Pre-Greyhawk Thief & Exception-Based Design
A long time ago, I talked about how the board game Pandemic designed its different player roles around posing exceptions to the rules. If a city overflows with disease cubes, then the disease spreads to nearby cities—except if you're a quarantine specialist and can prevent the spread. Players can remove one disease cube from a city per action spent—except if you're a medic and can remove all cubes at once. It costs five cards of the same color to cure a disease—except if you're a scientist and need only four. This makes the game really interesting, since with different player roles you will end up with very different strategies for how to counter the disease and win the game.
No one's a stranger to the thief discourse at this point. Thieves prevent other characters from doing things they should be able to do! Or, actually, no, they just have special abilities that let them do those things better. Thanks to the thief, D&D was ruined in 1975, the year after it was first published! And so on and so on. I've contributed to the kerfuffle before, writing about how the thief class messes with the thematic cohesion of OD&D as being about joining the ranks of the high classes (the gentry, the bourgeoisie, and the clergy) and accumulating social power.
I still agree with that take, but this post is about something different: similarly to player roles in Pandemic, I think that the original function of the thief class is to provide shortcuts or exceptions to typical D&D situations. This isn't dissimilar to how Robert Fisher defended the thief in his classic post, "On thief skills in classic D&D" (~2006-06). However, I'd like to focus more on how each ability specifically poses an exception to an existing formal rule, not just how thieves differ from other characters in the game world. The thief class originally had five special abilities: hear noise (HN), hide in shadows (HS), open locks (OL), move silently (MS), and remove traps (RT).
- Hear Noise: This is the only x-in-6 ability that the thief has, precisely because it is an improvement over the 1-in-6 ability that all characters already have (or 2-in-6 for non-humans). But the implication is that, over time, the thief will let you bypass this roll, or at least allocate less figures to attempting the task (since OD&D during dungeon crawls is fundamentally a worker placement game).
- Hide in Shadows: This one seems to me like a clear exception to the surprise roll that applies to the whole party. If the adventuring party as a whole is surprised by an NPC party, or if they fail to surprise the NPC party, the thief basically gets a second shot at surprising them. This is a clear advantage when playing OD&D as, primarily, an individual-scale skirmish game. This starts at a 10% likelihood.
- Open Locks: As indicated on Zenopus Archives, this skill is a time-saving one. Failing to open a lock means that the door must be forced open—which is the typical way of dealing with dungeon doors in OD&D. The implication is that attempting to unlock a door takes no time at all. I think whether or not all doors potentially have locks could be argued over, but, if this is the case, then the thief starts off with a 15% chance to bypass any door without spending any time.
- Move Silently: This serves as the likelihood of stealing something completely unnoticed or being able to silently strike someone from behind. The former is specifically relevant to inhabited rooms with treasure; the thief can just act to grab it. The latter is basically a critical hit trigger, since the thief already gains surprise (an extra round of combat!) via hiding in shadows; they just have to roll again for the additional benefit of extra damage. Both of these things have an initial 20% chance.
- Remove Traps: Everyone has a 2-in-6 chance of being hurt by a small trap, and it seems like this is regardless if they know it exists (OD&D seems to enjoy a disconnect between player and character knowledge, or at least bypasses that distinction as a matter of abstraction). So, everyone basically knows if a trap is there or not. The thief has the choice of attempting to disable the trap; if they do not succeed, they trigger it instead. The initial odds are 10%.
These are really not that bad, and neither are their initial likelihoods of success—at least since so many of them are second chances or shortcut attempts. That being said, it's pretty clear that the thief is functionally only useful during the dungeon-crawling phase of classic D&D. They don't have much that would prove useful in the hex-crawling (wilderness) or war-gaming (domain) phases of the game. Because of this, their existence might indicate a shift away from those other phases and more towards non-stop dungeon-crawling. At the time of leaving the dungeon and entering the wilderness (~30-40k XP), thieves have about a ~50% chance of success at all these things. But will they ever leave?
This has been the trend anyway, but I think that a generalized ability check and skill system elevates the benefits originally presented by the thief by (1) individualizing or personalizing character actions, (2) presenting disparity between characters' capabilities, and (3) covering a wider range of play situations than just dungeon crawling. This is not to say that I think that a universal resolution procedure should ever be presented as the backbone of a game, which I think obscures the activity of the game itself, but I think this kind of system is better to handle allocating tasks between characters with different abilities and skillsets. Give characters different capabilities, put them in situations where they have to split their efforts, let them help each other to make up for their weak points, and so on.
In any case, the above is my rationale for including the pre-Greyhawk thief in the optional rules for FMC. Understanding why the thief was introduced and what gaps it filled is essential to understanding how D&D evolved as a game, especially as it shifted in focus. This is also why I think the hobbit should be the thief class, if you're including one or the other. It's cute! They're little burglars.
Also, on a tangent, emphasis on "optional" in the previous paragraph! FMC is a study, not a tribute to a shibboleth. There's at least three different rulesets RAW without the optional rules (Appendix A by itself, FMC with Appendix A, or FMC without Appendix A), so (1) there's no such thing as a singular ruleset RAW and (2) introducing even more variability is its own end. The goal is to think critically about how the different components interact with each other, contradict each other, or produce each other historically. The thief, being so illustrative of the early shift in D&D's play style(s), is a great example of all three of those relations.
I wonder if perhaps the value of the thief became more obvious when the possibility of urban adventuring emerged, through publications like "City State of the Invincible Overlord" (1976). The world of the thief is a thoroughly urban one, essentially overlapping with that of the merchant who is both a victim and potential partner. The thief shares with the magic-user a potential for social ascension into the bourgeoisie, not through a profession but through wealth and finance. A "name-level" thief might run a guild but is likely also a financier to kings, nobles, and churches... Just a thought. Let me take the opportunity to thank you for FMC -- a delightful and thoughtful "study" of OD&D that, rather than trying to resolve its many ambiguities, reveals and revels in them -- and in doing so ignites the imagination wonderfully.
ReplyDeletethose are both really fascinating points, them being useful in urban adventures as well as them becoming part of the financial bourgeoisie over time!! the former especially is interesting because cities in OD&D seem to be mostly like CRPG-style menus; like you just visit the place, maybe sell or buy stuff, and leave. once cities become more like dungeons (so to speak), that seems like a great opportunity for the thief to shine!
Deletealso thank you so much for your kind words :) it means a lot that others find it just as worthwhile to explore OD&D as a wonderful mess, rather than trying to read cohesion back into it. i'm really glad it serves your imagination!!
First and foremost, congratulations for your job in this blog. I have being following it with intermittency but with great interest. I’m well aware that this post would have been more appropriate in your earlier entry in which you discussed the origins of the class, but I can’t for the love of me find it again and, frankly, since I don’t want to face the ghastly lack of progress in my final project for university, I would like to propose an alternative class origin for the Thieve, if I may. Before that, and running the risk of loosing your interest in the very first paragraph, I would like to specify some details about my background: I’m studying a History degree, I have focused my interest and my work in economic history and, in particular, in Late Medieval and Modern periods. Even if nowadays I’m working in the fields of finances and sovereign debt, I tend to obsess about pre-capitalist modes of productions more broadly.
ReplyDeleteNow with the main point. Taking into consideration the broad european inspiration of D&D, I think is safe to assume the thieve is inspired in the figure of the vagabond. Europe sustained an enormous amount of itinerant sub- proletariat and beggars in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern periods; the causes were many and interlocked: demographic increase confronting the technical limits of agrarian techniques and feudal or seigniorial property relations; the sustained, century-long rise of inflation in what have been named the “Prices Revolution”; the attraction of cities for those whom the countryside could no longer sustain as a source of job opportunities and the reality of an urban economy too narrow to absorb the newcomers, and a long etc. The usual redistribution of resources through the Church charity and, in a lesser extent, the municipal powers, were usually overflowed and were thusly restricted to help those who could prove their citizenship. The other way to earn a living out of these ways—ingress in a guild trade, occasional wage work in the cities or in the countryside during harvest or charity— was to join a noble house as a servant, which was also a complex endeavor. Even prostitution was municipally regulated and there were controls of whom could practice it, restricted also to the bathhouses.
This is, by no means, an exhaustive relation of the forces that drove the creation of this very particular and heterogeneous class, nor the manifold ways they appear in history. My point is that, for those casted out of these systems, a live of chronical or even professional crime was one of the few solutions.
In fairness, the image of the vagabond, the professional beggar was magnified and deformed in the collective imagination, with semi-literary figures like the Spanish “pÃcaro”—the literal translation of “rogue”, amply used in RPGs nowadays— or the most probably fictional mafias and thieves’ guilds like the Castilian “garduña”. The stories surrounding those guilds share, in fact, many common ground with the abilities associated to the thieve class. In matters of historical plausibility, I may recall the colorful descriptions of the “beggar kings” described by Engels in “The Peasant War in Germany”.
[...] I would argue these sub-proletariat, and more so, their literary image, may be at the root of the cunning and mercurial rogue found in the adventure novels and pulp fiction that in time inspired the creation of the D&D class. Also, I think the lack of attachments and the freedom of movement are some traits that supported the credibility of a life of adventuring, in a similar way—albeit diametrically opposite in origin—of the fighter’s suggested background.
DeleteP.S.: I apologize in advance for the more-than-likely grammatical and orthographical errors in this post. As you may have deduced from the aforementioned examples that cropped out of my head, I’m not a native speaker and expressing yourself in a second language may sometimes be an arduous job.
P.S. 2: In an absolutely different note: since you have scrutinized the entirety of the OD&D/Chainmail material and you have a knack—I think that’s a brutal understatement, now I’m rereading it, lol— for math, I have to ask: have you stumbled across a way to link point prices for units in Chain of Command and equipment prices in the player’s section? I’m mightily interested in finding prices for arquebuses in the original ‘elf game’.
hello rata, thank you so much for your kind words and fascinating take!! that should really be its own blog post because you are really onto something. reading thieves as the historical european vagabond class is very fascinating, and i agree that the history of that class is what went on to inform the figure of the adventuring thief in sword and sorcery literature. my initial hangup is that the backstory of thieves seems to be similar to that of the fighters, like you indicated (on that topic, i feel like someone told me before that one of the functions of the spanish conquest was to "export" ultraviolent spaniards); however, seeing that thieves were able to 'progress' their own situation seems very apt, and possibly related to what peter C said above about the thief being a class for urban adventures.
Deletew.r.t. arquebuses, it's funny because the chainmail point values seem balanced around action economy: bows cost 3 PV because they can shoot every round, but crossbows and arquebuses cost 1.5 PV (need to double check). likewise, crossbows tend to be cheaper in OD&D than short bows:
- short bow is 25 gp
- long bow is 40 gp
- light crossbow is 15 gp
- heavy crossbow is 25 gp
however, in one-versus-one combat, crossbows are more effective than bows, and arquebuses are more effective than both. to me, this might indicate that arquebuses are about the same price as a heavy crossbow or maybe slightly more expensive -- but i'm not sure if i agree with that valuation 😂
thank you again for your comment!!
Lol at "this page intentionally left blank". Echoes of the old joke about a Soviet protestor being arrested for waving a blank sign - "What would I write? It's so obvious!"
ReplyDeleteI thought for a second that it was going to continue into "What is role-playing? It's kind of like playing pretend with your friends..." and similar RPG boilerplate.