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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 8300712" data-attributes="member: 15700">I think the one thing we can all agree on is that the rules were ambiguous, and future iterations of D&D starting with 1e and Holmes basic just muddied the waters.Looking at the rules back then, it makes sense that most people would assume that only thieves could pick locks or find traps, despite what the original intent was or how it was originally played, because that's human nature to interpret things that way.  And I think it's clear that by the late 80s, the assumed style of play among most players was that only thieves could do that stuff.  Why do I make that conclusion?Because if the designers of 2e still assumed the original rule (everyone could attempt anything, and thief skills were just there for the really hard stuff no one else could do), then they would have kept something very similar to the skill progression in 1e, because if you follow that assumption, that skill progression makes total sense and is balanced.  After all, Skip Williams said a key design goal of 2e was to make it backwards compatible (which is why they stuck with descending AC rather than ascending, per his words).However, if you look at it through how most people actually played, that being that thieves rolled every time they wanted to pick a lock or remove a trap, then the thief skill progression table was woefully weak, and thus is why when 2e came out, they addressed that glaring weakness by allowing you to dump up to half your discretionary points into one skill, making even a 1st level thief have a decent chance of success at those things.So by making that significant change in 2e, it tells me that they knew that most players were not following the original intent (largely because the rules were extremely ambiguous about it), they knew that D&D wasn't growing through word of mouth via experienced DMs like the 70s but by swaths of new players learning together, and thus made a significant change to boost the function of the thief.</blockquote>

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