AD&D 1E Redesigned and Rebalanced Thief for 1e AD&D

[Celebrim]

One way the Thief gets hosed is in the saving throw tables: for Thieves, Poison should be broken out from Paralyzation and Death into its own category, with Thieves - and Assassins - getting the best odds of saving of any class (rationalized as being better trained with poisons and-or having built up a bit of immunity through repeated exposure).

I feel like this is a preference rather than a real need. At low levels of RAW, thieves already have good saving throws across the board. The very slow improvement of their saves is the problem, a problem that I solve by giving them even better saves across the board to start with. I wouldn't object to thieves or assassins getting a +2 bonus on saving throws versus poisons, which wouldn't require breaking the categories out or any other such big change. I just don't see it as a real necessity that they are particularly resistant to poison.

And, does any of the above tweaking also apply to Assassins?

Honestly, Assassins for me aren't interesting enough to be their own class. They basically are thieves with level caps in exchange for better weapon selection. There only really unique ability worth mentioning is their death attack, but that has to be one of the least interesting and least well thought out mechanics in D&D as it seems to want to turn an adventure into an off screen affair. The assassin narrates to the GM how he plans to kill some NPC, and rather than playing out the plan the GM dices for it adjusting the percentages in the table as he sees fit based on how good the plan is relative to the defenses the GM has chosen for the NPC. That's all RAW. And well, frankly I find that silly. Just play out the assassination attempt. That's more fun and less prone to subjective silliness.

That said, if I were working up revisions to Assassins, pretty much everything I wrote above would apply to them, and I'd port in the small tweaks that Assassins have, including Disguise as an additional thief ability, 1 more weapon proficiency, no weapon restrictions, one less NWP, and the level cap/leveling restrictions. I'd probably throw in that all assassins starting from level 1 get the Master Thief ability to deal backstab damage to any surprised foe and add to that that it applies to ranged attacks within 1" per level of the assassin, give them a +2 bonus on saves versus poisons, lose the special assassination table and be done.

I find higher-level Thieves - say, about 9th+ - are quite able to hold their own, if nothing else by that point they've almost certainly got some rockin' magic gear to help them out, and their thief-skill percentages are high enough to be at least somewhat reliable. It's the 4th-and-lower level range where they really have issues.

Everyone gets better magic gear to help them out, but every other class gets better benefit to almost all of it than a thief does. And while the skill percentages start to become reliable, the number of situations that they critically help out in is smaller than the number of situations that a M-U or Cleric with the same XP could help out in by uses of spells - even if they focused solely on things like Spider Climb, Levitation, Tensor's Floating Disk, Fly, Silence 15' Radius, Invisibility, Detect Traps, Detect Magic, Polymorph Self, Comprehend Languages, Knock, Passwall, Dimension Door, Telekinesis, Teleport, Tongues, Remove Curse, Dispel Magic, Wall of Stone, Clairvoyance/Clairaudience, Augury, etc. The M-U just is a better thief than a thief is.

The thief at 4th level and below is actually pretty decent class and you can show this mathematically. The THAC0 gap at this level is pretty small so you have a decent chance of hitting targets in the AC 5-8 range that is common at low level. You start out with better saves than a fighter and your AC isn't terrible. Your damage output isn't bad because that high Dex lets you dual wield with no real penalty, and you can always throw daggers or darts from tier two until you can get around behind the target for a backstab. You hit 4th level before the Barbarian hits 2nd and by that point you've got as many hit points as the barbarian started with. Specialization breaks this somewhat, turning even low level fighters into combat monsters that no longer need 18/50+ strength to outclass other characters, but you still are at least useful.

But as you level up, even though you stay a couple of levels ahead, you just do not keep up with the other classes. Spellcasters advance exponentially, getting more spells and more powerful spells at every level. Meanwhile, not only do you advance linearly, but you advance linearly at half the rate of the other linear classes. You gain about half as much hit points as a fighter. Your saves for the most part improve half as fast as a fighter. Your THAC0 improves half as fast as a fighter. By the time you hit 10th level all your saves that were better than a fighter are now worse. Your THAC0 that was two behind the fighter is now like 7 behind. Not only are you hitting for less damage, but you are hitting like half as often. A 5th level dual specialized fighter or a 5th level cavalier will handedly kill a 15th level thief in a straight up fight even if assume the thief has +3 weapons and armor and the fighter doesn't. When you start comparing like to like, say a 10th level fighter versus a 12th level thief the gap in capabilities is just enormous - the thief is worse at everything and the thief abilities are low enough utility to be almost color. No other class has that problem. A 15th level just about anything but a thief would be threatened by a 5th level fighter, but not overwhelmed by it because it would have answers of its own. The thief's only answer is something like, "Can I have the ring of invisibility, since the fighter and the M-U really don't need it?"

 

[Celebrim]

Interesting ideas! I really like the exceptional actions listed for the skills.

I also gave the thief class a boost in my campaign but not as extreme. The key ideas are:
1. A thief is never penalized for attempting their skills and failing the roll, unless the skill description specifies one (PP, Climb). For example, failing MS does not mean you are automatically noticed, failing RT does not mean you set off the trap.
2. Some skills are passive in common situations, e.g. the DM can roll Detect Traps for you if the party walks towards a pit trap.
3. A wider list of skills to choose from, and the possibility to replace the standard skills with others.
4. All thieves get Evasion (the one useful ability of the Acrobat IMO)
5. If the thief is single-classed, bonus skill points at some levels.
6. If single-classed, gain an "advanced study" at 6th level, such as Arcanist which gives you the ability to read low-level scrolls or Swashbuckler which gives you +2 to hit in melee. The ability improves/expands at 11th level.

We have a lot of the same ideas, although you missed that in addition to fixing the thief I'm also blanket answering questions like "Ok, so what happens if the non-thief wants to climb walls or move silently?" Also the full design (and understanding it) may require a full NWP (for thieves) write up, since I'm leaning into that as a means of addressing skill use. Even 2e was overly conservative in its write up of NWPs just as 3e designers were overly conservative when addressing skills, because both designers didn't want to add something that was game breaking. There were some feat like experiments in 2e though, and I think hindsight shows that is really where the design should have gone.

Addressing your changes:
1) We're doing basically the same thing here only I'm leaning into the failure/failure with consequences model of Pick Pocket and applying it universally. You generally don't get consequences unless you fail by worse than 21%.
2) Passive skill usage sounds like a good thing and can be justified but tends to put a burden on the GM to remember to do all that, and I hate shifting burdens to the DM.
3) I'd be interested in seeing your skill list, even though I'd probably turn most of them into NWPs, they probably have some good ideas.
4) As you can see, all thieves get Evasion as well (assuming they invest in it) as well as pretty much all the Acrobat abilities without having to switch to a new class. Under these rules, you can run a thief that is acrobat-like just by focusing your skill improvement on those areas, or one more traditional by focusing on the traditional thief skills. Or you can jack-of-all trades if you are willing to be about 70-80% in all areas by the time you hit 10th level.
5) Bonus skill points for being human and/or high INT, not just because this 3e innovation made a lot of sense, but because the original thief write up listed intelligence as the secondary attribute of a thief but didn't mechanically back that up.
6) This will come from the more 'feat like' NWPs I plan to right up, albeit I might not post those for several weeks. In any event, neither of the ones you listed are necessary though, since all thieves in this write up are effectively getting both advantages.