The Thief Skill as Saving Throw

(Note: A version of this piece by me originally appeared in Fight On! Magazine #6 in 2009. I'm reiterating it here now for those of you without access to that document.)

The thief has been under siege of late. Internet blogs, website message boards, and FRPG fanzines have all been buzzing with some fairly harsh criticism of this venerable class.

An admittedly simplified analysis reveals that thief critics tend to fall into two frequently overlapping camps. For some, the class is too weak. Thief skill success percentages are far too low to rely upon for most of the character’s career. The second camp holds that the thief class is simply a bad fit with the rest of the game. These latter critics claim that making activities like picking pockets and hiding in shadows dedicated thief class abilities creates awkward situations where fighting men, clerics, and magic-users are de facto prohibited (or at least strongly discouraged) from attempting to perform the same feats.

So how do we fix the thief without rewriting the class or implementing elaborate supplemental rules? Simply treat each thief skill score as a sort of saving throw that the thief is entitled to in the event that the initial attempt at a given task fails. If this second roll succeeds, the initial failed roll is ignored.

Example One: Two intrepid adventurers, a fighting man and a thief, are faced with a sheer wall. The DM rules that there is only a 1 in 6 chance to safely complete such a tricky ascent with no special equipment, possibly with a +1 modifier to the roll if the climber boasts extraordinary dexterity. The fighter rolls a four and doesn’t make it. He loses his grip and suffers falling damage. The thief rolls a five and also fails, however his follow-up Climb Walls “saving” roll is 41%, a success! He completes the climb safely.

Example Two: A thief and his magic-user companion are attempting to tiptoe past a distracted orc sentry. Neither are heavily encumbered or wearing metal armor, so the DM assigns a base 1-3 in 6 chance of success for each character. A failure by either is sure to be noticed by the orc. The magic-user succeeds with a roll of two. The thief scores a six and fails. His follow-up Move Silently roll is 88%, also a failure. Despite his advantage, the thief has blown it this time around. Roll for initiative!

This approach is easy to remember, quick to employ, and doesn’t require changing one word of the thief class description from your rulebooks. It strengthens the thief significantly by allowing for two chances to succeed at any given usage of a “class skill” and doesn't infringe on the ability of other classes to have a reasonable chance of success when attempting "thiefly" actions.

The first rule of effective "Lovecraftian" horror:

If your work doesn't share a single proper noun with Lovecraft's, you're probably on the right track.

The D&D CCG debacle: Who's really at fault?

On the surface, it's a straightforward combination of cynical marketing and absolute creative bankruptcy. But I'm not so sure.

I was talking with a friend of mine recently who works in the videogame industry. He told me downright harrowing tales behind some of the worst games of all times. No kidding. Several of them actually received awards for it.

These are projects that span the spectrum from "'gritty' reinvention of beloved cartoon mascot" to "is that even, technically, a game?"

And one pattern emerged: A few people (sometimes only one) with way more money than sense and a whole lot of well-meaning, talented people who know it's a bad idea, say it's a bad idea, and still finish the project because they can't afford to quit their jobs instead of putting work unto a bad idea. There's also no small amount of throwing good money after bad ("We've already sunk millions into this turkey, we can't stop now!").

So that brings me to D&D. It's no secret that they're a subsidiary of Hasbro and that Hasbro wants the D&D "brand" to be making more than it is. It's not hard to imagine WotC's designers, who are, we can assume, RPG gamers with some respect for the form and reverence for a classic like D&D, being told by some executive at Hasbro who wouldn't know Dungeons & Dragons from death & dismemberment insurance: "What about that Magic thing? That makes money. Just make it more like the Magic!" Right before he adjusts his snappy Gordon Gekko suspenders and snorts a three-foot rail of coke off a naked $5000/night escort before bellowing his best Al Pacino "Hoo-ha!"

So what's my point? I mean, for all I know, this might not be the case at all. Maybe so, but armed with these new insights into exactly how ugly game design in a corporate environment can get, I'm going to be hesitant to assign blame for this one. At least for the time being.

Certainly somebody has masterminded a forehead-slapping affront to a great game, but we may never know exactly who or why. At least not until one of us buys the right ex-employee a beer in the years to come and gets the full story.

Merry Christmas to me.

Special thanks to the probably spambot new "follower" of this blog who chose the delightful penis photo to represent himself. Just the sort of holiday cheer my front page needed.

He's gone now, but happy holidays the other 99 of you non-penis posting regular readers.

More updates after New Year's.

Still alive.

Barely.

Let's just say that a series of personal and health-related crises has been giving me one hell of a time. I haven't been gaming or thinking much about gaming.

This will change. Hopefully soon. In the meantime, I hope to make any of you reading this aware that I haven't quit the hobby or this blog. Updates will be forthcoming.

Dice Dice Baby

So I got some new dice:



This is the Q-Workshop "Classic Elven" set. They also come in an inverted alternate opaque color scheme (white with black lettering) and a transparent one, but this one just happens to go well with a black leather dice bag I have.

I've wanted to pick up a set from Q-Workshop for some time, since I love the idea of somewhat "fantasy looking" dice, but readability was always an issue. Frankly, some of their stuff is ridiculously busy by my standards, and there's no way I'm going to sacrifice basic readability for anything.

These, in addition to costing less than half what their more gaudy sets do (due in no small part to using so much less packaging, I suspect), manage to look cool with no loss of functionality.

If you're looking for a well-made set of dice that are both affordable and eye-catching without being over the top (stone, metal, more convoluted than somebody's "tribal Celtic" tattoo), I'd highly recommend this one.

What are these strange...urges?

First off, hello to all the new readers! I can't believe I'm coming up on eighty now. Unexpected, but very welcome.

Anyway, as those of you who've read the older posts around here already know, I started gaming with the chance find of a badly-scuffed but fondly-remembered copy of Moldvay's Basic D&D rulebook that I chanced upon at a thrift store in 1990 when I was twelve years old (no box, though, so I missed out on the Keep, dice, and crayon).

My first point of contact with "the hobby" (as opposed to the few friends I played with in my small mountain hometown of Big Bear, CA) was when I began reading Dragon Magazine in 1991.

So why reiterate all this now? Because just the other day I pulled issue Dragon #175 (my first!) off the shelf for a nostalgic re-reading and I found myself paying more attention to the ads than to anything else. Specifically: The ads for play-by-mail games.

I've never actually played a PBM, and I suspect that their popularity was very much on the decline even back in 1991. Case in point: Personal computers and email were apparently becoming widespread enough that these very same Dragon issues also had ads for the earliest large online RPG games, like the original Neverwinter Nights.

Still, one ad for Flying Buffalo's Heroic Fantasy in particular brought back cool memories. A group of adventurers charging what looked to be a giant cat-bear monster erupting from a pile of skulls. One of the adventurers, amusingly, was a tiny topless (!) female pixie creature wielding a pencil-sized spear. The text promised "...a play-by-mail game of magic and mayhem; where you control a party of humans, elves, dwarves, fairies, leprecons, ogres, or even a troll or giant." Younger me was intrigued, but sadly also cash-strapped.

So I decided that I was going to Google Heroic Fantasy, just for the fun of it. Maybe I'd find some message board or blog posts from old players reminiscing about the game and I could get some idea of just what I'd missed.

Turns out Heroic Fantasy (now in it's 28th year) is still around! At least if Flying Buffalo's website is to be believed. I've finally got a chance to read the rules and the concept is one that's really tough for modern me to wrap my brain around. It's sort of like a multi-player computer game, except you don't own the computer. Instead, you mail the guy who does a listing of what characters you want to run and what you want them to do and then he plays the game and mails you back to tell you how it went. That's just...bizarre.

Bizarre, but still somehow intriguing. Like a time portal to a bygone era of gaming.

Long story short, I'm considering giving it a try. One turn a month. Hand written. Stuffed in a real paper envelope, affixed with real stamps, and dropped through an honest-to-goodness mail slot.

Now that's old-school!