Why do we need thieves??

[pemerton]

AD&D if you played with most to all of the rules was more balanced than any edition that has come after.

I don't think this is especially true. And I don't think the rules for swimming do anything to support balance. They're just clunky and incomplete, and disconnected from other relevant elements of the game like STR and CON as ability scores.

 

[pemerton]

In fact it is to me far more arguable if anyone would have a better backstab, it would instead be an assassin type Prof, like ninja. The rest of the thief's skills boil down to fairly mundane abilities, henceforth the question.

I would expect that being stabbed in the back by a knight, or really anyone who is handy with a blade, to be a pretty unhappy experience. The D&D tradition of backstab/sneak attack is a mechanical device, bound up with the class build rules and the to hit/hit point rules.

As far as mundane abilities are concerned, I don't see why sneaking and climbing are any more mundane than (say) fighting. They're all things that people can have a natural aptitude for, and get better at by practising them.

 

[Bill Zebub]

As far as mundane abilities are concerned, I don't see why sneaking and climbing are any more mundane than (say) fighting. They're all things that people can have a natural aptitude for, and get better at by practising them.

That's the thing that makes me scratch my head about the very premise of the OP.

If they really want to write their own thief-less RPG they should absolutely write it however they like. But I find this attempt to find support in rationalizing that design as somehow more logical or superior strikes me as quixotic.

 

[pemerton]

That's the thing that makes me scratch my head about the very premise of the OP.

If they really want to write their own thief-less RPG they should absolutely write it however they like. But I find this attempt to find support in rationalizing that design as somehow more logical or superior strikes me as quixotic.

As best I can infer from the OP's various posts about the RPG they are writing (or have written), it seems to use magic-wielding classes to achieve genre-appropriate fiction without relying on metagame mechanics or other action-resolution and framing devices that don't directly correspond to in-fiction processes. In that sort of game, if it otherwise hews to fairly typical fantasy tropes, knights will not be fully mundane, and - almost by definition - no fully mundane character will be suitable to be taken up by a player to occupy a protagonist's role.

If I'm correct, then in repudiating the logic of "thief" as a class, the OP is just reiterating their underlying design principles and drawing out a fairly straightforward consequence of them. But I don't think that that has any broader consequences for RPG design.

In a class-based game that identifies fighting as a pre-eminent domain of conflict resolution, and that identifies magic as a distinctive (both in the fiction and in the mechanics) way of acquiring abilities, then there will be conceptual room for a character who does not use magic, and is a second-tier fighter, but in exchange is good at "other stuff". (Of course that sort of character is always in danger of being overshadowed by magic.) In D&D that's the niche of the thief or "skill monkey".

The parameters that create this niche - to reiterate, a class-based game in which fighting as a pre-eminent domain of conflict resolution, and magic as a distinctive (both in the fiction and in the mechanics) way of acquiring abilities - are pretty particular. Which means that the "thief" class is also pretty particular. But perfectly sensible within its appropriate domain.

 

[Bill Zebub]

...

In a class-based game that identifies fighting as a pre-eminent domain of conflict resolution, and that identifies magic as a distinctive (both in the fiction and in the mechanics) way of acquiring abilities, then there will be conceptual room for a character who does not use magic, and is a second-tier fighter, but in exchange is good at "other stuff". (Of course that sort of character is always in danger of being overshadowed by magic.) In D&D that's the niche of the thief or "skill monkey".

The parameters that create this niche - to reiterate, a class-based game in which fighting as a pre-eminent domain of conflict resolution, and magic as a distinctive (both in the fiction and in the mechanics) way of acquiring abilities - are pretty particular. Which means that the "thief" class is also pretty particular. But perfectly sensible within its appropriate domain.

That all makes sense, because certainly the OP has made a number of comments in this thread suggesting they have an almost reverential view of fighting.