At Dan's insistence, this and future RO posts will be moderately shorter.Rogues: Thieves and Bards, but Mostly Thieves
- I think thieves are the only class that causes problems in D&D parties based solely on its name. Novice players (and players who are just dicks) at times use the name "thief" to justify swiping things from their fellow party members - y'know, their friends.
- Thieves are the most customizable character class among non-spellcasters. You get to choose which of your skills you want to improve not only at 1st level, but every thief level you gain. Also, your thief skills draw a lot from other aspects of your character: your Dexterity score, your race, what kind of armor you're wearing (though this might slow down play if you switch out armor and have to recalculate your percentages). I am somewhat disappointed that these skills don't share the same mechanics as the optional proficiency rules (at least, as far as I recall; I'm not there yet), but system consistency might be asking a lot at this point.
- However, this doesn’t explain or excuse some of the modifiers to your skills. I guess dwarves are pudgy so it's harder for them to climb things, but why are they worse at reading? Does the beard get in the way? Why do elves, naturally dexterous with what one would assume are tiny hands, get a penalty to open locks? Half-elves don’t have any penalties to their skills, which is pretty good, but what makes them better at picking pockets than full elves while at the same time they're worse at hiding?
- You have to have better than average Dexterity (assuming 10.5 is average) before you stop taking penalties to your thief skills. Shouldn't a character with average Dexterity not have penalties to begin with?
- I was going to make a comment about the lack of leather armor on the Thieving Skill Armor Adjustments table, but then I caught the note at the end of the class's armor proficiencies. Reading is fundamental!
- Why wouldn't you mark an optional rule? Regardless, to calculate a thief's chance to be detected when picking someone's pocket, if using the optional rule in the Pick Pockets explanation, is 100 - victim's level * 3 + (thief's level - victim's level). This is needlessly complex, if for no other reason than it doesn't help the thief very much at all. In the example given, Ragnar (thief 15) picks Horace's (fighter 9) pocket. The optional rule increases Ragnar's detection threshold from 73 to 79, a whole 6%. In perspective, the rule lets a thief pick a target's pocket who's almost half his level as if… he were picking the pocket of a target almost half his level.
- Open Locks falls into the same category of failure as bending bars and learning spells. Can't pick that lock in one to ten minutes? "Oh well, it's just too difficult, guys! There's no way I can open this, even if I spent another one to ten minutes on it. Let's move on. We'll come back when I've slaughtered a few more goblins." Also note that this skill can be rendered useless by the knock spell or, I would assume, a good hammer.
- Exactly half of the thief's skills are rolled by the DM.
- I don't remember any DM allowing a thief to roll a Climb Walls check. Dungeon and tower walls had a habit of being coating in Teflon, in my experience. I'm going to have to take the book's word on thieves being better at climbing walls than other people, since I don't have a baseline of comparison yet.
- "At 4th level, the thief has enough exposure to languages that he has a chance to read most nonmagical writing." So you can't use this skill until 4th level? A footnote would have been nice a few pages ago.
- Backstab is an out-of-combat combat ability. I imagine this was put in to emulate the "sneak into the castle and take out the guards so your friends can climb over the walls undetected" scenario, just I'm not sure how well it works in that regard. Consider a 1st level thief using a longsword: on average, the thief can take out a 1st level priest in one shot thanks to the damage multiplier. That's pretty strong. However, this applies just to a 4th level thief (as damage modifiers won't go up significantly if at all by then), at which point it's not quite that strong. Seems to me a good rule of thumb is that a thief can usually one-shot a person of a level equal to his backstab multiplier. I can see people thinking I'm picking nits - the thief can /one-shot/ things, after all - but keep in mind the thief pretty much has to; after the initial attack, if the target is still alive it can call for help as a free action, and the sound of combat will probably attract others, not to mention the thief's general proficiency in combat (which is to say, very little).
- I thought bardic knowledge was one of those sacred cows 3e brought over, but there's no mention of it in the bard write-up. Bards do automatically know local history though, and they can guess what magic items do, so that's something.
- I really don't have much to say about the bard. They seem pretty blah on paper, which is probably why I didn't play them and very few saw their way to our table.
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