Why do we need thieves??

[Reynard]

Sorry for the digression, but writing a man you wish you could be is not what a self-insert means.

Okay. I'm not inclined to argue it further in this thread, since we are already way off topic.

 

[Umbran]

Sorry for the digression, but writing a man you wish you could be is not what a self-insert means.

Oh, there's elements of it. But, to be self-insert, the character still has to be recognizable as the author.

 

[1QD]

...

 

[GrimCo]

Then, of course a system doesn't have to be based on classes. It can be based on individual abilities or "skills". In which case, you also do not a "warrior".

In classless, skill based systems, some character concepts have large skill overlap (police detective, sleazy paparazzi photographer and actual burglar for instance would all have couple of same skills).

 

[Tonguez]

In fact, Howard makes some comments about Conan's lack of education. In many ways Conan is an anti-Howard. He's like, what if someone was really smart but didn't have a civilized education? Conan is also really brash and violent, whereas Howard was shall we say bookish in real life; I think it's safe to say Conan was a kind of wish fulfillment, but Howard also recognized that going around fighting everyone all the time was probably not going to lead to a long life or happiness.

In regards to the topic, Conan is written by someone who observed that up until the early modern period, stealing from strangers was generally considered okay.

Okay we can link the discussion of Howard and Conan to the idea that Players will use their heroic characters as proxies of what they see as 'ideal' traits, traits which they might well aspire to - Conan is certainly that and players of cunning dextrous rogues might well idealise those traits too, just as Fighters aspire to the traits of the skilled athletic swordsman etc etc.

But derailment might come if I posit that Conan isnt a Mary Sue or Howard’s wish-fulfilment fantasy rather it Howard’s mythologisation of his own ancestors.

Spoiler: the rest of this thought. spoilered so it can be ignored

Conan isnt a Mary Sue, he struggles and earns his reward, because that's the ideal "work hard, play hard - Toil the Soil and Conquer the Land". Howard wasnt writing himself with muscles; he was elevating his ancestral ideal, the heroic wild spirit that drove the 'eternal champion' embodied in King Kull, Bran Mak Morn, Soloman Kane, El-Borak, the Texas Cowboy. It’s the same tradition that gave us Tarzan and Aragorn and even Beowulf and Cú Chulainn before them

The Cimmerian barbarians of the Hyborean Age are identified as ancestors of the Gaels (Irish/Scots), they represent that Northern peoples before they were softened by the depredations of civilisation (honest barbarism vs. decadent civilisation is a major theme). They were an idealised form of Howards own heritage.

Conan is the heroic spirit of Howard’s imagined history: the distilled essence of the frontier, the warrior, the outsider. Part heroic ideal, part critique of modern decadence.

 

[Staffan]

You don't have to call it "thief" or "rogue" (to use the modern parlance), but in order to have a reasonable simulation of a world, fantasy or otherwise, IMO a skill-based character is very important, to complement the combat or magic/technology-based characters. If those things are all aspects of the setting, I feel they need to be included as options for characters, PC or NPC. Heck, I wish more games cared about diplomacy and commerce, and live the games that do. Anything that you can do in the setting should be a character option in the game IMO.

I think "skill-based" in this paragraph is a bit of a misnomer. In many (probably most but I don't have any statistics) games, combat and magic are skills. I think you specifically mean infiltration skills (stealth, lockpicking, climbing, swimming, etc.)

 

[Tonguez]

I think "skill-based" in this paragraph is a bit of a misnomer. In many (probably most but I don't have any statistics) games, combat and magic are skills. I think you specifically mean infiltration skills (stealth, lockpicking, climbing, swimming, etc.)

Even when Combat and Magic are also Skill best there are often have extra steps like using mana points or spell slots, and of course damage rolls and HP. So they not pure Skill use, in the manner of picking locks or investigate

Combat - Magic - Skill are thus the three mechanical systems used in RPG games to do things, they often overlap even to the point of all being skill-based, but there is often enough to distinguish the three

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think "skill-based" in this paragraph is a bit of a misnomer. In many (probably most but I don't have any statistics) games, combat and magic are skills. I think you specifically mean infiltration skills (stealth, lockpicking, climbing, swimming, etc.)

That tends to be true outside of class systems as far as combat (though you have odd cases like the Hero System, but that's as much a historical accident as anything), but with magic it tends to depend on how the magic system operates in general. Though its not class-system like much, traditional RuneQuest only has one of its three magic systems as skill based, and there are others that are either "investment based" (as in, you expend experience directly to acquire spells but they don't look like skills) or are talent/attribute like rather than looking like skills in the system.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Even when Combat and Magic are also Skill best there are often have extra steps like using mana points or spell slots, and of course damage rolls and HP. So they not pure Skill use, in the manner of picking locks or investigate

Combat - Magic - Skill are thus the three mechanical systems used in RPG games to do things, they often overlap even to the point of all being skill-based, but there is often enough to distinguish the three

Though this gets confusing in some games because some skills are used for task-based resolution, which can look a lot like damage accumulation. I can even think of one older example that had attribute based effect rolls that looked kind of like damage.

 

[Older Beholder]

Given the amount of TTRPG's that don't have thieves, I'd say we don't need them.
Even DnD relegated thieves to a sub-class.