Thief and Thieves

I've been thinking about Thief recently. Not the class, but the 1998 game. It, and it's sequel, Thief 2: The Metal Age, are the games that I believe get closest to making you feel like a thief. It got me thinking about thieves (the class this time), or as they would later come to be called the rogue (a name I find better, but I digress).

Thieves suck. Thieves have sucked in every edition of DnD except for 4th. From their inception thieves have always been the worst class, or at least near the worst, and I don't think it's just a numbers game. You could make the B/X thief better numerically and I think it would still suck.

The Thief.

Let's start at the beginning. What's a thief? Someone who steals. In DnD terms, they handle the lock picking and scouting and the assassinating. The thief (in OSE) has two major defining characteristics: sneak attack (or backstab, if you prefer) and thief skills. 

Sneak attack is bad. In theory, sneak attack makes up for the thief's lack of combat skill, being that they have a d4 hit die, leather armor, and no shield, but sneak attack is such a limited effect in B/X. It exists exclusively to allow the thief to slit necks, except it is still very easy for the thief to fail at doing that, either by missing or just not hitting hard enough. Later editions would codify sneak attack into a bit more of a central piece of the thief toolkit. In contrast to fighters, thieves are about one really big hit. Frankly this just makes missing feel worse.

Thief skills are equally bad. Hide in shadows is the thing you'd expect thieves to do the most. They sneak, that's what they do. Hide in shadows has a 10% chance to work at level 1. By level 8 that is up to 55%. At that level a mage can let someone fly. Twice. You might say "well the thief can do it infinite times a day" and to that I'd argue that it only takes the thief failing once to end up a corpse.

This is beating a dead horse. I haven't said anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before. We all know thieves suck, and if you didn't you would sooner rather than later. Let's open a new can of worms then.

Why is the Thief One of the Big 4?

The big 4 is my personal name for the fighter, mage, cleric, and rogue, the four main archetypes in DnD classes. You might notice a small difference between the first three and the thief.

Fighters are hard(er) to kill, with an emphasis on weapon combat. They hit stuff good. 

Mages are people who do arcane magic. They have access to a wide variety of spells that do dozens of unique and useful things.

Clerics are worshipers of gods that are given divine power and can be mediocre at hitting stuff.

Those three archetypes are varied. A lot of different ideas can fit under them. A fighter can be a fighter, or a fighter can be a barbarian. A mage can be a mage, or a mage can be an illusionist.

Let me ask again. What's a thief? Someone who steals. Thieves live in this magical place where what they are is so strict. A thief is a thief. There are no other options. You might argue that a dexterous archer is a thief, but no that's more of a ranger, which is definitely more of a fighter than a thief. An assassin is a thief, I suppose, but it's still someone who steals and sneaks, it's just a thief with greater emphasis on slitting throats.

I think thieves make the game worse. There's an argument for older DnD that goes "the lack of special abilities on character sheets implies you can do whatever you want". I think this argument is dumb, partially because it's false. Thieves have special abilities that only they can do. It makes no sense that only thieves can pick locks. I can pick locks and I am most assuredly not a thief. I can put my ear to a door and hear behind it. Anyone can do that. There's an argument, and a good one, that thief skills are just adventurer skills. Go tomb robbing enough and you'll learn how to lock pick.

So where does that leave us? Obviously removing the thief is silly. Thieves are baked into the fantasy genre at this point and I think there is merit to having a big 4 rather than a big 3. The question is if everything the thief does is bad, what is it a thief should do?

A thief never plays fair.

Now we loop back to Thief (the game). Something I love about the Thief games is that you are weak. You will lose in a fair fight 90 times out of a hundred. So you never take a fair fight. You cut the lights with water arrows, make new paths with rope arrows, and when all else fails you clobber someone with a blackjack. Hard to catch a thief when you're asleep.

There's an expectation in the OSR that the players should never fight fair. A fair battle is a lost battle. Thieves should take that a step further. A thief isn't just tilting the odds in their favor. A thief is changing out the machine that weighs the odds.

Adventuring equipment is a part of DnD that's been there from the early days. You wouldn't know this if you started with 5e, because the stuff is treated with an obscene lack of improtance. It's often little more than a checklist, a bit of tedium before the fun of dungeon crawling. I think we can change that. Think about a fighter for me. Anyone can use a weapon in DnD. A fighter is simply the best at it. Do that with items and thieves. Sure, you can use a 10-foot pole to poke for traps. Anyone can. The thief can just also use it to pole vault over the enemies and fire a net from their crossbow once they land. A thief never plays fair.

Thieves are masters of all sorts of mechanical and alchemical items. Anyone can use normal poison, but a thief knows how to use and where to get special poisons with unique effects. A fighter could use a normal arrow. A thief could use an arrow that explodes into a pool of oil to set up for their mage's fireball. A fighter wouldn't know what to do with a grenade. The thief knows exactly what to do with it.

While fighters are masters of weapons and combat, and mages and clerics are masters of their respective types of magic, thieves should be masters of items. Their tools and the environment itself are the weapons of a thief.