Why do we need thieves??

[nevin]

I am sorry that your scope of warrior is soo ... small and thusly tied to DnD's limited interpretation and expression. I might, if possible, attempt to expand your concept of what a warrior is. I will first take MMA, and note very quickly that in counter to warriors being only there for murder, and make the distinction that combat is not always murder.

I certainly see MMA fighters, (hrmph it's in the name) as warriors. To this end, yes they earn money for, here it is again, combat. Instead of lethal weapons they use natural weapons, which still have the potential to kill, but that really isn't the point is it? They get in a ring and fight. Now let's put your average guy into the ring. Now according to you, no special training or moves are required by the farmer what so ever. Surely there will be no difference in skill or relative ability to defeat one another.....

And here, in a real life example, is where your argument shows its divine limitations. There is most certainly a training requirement, a unique set of skills that will allow the MMA fighter to over come his average guy rival. And it will happen nearly every single time. This also rings true if each combatant has a long period of time fighting in their own native fighting style. A dedicated warrior will always beat out an average person, every single time...(nearly) But as a general rule, yes.

Lastly many professions take part in combat to protect, self defend or to acquire loot. This does not make every single one of them warriors. A warrior is a specific expression of combat, not just a combatant.

well see very few MMA games in m RPG and even if you add all the professional wrestlers and MMA and other Martial Artists 99 percent of people who train to fight are training to kill. Even if they don't expect to do it every day. so a few percentage points of athletes don't really move that needle at all. Historically paid combatants for sport were pretty rare unless it was to the death anyway so your argument only holds for modern times anyway. But Warriors name starts with WAR for a reason. The concept of Warriors came from all the many wars most of the combatants throughout history participated in. And inspite of many cultures attempts to turn combat into a sacred or special thing in the end it always ends up with people trained to kill killing each other. I seriously doubt there are any DIVINE limitation in my Mundane argument about people trained to kill killing people.

And I'm pretty sure Bruce lee got shot in the chest by a street thug. Police officers sometimes get themselves in trouble because muscle memory kicks in and they kill people they shouldn't because they react without thinking. Most Chinese and Japanese orders that revered martial arts died in the 1800's because guns erased your idea that trained people always win. Even if you go back historically many groups of trained warriors and monks became so successful that kings, and emperors just overwhelmed them with force and killed them all. That and honestly size, and mass and numbers mean far more than most people realize. As I said. I fully accept the argument that other people kill for money. That doesn't limit or mitigate my argument about warriors at all. Though I am fully aware that pointing out that people who train to kill usually do kill and that there is nothing good, holy, divine or even sacred about it, is something that pokes at many culture's sacred cows about their special men and women of war and combat. I'll even admit that some of them use those abilities to protect others.

however this is a gamer forum we are talking about RPG games and it's really silly to try and frame an RPG , mythical, argument around real life.

I'll leave with one statement. IMO Training to Kill is training to kill. nothing more nothing less and there is nothing divine or special about it. This is why the term MURDERHOBO exists in the game community. You can be a warrior and not a murderhobo., but there is nothing uniquely divine or special about warriors. (but that could be different in a fantasy world). In reality they are people who with all the options their society gave them to make the world a better place decided to focus on how to kill people. But I do love my myths and legends where the most noble warriors slay all the bad guys and make the world a better place. It is sad that it doesn't seem to work that way in real life. This is why we have them in games. I don't expect you to agree with me. Don't really care if you disagree with me. I've had my say.

I'm not replying on any more on this particular part of this discussion. /done /peace out

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

I don’t see the problem. Thief is an established archetype in fantasy, and they usually lag behind casters and big sword dudes in power developement. So if someone want to be a stealthy, backstabbing skillmaster just go for it, it doesn’t make my games worse in any way.

 

[aramis erak]

This is how Fantasy Trip handles it. Your char creation choice is between 'Hero' and 'Wizard'. Heroes are anything other then primary magic throwers. There is no dedicated 'Thief' but if you pick enough roguish talents for your hero, you are effectively the party sneak/diplomat/infiltration expert.

Players wanting to do something other then "Bash it with a heavy something" or "Zap it with magic" will probably pass on a game that forces a choice between Bash or Zap. Some people really want to Sneak, Talk, Spy, etc.

TFT does have Jobs, and thief is a job, with talent and attribute requirements. Those jobs on the list include a bunch that correlate to classes, and provide a reason to take the standard array of skills so your character has downtime employment...

If I run pre-3e editions, thief skills will be replaced with proficiencies which means that anyone can pick them up, but the thief gets them for free. So I won't get rid of the thief, but they no longer have sole access to their various skills. 3e onward, since anyone can pick up other skills it's easier to have a fighter that can pick locks; however, since the thief turned into the rogue which has more than just the skills, it is a little more justifiable to keep it in.

Note that the ability to take thief skills is extremely limited in AD&D 2, absent in AD&D 1. Tn the GAZ series and HWR series, for use with BX/BECMI/Cyclopedia, the thief skills are restricted to Thieves and Demihumans; thieves get them all as class features, and DH's get them at the same level as a [human] thief; they just can't take all of them. (and some of them are overshadowed by demihuman features).
For AD&D 2e, there are three methods, both involving custom classes... the DMG method, which is the hybrid character is a unique class, and the Player's Option: Skills and Powers method, which is point build. Note that the rules in Dark Sun don't give you them as a proficiency - they allow you to pick the same number from a wider range. Bards and Rangers also get some of them. There's a third method - Kits. But few kits include thieve skills. And only Dmeihumans get to multiclass into them.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

Most are not based upon Howard's Conan... most are based on Lin Carter and others' versions. Howard's conan was usually in a shirt, wore chain when expecting to fight, and was muscular but not a body-builder/he-man physique.

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.

Only until other authors took over the writing. Then he hits the super-duper swormaster, and stops being the guy climbing sheer surfaces.

In games, Howard's conan, Once thieves were added, he was better represented as a Thief-8 than a fighting-man-8. And only about STR 16. Definitely Con 18. And Dex 17 or 18. Lin Carter's Conan is definitely a Fighting-man-8. And maybe working on his thief 5 to go on to Bard...

Pondering this thread, it occurs to me that there are a bunch of separate questions:

Do RPGs need thievery mechanics?
Do we need rules for sneaking around, opening locks, detecting traps, picking pockets, forgery, etc.? Personally I think the answer is yes, because I enjoy those narrative elements. At the same time, I find most implementations problematic, as attested to by very long threads that often appear on those topics.

If yes to the above, do RPGs need archetypes that specialize in those skills?
Again, I think the answer is yes. Many, many people enjoy playing those archetypes, even if it's more challenging to name specific examples from history/fiction/myth than it is to name warriors and wizards (or even warlords!).

If yes to the above, and it's a class-based game, does the archetype need to be a distinct class?
"Need" to? No. But that's tangled up with the question of how many are "needed" at all, which is really just a design question. Sure, go ahead and make thievery a 'build' off the fighter chassis. That can work. But if the result is that the character feels strictly worse, maybe because a bunch of class features are wasted with insufficient compensation, then you've designed it badly.

If yes to the above, should other classes be able to do thievery, even if less effectively?
In my opinion the answer should be yes. Just like a wizard can whack things with a staff, anybody should be able to try to sneak around and forge a document and notice a trap, and maybe even pick a lock, but less effectively. But somebody else might say, "No, picking locks is more like casting a spell. Either you've been trained, or you haven't." Ok, that's fine. I don't think there's an objectively correct answer. From a game design perspective, though, that means you either have constraints on adventure design, or parties are required to have a thief. In that sense it's kind of like whether or not an assumption of magical healing is built in the game. If it is, then every party needs a class that can heal.

Niche Protection says "No" to the last. Realism says "Go skill based"…

I like thieves, but because they have a niche: urban stealth. This is often expanded to criminal contacts and techniques.

They are not "skill monkeys" in my mind. That's not a niche, that's a rules mechanic. They don't have spells, certainly, but their abilities are greater than just a collection of skills.

The skill monkey aspect came in D&D 3E/d20 Rogues. Who are able to be thieves, but are not inherently skilled in thievery.

This was questioned in another thread. You could say the thing about any class.

[snip of exemplars]

The truth of the matter is you only need two, a melee and magic user. But people like the flavor of differentiation. Or, the game system mechanic's require it. In the end, it is what is best for the system, not what is logical.

If your choices include melee and magic user, you've left out ranged combatant and non-combatant non-caster.
So I see a flat minimum of 3 classes in a class based: combatant (mixed melee/ranged), caster, "other"....
And Casters can often be seen in two camps... healer and damager, but there's a third kind – the buff/debuff caster – and the fourth kind – the utility caster.

In many class based games without distinct skill mechanics, classes are really just super broad skills. and some ostensibly skill based games are effectively class based.
Star Trek Adventures 6 "disciplines" are so broad that they're class-like... but every PC is multi-classed into all 6... in a 0-5 rating system, with PCs being 1st in all 6. (I really think they should have added Merchant and Psi as disciplines...)
Battlestations! 5-7 skills (core: Athletics, Pilot, Science, Engineering, Combat; fully expanded adds Diplomacy, Psionics, and Sanity...) are again, effectively classes (except Sanity) - and most have most of them.

Classic Traveller is just enough in its first skill list to really be skill based, but even there, some of them are so broad that they get split later in the run (Books 5-9)... but your skills available are limited by career, so careers have a class-like function, but not niche protection. You need 5 skills for all ship operations, and a 6th for "setting reasons" in CT-77 & CT-81: Pilot, Navigator, Gunnery, Engineer, Steward; Medic is setting reasons, but a great idea. Streetwise, Administration, and Computer are useful but not essential. But every weapon type on the tables is a distinct skill, too... so, a big inconsistency.... MegaTraveller has a much larger skill list, including the subdivisions from Books 5-7 (8 was after MT, and 9 was this year), and a bunch from magazine articles, but reduces the weapon skills massively.

 

[aramis erak]

I suspect their point is the dedicated class/role called "thief" is largely a D&D artifact that, to the degree its elsewhere is because of the shadow D&D casts, you don't have to have a dedicated mechanical hook for that to have that ground covered. I'd argue the only reason D&D even had one there was OD&D didn't when it first came up have the mechanical scaffolding to provide good support for that in other ways, having no skill system at all as we'd recognize it.

Thievery is a VERY common story archetype skill set, in almost every genre of literature, save caveman/pre-sapiens Homo sp..
If it hadn't been added as the skill exemplar, fans would have written one anyway.

T&T didn't have one until 7th edition... but that's becuase the well meaning guys at Fiery Dragon didn't understand that Rogue in T&T is short for "Rogue Wizard" ... and added a thievery aspect to it.

 

[dragoner]

If your choices include melee and magic user, you've left out ranged combatant and non-combatant non-caster.
So I see a flat minimum of 3 classes in a class based: combatant (mixed melee/ranged), caster, "other"....
And Casters can often be seen in two camps... healer and damager, but there's a third kind – the buff/debuff caster – and the fourth kind – the utility caster.

Thieves also are recon, in the tactical sphere.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thievery is a VERY common story archetype skill set, in almost every genre of literature, save caveman/pre-sapiens Homo sp..
If it hadn't been added as the skill exemplar, fans would have written one anyway.

It didn't have to be an entirely separate entity though. In a more expansive system, it'd have been something that could be attached to a FM or a MU. And it wasn't the only character type the system didn't handle at that point. I can't tell you how many homebrew beast masters I saw.

 

[pemerton]

In Classic Traveller, the closest service to a "fighter" is Army or Marine. The closest to a "thief" is Other.

On the Service Skills table, there are 24 possible results.

On the Army table (1977 version), those are:

4 results of +1 stat increase (STR, DEX, END or EDU)

1 Brawling, 2 Blade Combat and 3 Gun Combat results

3 Tactics results, 1 Leader result and 1 Forward Observer result

3 vehicle results (ATV x2, and Air/Raft)

6 other skills results (Admin, Gambling, Computer, Electronic, Mechanical, Medical)​

The Marines table is very similar, but there is no +1 EDU, Forward Observer or Air/Raft, and instead Vacc Suit, and 2 extra Blade Combat results (for 4 total Blade Cbt).

Results on the Other table are:

3 stat increases (+1 STR, DEX or END) and 1 stat decrease (-1 SOC)

3 Brawling, 2 Blade Combat and 1 Gun Combat results

3 Forgery, 2 Streetwise and 1 Bribery results

2 Gambling results

6 other skill results (Computer, Electronic x 2, Mechanical, Medical, Jack-of-all-Trades)​

Both Army and Other have the same chances of physical stat increases, and the same number of actual fighting skills, although soldiers learn to shoot whereas lowlifes learn to brawl.

And they are pretty similar in the technical skills they learn.

But whereas the Army teaches operation of vehicles, tactics, calling in artillery, and leadership; life on the streets teaches street smarts, forging documents, bribing officials and cheating at cards.

That's a real difference, but it's completely different from how classic D&D draws the distinction between Fighter and Thief: it's got nothing to do with martial aptitude, or climbing, or picking locks. In fact, the latter is just a feature of a particular bit of equipment (from Book 3, p 14):

Lock Pick Set (Tech Level 6) CR 400. Allows picking of most ordinary locks on a throw of 8+; throw once per 15 seconds. Weight is negligible.​

The differences in Traveller pertain to fields of action that don't even really figure in Classic D&D, at least in mechanical terms.

 

[Mannahnin]

Most are not based upon Howard's Conan... most are based on Lin Carter and others' versions. Howard's conan was usually in a shirt, wore chain when expecting to fight, and was muscular but not a body-builder/he-man physique.

Only until other authors took over the writing. Then he hits the super-duper swormaster, and stops being the guy climbing sheer surfaces.

Conan certainly does wear armor when he can, in the original Howard stories, but he is stronger than almost any man/can wrestle gorillas and the like (not beat them, but survive a grapple long enough to win with a knife or something). Not superhuman, and I don't know if Howard would have pictured him as bodybuilder physique, per se (though maybe something like a 1920s bodybuilder, say Eugene Sandow but much taller), but he's supposed to be kind of like original comic Captain America- something like the peak of combined human strength and agility. And he's as skilled a swordsman as he is a general athlete (including climbing, leaping, etc.).

 

[Tonguez]

Conan certainly does wear armor when he can, in the original Howard stories, but he is stronger than almost any man/can wrestle gorillas and the like (not beat them, but survive a grapple long enough to win with a knife or something). Not superhuman, and I don't know if Howard would have pictured him as bodybuilder physique, per se (though maybe something like a 1920s bodybuilder, say Eugene Sandow but much taller), but he's supposed to be kind of like original comic Captain America- something like the peak of combined human strength and agility. And he's as skilled a swordsman as he is a general athlete (including climbing, leaping, etc.).

From Red Nails
"Conan had discarded the remnants of his tattered, blood-soaked shirt, and stood with his remarkable muscular development impressively revealed. His great shoulders were as broad as those of Olmec, and more cleanly outlined, and his huge breast arched with a more impressive sweep to a hard waist that lacked the paunchy thickness of Olmec's midsection. He might have been an image of primal strength cut out of bronze."

RE Howard himself dabbled with a bit of bodybuilding and so definitely had the 1920's version of "gym bod" in his head. Not a hulking brute, elsewhere Conan as described as having muscles knotted like iron cables and to move with the supple ease of a great tiger, his steely muscles rippling under his brown skin - so muscle and suppleness, Strength and Dexterity (Agility)

The exert also confirms Conan wearing shirts, but also them becoming quickly tattered and discarded.

One of the fundamentals of pulp Sword and Sandals was that being close to nature (barbarism) naturally made you stronger, with muscles like knotted iron cables and a sexy hard waist - "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."