Blog book club #1: On Thief Skills in Classic D&D

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Welcome to the first weekly blog club! This week we are looking at “On thief skills in classic D&D” from 2006 by Robert Fisher. In case it wasn’t clear, Fisher’s post is about the original B/X version of D&D.

Next week we’ll discuss “Same Description, Same Rule” by Ben Robbins.

Some of my own thoughts

First, a better example of OSR reinventing the wheel would be hard to find. If you search r/osr for “thief skills” there are pages and pages of results, an echoing cry down the ages: “Why are thieves like this?”, “How can we fix it?”. Of course, Fisher’s solution is but one; the matter is not closed. On the other hand, I wonder how many of those threads arrive at something similar?

Secondly a quick simplified chronology of the old school Thief: OD&D (the three little booklets) has no Thief. B/X adds one with the “problematic” rules Fisher is dealing with in his post. The Thief skills are pretty similar throughout the the Basic era and in AD&D 1E. AD&D 2E changes things up by adding a skill point system that thieves can spend to improve specific skills.

With regards to the retroclones of B/X: Old School Essentials and BFRPG leave the Thief largely unchanged. LotFP replaces the Thief with the Specialist, which gets skill points, switches everything to a simplified X in 6 system, and expands the range of skills to be able to create more diverse character types.

Thirdly and lastly: a literature review of blogs: I thought it might be interesting to look at Fisher’s particular thief “fix” in a wider context.

As far as I can tell there are four broad approaches. Note that I’m excluding people who are inventing whole new systems and games like Cairn that don’t have any attempt to include Thief skills - these are all people trying to start with the B/X Thief and decide what to do with it.

  1. The OD&D purist: There is no need for a Thief class; its existence is an anathema hindrance to all players engaging creatively with the fiction. (James Maliszewski, 2008; Jonathan Becker, 2020)
  2. The apologist: The Thief is fine as is, and here’s why. (Chris P Wolf, 2018)
  3. The interpreter: You’re reading the Thief wrong; the skills are intended to be used only for exceptional feats. (Fisher (our blog club post); Gorgo Mormo, 2018).
    • A notable variant: Josh McCrowell of His Majesty the Worm follows in Fisher’s footsteps and takes them further: making the skills explicitly magical exceptions to normal efforts and thus more powerful, but of limited uses per day. For example: “You can step into your own shadow. While in your shadow, you’re practically invisible.” (Josh McCrowell, 2020)
  4. The updater: Let’s allow specialising and/or simplify and/or bump up the numbers a bit. (AD&D 2E; LotFP; Chris Kutalik, 2015; Jack Shear, 2016; Eric Diaz, 2022)

Discussion time

Hope that wasn’t too much! Some questions to get us started:

  1. How have you used the B/X Thief, if at all?
  2. What other Thief-y, Rogue-y rules have you played with?
  3. Do you have any other ideas, either about the B/X Thief, or how you would handle Thief-like issues in your own game?
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This is a great start! Especially the little literature review! I’ve been playing the thief as per Fisher’s approach and it has served me well. I would add that I prefer a coherent x in 6 system to replace the varying dice rolls and make life for new players a bit more logical at the expense of having the exact same probabilities. So I guess I would fall into the Fisher Camp with some OD&D DIY spirit to simplify things a bit.

To add to the conversation beyond this, I really like how elegant and simple Shadowdarks approach is as it sidesteps the whole Fisher argument: Thieves simply get advantage on these activities versus all other classes. Useful from the start and relevant for the entire game.

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  1. I personally only get to play B/X like once or twice a year at Garycon so I’m going to skip this one.
  2. Lately I have been playing Shadowdark and DCC the most and honestly this article has changed the way I will be ruling thief abilities in those systems to reward the class a little bit more. More on that below…
  3. Ruling the thief’s abilities on failure will be what I will be changing.

Thieves, however, have a chance to move silently. If successful, there is no chance for the thief to be heard. If the thief fails to move silently, they should still be considered to be moving quietly.

Note that if he is moving silently, a thief is not hiding, in shadows or otherwise. Move silently & hide in shadows are mutually exclusive. There is no double jeopardy.

Both of these abilities are key to the DCC thief though I have never seen failure being ruled this way, instead failure is the same as anyone else. The idea that on failure the thief is still able to move quietly feels far more interesting to me in terms of gameplay, especially when failure usually has serious consequences and disincentivizes the thief to use their supposedly superior skill. From now on in that system I think I am going to only have a negative consequence on a critical failure, where maybe they make a noise and attract attention.

I also think the author’s distinction between hiding in the shadows and hiding out of sight were also a great distinction to make that isn’t really discussed in “modern” gameplay. And I will be looking to pull that forward as well.

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Although in DCC don’t thieves get extra luck to burn to turn failures into success? I haven’t played the system enough to know whether adding this extra layer of “soft failure” might make stealth too easy.

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They do get to burn luck but it gets taxed pretty heavily, and the thief often gets put in the position to be the one sneaking ahead in the dungeon looking for the traps and stuff like that. Traps in DCC can be death-level punishing so you really want to hold on to the luck until it matters, especially since you only get 1 back per day.

But even more so, I think it just makes the thief as a character make more sense thematically to “soft fail.” I might have to play with it though, maybe the actual fail is 1-3, or 1-5, either way it has be rethinking how I rule sneaking DCs for a thief.

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Well, I have to say I’ve not worked with B/X thievess much, as I’ve not spent a lot of time with B/X. I’ve spent the bulk of my time with AD&D and the thieves therein. I realize the two systems’ thieves are largely alike, so what a table does with one would work much the same for the other.

I’ve not been much for playing thieves, so have limited experience with thieves in other systems. I did enjoy thieving in TSR’s Conan system when we played that. that’s the only system from long ago where I actually recall anything about playing a thief.

As for how to handle thieves? Not long ago I wrote up thieves for AD&D & B/X, based primarily on what Gygax had in the 1e PH and DMG. It included discussion of non-thieves attempting thief skills and provided both qualitative and quantitative advantages for the thieves. For example, thieves don’t have to roll for climbing the easiest walls, unless the player wants the thief to push their effort and move more quickly. Non-thieves have to roll for those climbs, and they move more slowly than the normal thief move rate. (I expect ropes to be used for climbing in most situations and thieves are more adept at handling and climbing ropes, too.)

Since then, for my projects, I’ve actually done away with thieves. Well, burglars and pickpockets and other openly criminal actors. What I do have with exploration skills – find & disabling traps, noticing sliding stonework, blahblahblah – are treasure hunters. Some of the conventional thieving skills are deprecated – pick pockets, hide in shadows, backstab – and others, such as read languages, fit better diagetically. Being specialists, they have qualitative and quantitative advantage over non-specialists in what they do.

Edit to add llink to blog post: The Thief is Dead…Long Live the Thief! – OSRPGtalk

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Great start to discussion.

To me this post is less interesting for what it says then when and how it says it. This post is published in 2006, when the OSR is not really a thing, there is grumbling about 3.5E, but 4E is still a couple years away and D&D is at one of its low points in popularity. It’s an artifact of a time where there is far less “RPG theory” out there, and a far smaller scene. Fisher is posting on Dragonsfoot perhaps but there is not the larger community debating these things at the time.

Again, there is also no “OSR” at the time, not the name in common use and certainly not the broad recognition of a play style or community of practice. Yet, Fisher begins a fundamentally OSR project - a hermeneutics of old D&D. He’s looking for answers to the problem of thieves in the books without reference to authorial intent - figuring out how the old rules might play out to solve his issue in play. He’s also specifically looking at low level thieves - both in his commentary and as he is citing to Basic (B/X & BECMI). Also notable is that he pulls in other rules for non-thief rules (e.g. demihuman abilities) and includes mechanics from X4, Master of the Desert Nomads by Dave Cook of the Expert in B/X (not a great adventure btw).

To me this is a model for OSR - especially early OSR behavior - looking to resolve issues in older systems that have led to profound changes in the 3.5E era (shifting thieves into rogues with all the attendant ninja/MMO stuff), but doing so on the terms of the text or with textually supported changes. I also note that there is no discussion of emulating older play or finding the right way to play older games … because Fisher already assumes the audience is part of the community that plays or has familiarity with these games - he’s suggesting house rules.

Two things I also note:

  1. Thieves are first introduced in the Greyhawk supplement for OD&D. This allows for some weird speculations and digressions about what their original intended role in the party was - especially if one takes the view that OD&D is intended as a supplement to fantasy wargame campaigns. It also makes the next point more interesting to me - because again Fisher isn’t reaching back for the first “true” concept of the thief, but rather the one in the game he is playing (B/X or BECMI).

  2. Fisher is talking about thieves in B/X & BECMI - and doesn’t bring in AD&D, something that is interesting because it focuses on the issues where thieves are most irksome to players, at low level when their skills fail. At high levels there skills may be less important/useful but they rarely fail.

So to me the post is most interesting to think of contextually - as a marker to how “OSR” thinking and style of theory started to appear.

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I’ll start out by listing my main problems here, not all coming out of the article itself, but because of the *waves hands* general situation:

  1. I don’t consider it a good “fix” mechanically.
  2. It’s a bit too apologetic to me (pet peeve of mine, admittedly).
  3. The Thief is still crap after it.

I’ll go a bit in detail, but hope I don’t end up with something longer than the actual post :wink:

Let’s assume the wording really implies an almost supernatural ability for things like moving silently, hiding and climbing. First of all, that makes “open locks” and “pickpocket” odd ducks, and especially the latter isn’t exactly associated with supremely highly skilled individuals.
But yeah, class-based systems, niche protection, etc., I’m not complaining about this too much in other, similar rule sets, either.

But a thief’s chance of the “regular” feat is either automatic or the same as everyone else, independent of level? Or less than normal, and thus not used?

Also, percentiles or Russian Roulette, my least favorite D&D dice mechanics when they relate to classes…

Now, regarding the apologetics, I don’t really see this in the article itself. It’s admittedly seeing things from a different point of view, which is a good approach in general. A lot of fun and creativity can be had this way.

But we’re also discussing the wider OSR sphere here, and I’m seeing way too much creative rules interpretations being touted as “This is How The Founding Fathers Wanted It/Did It/Did It Sometimes”. I see this by itself more as using the words as a creative prompt than “interpreting” it in a sense of trying to eke out how it was done back then, but in the decades after that…

And finally, I still don’t see the Thief as a good archetype. It clashes with some fiction, as it artificially creates a distinction between truly sneaky people and those who are good at fighting (it’s not just Conan who goes against that), it introduces skills where they’re not needed and done in a different way than anything else. Also even more exploration rolls, party splitting etc.…
(As a fictional archetype, it’s at least not as unprecedented and sheer out annoying as either clerics or late-stage bards)

Now, for the how do I run 'em part. I have to admit, that most of the time I don’t care deeply enough to eliminate or change them as a DM. They don’t change the way I run dungeons that much, as I’m a heretic when it comes to strict procedures and time keeping. And they barely influence the world building, as opposed to clerics (which I prefer to leave out of the game whenever I can).

When we’re playing AD&D, I’ll just ask whether they won’t just use the Monk :wink:

If I ever were to spend much time on revamping the class and didn’t have ability checks and/or skills in that campaign, I’d probably go for the Complete Warlock approach to abilities, where most of it isn’t based on PC rolls at all. For example, you get Pick Most Locks, so you just open them, if they’re not magical or very, very technically advanced. And you Move More Silently, which just means that you add a pip to the regular chances of not being noticed. Plus some fun stuff like being better at arson or cheating at cards.

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Just to say: I am reading and appreciating everyone’s input. Thanks for participating! :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, this struck me too! Before I conceived of the blog club I read as far as the 2008 part of Marcia’s list. In this post about Dragonlance (we’ll get there everyone!) James expresses some sentiments that I find unremarkable: that TSR in the 1980s were moving into pre-planned stories with railroady games. If you posted that in an OSR/post-OSR community you would get broad agreement. But the comments below the post are full of the contradictions that existed in the D&D community at the time: trying to thrash out what “story” is and where it comes from on and so on.

It made me think that we have become siloed in this late and degenerate age - there are vast numbers of people buying and playing WotC products, and I’m sure lots of them have quite trad playstyles, but you don’t see them commenting Grognardia posts.

Not saying that we necessarily have to do anything about that, by the way - the RPG hobby is huge these days, and smaller communities are inevitable. It was just surprising for me to be reminded how things have moved on.

Answering my own questions briefly: I’ve never played B/X. My OSR gaming has been homebrew rules imparted to me by Eero Tuovinen, 5E but with lots of OSR tweaks, and then my own homebrew system. But my own thinking about exploration challenges boils down to:

  • Don’t roll for things that are easily described
  • Not everything can easily be described, so let’s roll for those to represent character skill
    • e.g. I don’t want my players to describe investigating every corner and every crack as they progress down a corridor
    • e.g. Dealing with internal workings of a mechanism

Of course, some would argue that a well designed scenario will always telegraph secrets to be found (whether treasure, traps, or secret doors) and then provide the players with interesting choices. But often I am running a module that doesn’t follow that rule, so I like to have procedures that can handle that. In which case having a character (Thief) who gets a bonus to those activities is good.

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I don’t really mind the B/X Thief too much. The Rapid Advancement and Lack of Weapon Restrictions are pretty nice. B/X also has the boon of Trap Activation. Many take issue with the Special Abilities and dislike the abysmal percentage chances at lower levels however. We played mostly BECMI and the progression was even slower in that presentation due to the extending of the Levels to 36 :slight_smile:

Interestingly, over the course of a Sustained Campaign these Abilities tend to atrophy a little bit. There’s simply not a lot of Locked Doors or Fiddly Treasure Traps to deal with in the Wilderness Exploration Tier, so the Thief’s Role can become more of a “Scout” type Character. By the time they reach Domain they usually have access to Scroll Use and won’t really be making as many d100 Checks (why Hide in Shadows when you can just Turn Invisible, why Pick a Lock when you can just Knock it open?) and their role can change yet again, they sometimes become more akin to Spies, Guild Leaders/Masterminds, or even Assassins.

Here’s my ancient post about alterative resolution methods for Thief Abilities from 2008 so as you can see, it’s been something we’ve been blogging about for a long time. Some alternate approaches to handling those abilities, and some of these ended up becoming more popular over time.

Nowadays, I do like to use the Turn Undead Table/Matrix for these abilities quite a bit occasionally. I enjoy how it bakes in Difficulty (You can just use the Dungeon Level or HD of a Foe most of the time! No need to set this as a Referee!) and even has some limited “partials.”

One thing that has proven popular with my Players is extending the number of tricks of the trade that they can learn with some additional d100 - Unusual Thief Abiltities. These are usually things they pick up via Training, Adventure, or as other Rewards in Play rather than just selected as part of Advancement. Though it can be fun to offer them the ability to “swap” one of the Standard Ones at Character Generation just to give them the option of being a very specific kind of ne’er do-well.

I always make sure to provide Clues and Tells for those Tersely Detailed Traps when it comes to Modules that might be missing those, as they tend to make those kinds of Hazards a bit more interactive and less of just a decision to roll the dice and risk it.

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This is a really useful table! Do you find that if you use descriptions like these the players ever fail to find the trap? Not saying that’s a problem, if so, just curious.

Indeed!

I am thinking of gathering more blog posts for my literature review and writing it up more fully (as a blog post, no less!), so I’m interested in any other posts people have written or found.

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In terms of the Clues and Tells, they really just help keep things a little more interesting in terms of the fictional space. For me, I’m not a very big fan of the “Gotcha!” style trap that springs without any warning or sign so I tend to use those very sparingly.

Sometimes they don’t get properly investigated or the approach the Players take might result in interacting with them, so they spring anyway (good ol’ Trap Activation does act a bit like a preliminary Saving Throw here) and we have to resolve them. For me, the best Traps are the ones that if triggered, have that Forehead-Slapping Moment for the Players: “Oh, I guess we shouldn’t have ignored those Bloodstains…that’s on us.” or “I thought something looked fishy about those Chains dangling over there…”

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With my genuine apologies to people who are deeply in love with ALL the B/X and OD&D rules, I do find many of the thief skills way too low. Even one of the original designers has said that he would have fought harder to increase starting thief skills.

Personally I prefer Cairn style rules where everyone can do everyday thief style things like climbing, sneaking and trying to open locks.

But if you wanted something B/X style my (probably awful and heretical) tweak was:
d20 roll over
Base chance for a thief is 9
Thief level divided by 2 rounded down is subtracted from the base chance. For all the skills.
So:
Level 1: 9
Level 3: 8
Level 5: 7
Level 7: 6
Level 9: 5
Level 11: 4
Level 13: 3
Level 15: 2

Non thieves: 12
or 13 but they can add their DEX bonus to the roll

If you want thieves to add their DEX bonus to the roll increase the base chance for thieves to 10.

That gives thieves a starting 55% chance on their thief skills. If you wanted to keep a percentile system you could do:
Level 1: 55%
Level 2: 57%
Level 3: 60%
Level 4: 62%
Level 5: 65%
Level 6: 67%
Level 7: 70%
Level 8: 72%
Level 9: 75%
Level 10: 77%
Level 11: 80%
Level 12: 82%
Level 13: 85%
Level 14: 87%
Level 15: 90%

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Is the Post OSR a “late and degenerate age”? I don’t really think so, while in the 2000’s a lot more people reading OSR blogs were familiar with Trad style play as embodied in late TSR/early WoTC D&D, I don’t think that this is much different then today when many people coming to Post OSR spaces have more experience with Contemporary Trad as embodied in 5E.

I suspect that the Post OSR has become a bit more dogmatic and stuck in its ways, at least when it comes to long standing maxims, mythologies and fictions like “Dragonlance ruined D&D” or “The Wilderness Tier”… This is only part of the process of the “OSR” becoming more a fan community rather then a creative one. Think if it this way - Expressionism was pretty cool back in 1905 - creative and still new - but it’s not in 2025, it’s just someone’s hobby painting of thier garden at the local flea market. That doesn’t make it bad or untalented, but it does mean its a little stale.

With the Post OSR I think there are plenty of people moving things forward, doing experimental stuff, it’s just that this isn’t the same people that complain about Dragonlance or have “new” thief skills systems to write up, both of which have been done 10,000 times in the last 20 years.

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(This doesn’t detract from your post, but just to be clear: I said “late and degenerate” tongue in cheek).

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I figured you had - but it’s an idea that one could draw from a lot of stuff going around lately - including some of the things I had in my first post.

Just wanted to clarify.

It also raises interesting questions.

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I’m a bit biased about this post since I read it during my first dip into the OSR and it’s colored my opinions and those of my groups. We used the B/X Thief as described in the post - exceptional abilities that break the rules.

I haven’t played with too many other thief-y rules myself, but I do like Flashbacks from Blades in the Dark for drawing inspiration from modern crime media. They’re much higher power than most B/X characters. I also like the Deft from Whitehack that can automatically succeed on something difficult (or attempt something that should be impossible) once per day.

I personally prefer special abilities not requiring additional rolls – they can do things for free others would need to roll for, and attempt things that are impossible for others. I’m not a fan of making tons of player-facing rolls, especially if they have low rates of success.

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I find the B/X Thief to be one of the weakest classes in that system. Introducing the first skill system to see the Thief fail the majority of the time I find a hilarious anachronism.

Anytime I have an OSR style thief at the table, I’m usually using rules like Backstab rather than the thief skills. I find those are used much more often. Arguments about whether a thief is hidden or not and how they can become hidden again persist to this day.

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Yeah: Assuming Competency when it comes the Adventurers (based on their Class and any Background/Prior Vocations they may have) goes an awful long way to eliminate unnecessary and uninteresting points of failure. I’m not going to make someone who was a former Sailor roll to Swim across a Calm Lake, or tie a simple Knot. If there’s a Grog-drinking Contest or Sea Shanty Singing situation, they’re probably going to be better at that than others, etc.

The same goes for Classes to a degree: In situations where there’s little to no Risk, or the consequences of Failure aren’t going to generate anything interesting we can just let that happen. If the situation favors them in a significant way, then we don’t necessarily need to make a die roll to arrive at the outcomes. A Fighter can judge at a glance the quality of some looted Weapons/Armor, a Cleric is familiar with most types of Undead and major Religions that might be present in the Setting, etc. The Thief needn’t make a roll to Climb a Tree or over a Short Wall with plenty of Hand Holds and so forth.

This occurs a bit in a few of my Rules Reference/Play Examples that explain a little bit about the process of making Rulings and when to Require a Roll. I think the one I put together on Back-stabbing & Bushwacking (in the Play Example) goes specifically into how I handle some situations for a Thief Character.

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although sailors were notoriously shitty swimmers…

but yea, I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I feel like there is a sorta NSRish consensus that backgrounds should take the place of skills. PC is a sailor so they don’t need to roll for sailory things unless under extreme circumstances. things like -move silently- are extraordinary abilities that fall under some sort of outside category (“gifts” or whatnot) that allow PCs to do normally impossible things. so to me it’s interesting to see the inchoate version of this concept 20 years ago.

SIDE NOTE: I also want to point out that dragonlance DID break D&D for me. I remember getting that first module for Xmas when I was like, in 6th grade, and wondering what the hell was wrong with it; i couldn’t even figure out how to run it. my impression was it was some sort of book that you had fights in. it was the beginning of the end for D&D. I didn’t renew my dragon magazine sub and bounced to other systems. and this was exactly one Christmas after Ravenloft, which felt so modern and blew my mind. (mostly for the isometric maps I must admit, but also the plotty bits).

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