tech than the armor before it and climbing is more doable than most people think - the stories of William Le Marshal in his 50s climbing castle walls are maybe less hyperbole than my gut reaction considered them when I first read of it) but I agree that is unlikely a table was aware of any of that even so.

 

[qstor]

I'm wondering "where's the fun?" in OSR games like Labyrinth Lord/Swords and Wizardry?

The fun for me is playing a "stripped" down PC without all the bells and whistles of 5e/PF/d20.

I started with 1e so I'm actually more partial to OSRIC than LL and S&W but I'm been playing DCC with a friend of mine lately and that's fun too.