The state of Post-OSR content
- Thread starter Yora
- Start date
I didn't know people missed me that much.
For what it's worth, I am new to this forum but recognize you from GITP, and seeing your name on this thread is exactly what got me interested enough to read it.
(Great points from others too--I'm currently only up to page 11 but have gotten tons of insights from various posters, too many to name. Other threads here have been great too. This is my first actual post though.)
The Heretic
Should be playing D&D instead
Hello Hemlock. Good luck with the bitter edition-war that broke out somewhere around page 20
I looked back (wanted to make sure I was well behaved if I was involved) and it looks like the edition wars started well before then.
And anyway we can all blame that on DP.
squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
We were debating whether or not you'd ever reply to your own thread.
Wow, that is a brilliant article.
5E has a mechanic for rewarding players for good roleplay by giving them floating advantage called "inspiration". AD&D tends to give bonus XP instead. But what if I instead reward them with a draw from the Campaign deck with cards like
"the monsters turn out to be friendly to you" or
"choose a NPC who has previously been mentioned or seen--they now have a hidden nemesis dedicated to their destruction" or
"Calamity strikes! Choose one type of monster such as 'mind flayer'--this monster does not exist in the game world if it has not already been seen, or if it has will soon cease to exist, being wiped out by enemies or natural disasters or arcane cataclysm. There may be side effects."
If I limit them to holding one card at a time, immediately expiring when a new card is awarded (you can keep the old card and ignore the award but can't play it and still receive the award)... I think this could be a lot of fun if I can think up enough cards!
Thanks for sharing.
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Yora
Should be playing D&D instead
I did! For the first 5 pages.We were debating whether or not you'd ever reply to your own thread.
Until the topic had been properly debated and resolved.
Johann
*eyeroll*
There's a "Dork Tower"-themed deck of cards for D&D 3e with various (less extreme) effects. I liked the idea at the time, but never got around to using the deck. Today, I have enough chaos via random encounters and reaction rolls. Works beautifully.
Most of the criticisms of the Thief that I've read aren't conceptual, but mechanical: it's not that sneaking and finding traps aren't cool or worthwhile, it's that (O/A)D&D Thieves are *bad* at these things, especially at low level.
Intuition tells me that the root of the problem is using % dice for thief skills, in conjunction with low starting values for all the skills.
I wonder whether a dice pool mechanic might not be a better way to model expertise. Something like the following five Thief skills, each starting at one die (d6):
Camouflage: exist/sneak without your presence being detected
Forgery: create documents, uniforms, etc. that look like the real thing
Hands: delicate manipulations such as pickpocketing, card magic, lockpicking, disarming fine traps
Perceive: notice large traps, hear clues, oppose Camouflage
Savvy: predict NPC actions, detect social manipulators, have already prepared for a given situation.
(Maybe a Climb Walls skill somehow too, or is that just Hands?)
I'm imagining that you get one extra die per level to add to one of these skills, or maybe two at high level. Tools might give you additional dice or subtract dice if they're substandard.
Example usage:
Picking a crude lock jury-rigged out of iron by a goblin blacksmith requires Hands 1:5 (read: at least one 5-6 in your dice pool). A 1st level thief who chose to specialize in Hands (2 dice) and has decent tools (no penalty, no bonus) would roll two d6s. If either is 5+ (55% probability) he picks the lock, otherwise that lock is beyond him until the situation changes (such as gaining more Hands skill or consulting a mentor about goblin locks). At 2nd level, he could bump Hands to 3d6 (70% chance of success on the crude lock) or invest in a different skill.
A lock in town might be harder, 2:5. A really impressive tamper-resistant lock might need higher rolls, such as 2:6 or even 3:6. A Hands 3:6 lock is impossible for a novice thief to pick, and tricky even for a master thief with Hands 10d6.
Similarly, forging a simple travel permit within the Hobgoblin Empire might be Forgery 1:5 (easy for anyone who's ever seen one) while access to a classified military location might require Forgery 3:6 documents.
If the PCs get thrown in a jail during a heist, "I've already bribed this guard with money. He's supposed to drop a copy of the key on the floor" might require a Savvy 3:5 check, but if the DM decides that this guard isn't corrupt, and money won't work, he could say "roll Savvy 5:5 instead" and on success, tell the player, "You found that this guard isn't corrupt and won't take money, but he's desperate to find his missing daughter [adventure hook]. You promised to help with that if he helps you. He drops the key on the floor just as you had planned."
I imagine that instead of various races getting +/- 5% to Hide In Shadows, etc., elves might get * or ** to Camouflage while halflings get * to Perceive, where each * means "you can add +1 to a die of your choice". Thus, Camouflage 2d6* might roll 4, 5, which you can use to satisfy Camouflage 1:6 (4, 6) or Camouflage 2:5 (5,5).
I think by boosting the low-level success rate and reorganizing the skills, Thieves would have a unique niche that isn't easily duplicated by a wizard with Knock and Invisibility. Having a Thief in the party would feel less like a tax begrudgingly paid (or ignored in favor of another priest to offset trap damage) and more like a role that brings an actual benefit to the party and is fun playing.
At any rate, this is about what it would take to get *me* to want to play a Thief sometimes.
Just spitballing here--anyone want to comment?
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squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
We've always had a thief in the party...and they have always lasted the longest. There's also the bonus of neutrality and no impetuous to play hero (i.e. naked self-interest). It wasn't until recently (probably post the min/max 3e era) I'd heard any shade being thrown at thieves.
Beoric
8, 8, I forget what is for
We've already had this discussion, and I think it ends up the the utility of a thief is entirely dependent on the predilections of the DM in relation to a whole bunch of factors including combat environment and rulings regarding getting into backstab position.
Back in my 1e days my personal experience was that thieves were so outclassed in combat they were no fun to play. Especially as you rise in level, when the differences in "to hit" bonuses start to add up, and MUs come into their prime, and fighters start getting the really good gear (and maybe the odd strength bump here and there), I found I just couldn't hit a damned thing, especially since I could never get into backstab position. It probably got worse when fighters were given weapon specialization. So I ran fighter/thieves just so I could have access to the fighter combat table and multiple attacks.
EDIT: So you can address the problem with a particular DMing style, or with multiclassing, or with new mechanics like @Hemlock is suggesting. But you wouldn't need to do those things if there wasn't a problem in the first place. And it is not an answer that you have only ever played with DMs who had the "proper" (i.e. corrective) style; that just means you were always using a correction, and you just didn't know it.
Back in my 1e days my personal experience was that thieves were so outclassed in combat they were no fun to play. Especially as you rise in level, when the differences in "to hit" bonuses start to add up, and MUs come into their prime, and fighters start getting the really good gear (and maybe the odd strength bump here and there), I found I just couldn't hit a damned thing, especially since I could never get into backstab position. It probably got worse when fighters were given weapon specialization. So I ran fighter/thieves just so I could have access to the fighter combat table and multiple attacks.
EDIT: So you can address the problem with a particular DMing style, or with multiclassing, or with new mechanics like @Hemlock is suggesting. But you wouldn't need to do those things if there wasn't a problem in the first place. And it is not an answer that you have only ever played with DMs who had the "proper" (i.e. corrective) style; that just means you were always using a correction, and you just didn't know it.
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squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
I'm an old man. I've already had EVERY conversation.
Not suppose to be in combat. See below.
That's my answer. AD&D Thief not broken. Condolences. Sucks to have sucked.
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Hmmm. I would think DM predilection is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making thieves appropriately fun. That is, as a DM, as much as I would like to let first-level thieves be awesome, I don't think I could do it under AD&D 1e rules where the success rates are so low. *Maybe* I could do it with 2e rules (more thief skill customization at level 1 to let you be mildly good at one or two skills, although sneaking still requires boosting two separate skills).
But I think I can satisfy my predilection better by actually changing the probability curve. Then I can offer thieves opportunities to do things they're actually *good* at instead of just mildly competent.
Probabilities matter, is what I'm saying.
I never really saw thieves in play back in my munchkin teen years with AD&D, didn't see any use for them in Gold Box CRPGs in the 90s, and haven't been much attracted to them since reviving my interest in AD&D even though (being older) I am much better now at seeing theoretical uses now for stuff like Detect Noise and Pickpocketing. They just take so long to develop useful levels of skill.
Maybe it's just my ignorance though. I'd love to hear more about how you make use of low-level 1e or OD&D thief skills.
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Two orcs
Officially better than you, according to PoN
My first house rule running ACKS (which uses the B/X thief pretty much straight) was to count them as 4 levels higher for the purposes of thief skills. Interestingly one of the first ACKS expansions (Heroic Fantasy Handbook) did the same by jumping through the hoops of adding specialized thief gear and giving bonus for light encumbrance.
Something else I've seen in later ACKS and certain other people suggest on blogs is to give the thief limited infravision (30') to aid it's role as the dungeon scout, to make sneaking viable (by either having no light source or only using a tiny candle) and to create a sort of "dim zone lurker" role where it moves in the dim zone just ahead of the torchlight so it always has a shadow to hide in. This requires that elves, dwarves and others don't have better infravision since that again robs them of this role.
Something else I've seen in later ACKS and certain other people suggest on blogs is to give the thief limited infravision (30') to aid it's role as the dungeon scout, to make sneaking viable (by either having no light source or only using a tiny candle) and to create a sort of "dim zone lurker" role where it moves in the dim zone just ahead of the torchlight so it always has a shadow to hide in. This requires that elves, dwarves and others don't have better infravision since that again robs them of this role.
Yora
Should be playing D&D instead
Thieves are one of the many cases where I wish the people who wrote down the rules had given some kind of explanation on how they would actually use them in practice. I don't care if it's "you can use and apply the rules any way you want to in your campaign", If they wrote it and printed it, they should at least have played with it before until they decided they had something that works for them. And I really would like to know what that was.
Yora
Should be playing D&D instead
Something I just found:
chiquitafajita.blogspot.com
And a reply to it:
lurkerablog.wordpress.com
For people with nothing else to do for the weekend.
The OSR Should Die
You are on my old URL! You will be redirected in 5 seconds...
chiquitafajita.blogspot.com
Have you tried ANT? A response to Marcia’s “OSR is Dead” post
I don’t usually indulge in talking about “the scene” or categories like OSR or Storygamers, but this article was so nicely and lucidly written that I couldn’t help worrying …
lurkerablog.wordpress.com
Something I just found:
And a reply to it:The OSR Should Die
You are on my old URL! You will be redirected in 5 seconds...
For people with nothing else to do for the weekend.Have you tried ANT? A response to Marcia’s “OSR is Dead” post
I don’t usually indulge in talking about “the scene” or categories like OSR or Storygamers, but this article was so nicely and lucidly written that I couldn’t help worrying …
For what it's worth, recent WotC 5E publications already to have stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest of dissatisfaction, such that reading (okay, skimming) those histories of the OSR feels familiar. I don't know if that means 5E will just have its own preservation-oriented movement, or if some 5E-players will realize how much they prize the design elements WotC is shedding and will evolve towards classic/trad/OSR play. But it feels like a schism started in 2020 with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and is accelerating with Monsters of the Multiverse.
I'm speaking of things here like an increasing emphasis on character generation as a form of self-expression and an even-greater emphasis on designing NPCs to exist only for ~three rounds of combat, using a degree of designer fiat which emphasizes that these NPCs are not playing by remotely the same rules as PCs are.
Many players are fine with this. Many are increasingly not. It's hard to know which is the majority (probably silent) but there's a schism happening.
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squeen
8, 8, I forget what is for
WotC really has a product called Monsters of the Multiverse? I mean, wow, jumping on the MCU cinematic band-wagon a bit hard aren't ya? No original concepts of terminology of your own? The Marvel comic-book multiverse has existed since the 70's...but after one or two movies...and BAM! it multi-verse this, meta-verse that sprayed all over pop culture like a cheap coat of paint. Pathetic!