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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7633203" data-attributes="member: 4937">I pretty much agree with this.I don't fully agree with that.&nbsp; 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 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.&nbsp;&nbsp; In brief, yes the thief is meant to give you abilities that are otherwise impossible.&nbsp;&nbsp; But it's not meant to make impossible what is an act of ordinary skill.&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It's coming from the sort of resolution methodology that I think applied to OD&amp;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.&nbsp;&nbsp; The thief skills are meant to live in that ambiguous space between obvious success and obvious failure.&nbsp; I think that in practice before the thief mostly everyone did find those tasks impossible.&nbsp; That is to say walls weren't normally climbed.&nbsp; Players never normally convinced the DM that they could move silently.&nbsp;&nbsp; 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&amp;D play before the thief.&nbsp;&nbsp; Again, I can just imagine the argument about realism, with the DM holding the trump card as to what works.&nbsp; 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.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.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7633203, member: 4937"] I pretty much agree with this. 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 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. 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. 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. [/QUOTE]

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