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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9876006" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no intention of arguing with your own lived experience, but that claim is not one I find objective.Gygax played his first game with Arneson in February of 1973.  By 1974, the thief as a playable character with percentile chances had been published by Gygax, originally in a newsletter.   This is correct but also highly misleading.  Only one table that I'm aware of played with the thief without percentile chances.  The original thief that was brought to the attention of Gygax was modeled after the Cleric, but with a different spell list.  A first level thief for example got "Open Locks 1" that allowed him to open a simple, non-complex, non-magical lock.  But remember, this was also before Vancian spellcasting.  This was at a time where if you knew a spell you could use it at will, casting Sleep or Fireball every round.  The number of tables that have that experience of D&D, of which you might be one or an heir, is notably however very very small.  The vast majority of tables didn't exist in that era and never had access to a thief written in that manner.  As for the argument you here make, I find it very self-defeating.  The argument that before the thief anyone could just pick a pocket or open a lock through roleplay precludes the idea of the thief ever being invented.  Before anyone ever would say to the GM, "I want to play a thief" it is a prior condition that that player didn't feel like under the processes of play presented to him that he could play a thief with the rules and procedures of play as they stood.  In other words, it had to be the case that at least some player - the very player who invented the idea of the class - felt that he lacked narrative authority to successfully open a lock or climb a wall or pick a pocket and so wanted rules put in place that would grant him the narrative authority where his GM would say "Yes" to those propositions.  If the world mostly worked like you claim, if what you claim was normal and intended, then the thief class would have never been invented, nor would the idea even caught on.  The most likely explanation for the thief's success is that the vast majority of tables that encountered the idea recognized it as a mode of play that was before that point not practical because prior to the thief all the narrative authority lay with the DM and his mood at the moment.  After the thief, a player could strongly assert that he had the ability to pick a pocket or climb a wall or whatever.It certainly wasn't because the class was any good.  Power gaming didn't lead to the thief.  We got there because it was perceived as opening up possibilities of play you didn't have without it.  Without it, the game is just "Mother, may I?"Or, it didn't.  The problem I have with your description of your experience, is if I take it as first value it violates Celebrim's First Law of Roleplaying Games - "Thou Shalt Not Be Good At Everything".  In my experience, all RPG play depends on the first law to be functional.  If player's can declare their character can just do anything with automatic success, you don't have a game, or at least you don't have a very interesting one.   Games are defined by their limits, what you can't do.  If you can propose anything, what's the challenge?What I'm guessing by this statement is that your table and the community you were in was its own evolved little sect of OD&D players that evolved their own processes of play and then ignored the direction the game went because you were already comfortable where you are.  That's fine.  I'm not saying the way you played was bad.  Clearly you enjoyed it.  The problem I have is you declaring the way you played to be the originally intended manner of play, and really by the time you can call the game D&D, that's not true.  What you are describing is a very small Arneson focused style of play that was known really only known to a very few players, and which wasn't that far removed from being a Bronstein. So, everything you describe is both familiar and unfamiliar to me, in as much as you seem to think that you are citing some novelty that no one would be familiar with.  How you describe play in later versions of D&D doesn't ring true to me at all, no matter how much insight you are providing into the culture of OD&D play in the Midwest in the 1970s.  There are plenty of times when for example a 3e PC can simply declare he can do something without rolling and with no chance of failure, because he can take 10 or take 20 or because he can't fail the roll because the DC is smaller than his bonus on the roll.  What's different is that he has from the game narrative authority to do that - it says so on his character sheet.  He's not depending on fiat.On the other hand, the idea you are describing of the thief skills being automatically successful unless "contested" seems both unworkable in practice (most of the skills will be contested) and nothing like how anyone I played with thought of thief skills.  My own conception of them is that they are basically like saving throws.  They don't preclude you finding a trap by poking it with a 10' pole, but they do mean that if you can't figure out how to find the trap or disarm the trap through scenery interaction, that you at least have a saving throw to fall back on.  And really, that's how I used them.  They weren't reliable enough to be your first recourse, and as a thief you weren't durable enough to get it wrong.  You used them when other methods failed you.</blockquote>

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