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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7633159" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Ironically, I don't.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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 <em>that the DM said he could</em>. 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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>And if some DMs out there couldn't deal with that, then that is on them and not on the thief class.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7633159, member: 4937"] Ironically, I don't. 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 [I]that the DM said he could[/I]. 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. 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. 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. [/QUOTE]
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