I'm afraid you're overcomplicating things mechanically, Daztur.

Thesis: I posit that the reason people defer to their character sheet in lieu of freeform creativity is because when things are quantified tightly it is the easiest way to determine odds outside of GM judgment.

The tighter or more elaborate the quantification, the greater reliance upon the system's mechanical odds over GM adjudication.  It short-circuits the table's trust, encourages system mastery over social negotiations, and creates a GM v. PC antagonism. In turn this stunts freeform creativity for both, as it teaches GM little about better presenting situations, and players little on how to descriptively overcome them.

The reason I advocate Thief Skills (as I run them) and NWP skills (as RAW) is because it reduces mechanical reliance in favor of social negotiation. However, I'm deliberately not playing it like many others have. It is also why I understand the 1e distaste for skills in general for a class system.

Here is what I feel is core to your question:

What I want to avoid is skills that can be used to solve an interesting obstacle (either with one roll or with a series of rolls) directly. For example if the players know a trap is there I don’t want people just saying “I use my skill to remove the trap!” (as a kid did in my Christmas Eve game) or if there’s an NPC they want to make friendly say “I use Charisma on it!” (as an adult who should know better did in my 5ed playtest game). I also want the whole thing intuitive enough that kids and newbies don’t get mixed up and think they can do that after reading their character sheet, making me have to explain that skills do not work that way.

After some thinking about it I think that the best way of doing that is to have skills give players a few puzzle pieces but leave some yawning gaps that have to be filled in with outside the box thinking.

You want players to INTERACT with the environs. You need to train them to "see the world" first before they "solve things" in it. The key is presentation and probing questioning.

One of the best GM tools here is the good ol' question: HOW?
(It is rapidly followed up with: WHY?)
How do you charisma the NPC? Why do you think (talking about cute kitty cats; flirting; smiling with your Cool Face) will bring favor with this NPC?

In fact, most of the old TSR Thief Skills and NWPs required an answer to "HOW?" before the GM adjudicated the roll. It's one of the missing pieces I repeatedly see in 3e/PF (even 4e) games. Players hear a problem, select a skill, roll off and say they succeed --  all without interaction with the GM (who is their eyes and ears to the world). It short-circuits the whole paradigm of being in the world.

So I won't tell you not to go forward with this system. As systems go, it's as good as any. But I also feel it doesn't tap into the root of your dissatisfaction.

Instead I invite you to brainstorm, "How do I get my players to ask me questions about the world's environs first?" Because I feel if you can get them to think of the world as a resource (which you provide), it will build trust and open potential to off-the-page solutions first. Only once that's established will it become second nature to merge off-the-page solutions with on-the-page increased solution capacity (mechanics, keywords, etc.).

I ask you to re-imagine your question as a social issue involving trust, and seek solutions through mutual human presentation instead of system mechanics.

Let me bounce an idea off of that post.

The concept of player skill is best described by this template:

Player: "I do A."
DM: "You do A, and B happens."

This is the basic exchange in a player skill oriented game. The player describes his actions, and the DM describes the results of those actions. Ideally, this process does not involve dice at all. For example, assuming suitable circumstances (light source, no pressing time limit as the enemy is charging down the corridor), a character can look at the books on a shelf to see if any are significantly less dusty than the rest, and the DM will say that a large green book near the right end has stripes of dust rubbed off. No die roll necessary. The character can try to remove, pull or push the book; and the DM will say that on trying to pull it off the shelf, there's a click and the shelf swings open to reveal a secret passageway.

At no point during the process there is a need to roll the dice. There is no reason why any character couldn't perform this set of actions with the same set of results, regardless of his class, whether he rolls high or low on his Search Room Roll, or in fact whether or not he even has the Search Room Proficiency.

Now, when do we roll the dice? I postulate that we roll the dice in two situations:

1 - When a set of actions under a set of circumstances has a variety of possible outcomes. Say, a character is trying to cross a very old, very weak ropebridge. The character is neither so heavily clad in plate armour and carrying furniture on his back that the bridge should automatically collapse, nor is he magically render as light as a mouse. In this situation there's just no way of telling, so the DM assigns a reasonable chance to the bridge collapsing and rolls the die.

2 - When the player and the DM are unable to describe a reasonable cause-and-effect, even if there's only one likely outcome. This is most typical of combat situations. If both the player and DM were well-learned students of historical swordfighting, they could (to an extent) describe a fight without rolls, simply stating what grips, what steps and what directions of attack the various characters employ. To this pair of people, such a description would be sufficient to determine the result. However, most players and DM's are not experts in historical swordsmanship, so their exchange would look something like this:

Player: "I execute a Quarte parry with my wrist supinated, then lunge forward in Riposte."
DM: "Dude, I don't even know what those words mean, let alone have a f*cking idea on what the orc is doing."

It just doesn't work... so they roll.

Same thing with trying to pick a mechanical lock. How would you even begin to try to put your actions in an "I do A, B happens"-format? "I move the pick inwards 6 milimeters, push it upwards with a force of X Newtons until it doesn't move anymore, then try to rotate it clockwise with a force of Y Newtons"? This just obviously doesn't work.

Rolling is good in such circumstances, because we can assume that even though we, real life people don't understand the minutae of fencing or lockpicking, our characters do to a smaller or greater extent, which, in turn, gives them a certain chance to succeed - the exact chance being determined by their understanding of the matter (which we can't judge) and a number of outside factors (whose effect we largely can't judge, either). What we DO understand is that there's a chance, so come to a conventional agreement on roughly how high that chance is and roll the dice.

Now, the relevant part of all this is this: if there's no inherent randomness in the outcome, and if the causality isn't so complicated that the players and the DM cannot understand it, there should be no roll. Or, in other terms, only roll if there is no clear, non-random causality between the action and the reaction.

Now, to apply this to the matter at hand with thief abilities. Some situations and some actions CAN be described as "if A, then B", and thus no rolls should be made. Searching a room (or parts of it) should typically be like this. Disarming some types of traps might be like this. If the player says "I jam the end of my 10' pole under the counterweight" or "I stand beside the chest, reach out with my blade and use my sword's tip to flip the latch", then (assuming that this course of action, when performed exactly as described, would have a clear and unambiguous result) there should be no rolls made.

Some other thief skills, however, are different and DO require rolls. Moving silently is such, since there are too many incalculable and undescribable factors affecting the outcome. Same thing with opening a lock with a set of lockpicks (but not, say, pouring acid on the lock).

The problem with the Thief as a class is that its abilities don't make a clear distinction between these two different sorts of situations. It just lists "Disarm Traps 35%" and doesn't care if some traps ought to be disarmable without any randomness with a simple set of actions.


I had more, but it's time for me to leave from home, so maybe later. The gist of the rest is this: remove the Thief class and give everyone a decent chance to sneak, climb, search a room or whatever.

I hear your argument. It's mainly an issue of the two most used rolls -- and how one of them is poorly implemented in D&D as a class game: 1) pass/fail, and 2) degree of success.

Your first example, Premier, deals with a simple pass/fail check unknown. It is the simplest case to understand when to use randomness. There's a binary probability result (bridge breaks, bridge does not break), the roll determines.

Your latter example deals with GM/player topical familiarity. Yes, there's personal limitations to player brainstorming PC actions (or GM creating environs). In this case rolls help simplify the complexities of reality. It's a necessary rpg function because at some point our brains will melt from info overload and minutiae.

However there is a happy medium, and it is OK for a GM or player to expect more environmental interaction from play.

But this is what I find what you say is important, Premier, and why it ties in with my mentioning of Degree-of-Success rolls previously:

"The problem with the Thief as a class is that its abilities don't make a clear distinction between these two different sorts of situations. It just lists "Disarm Traps 35%" and doesn't care if some traps ought to be disarmable without any randomness with a simple set of actions."

There's no description on how to use these skills to represent Professionalism, without confusing people about issues of Permission. And I think it's because this is a legacy of Degree of Success being stumblingly invented in mid-system creation. Thief skills were one way to historically answer the question, "how good?", of a professional over an amateur.

IIRC several old timers, like Old Geezer and others that talked about the old days in RPG.net, said Thief skills % were used as a fail-safe roll. Basically either the GM auto-passed, or rolled an attribute check or difficulty target number (essentially DC), and if that failed there was the thief % roll to fall back on. As a fail-safe check, it represented Professionalism in a way.

However, somewhere along the way thief skills became interpreted to be the reserve of the thief (Permission). And further the thief skill rolls became a singular roll, with a frustratingly low %. Without contextual support for interpretation, the fail-safe check morphed into a pass/fail check. In turn this ended up inadequately representing Professionalism, and frustrated other classes from attempting certain things.

Yet I feel a better way to show Professional differentiation is through Degree of Success. It's more immediate to visually grok. However a buffer fail-safe roll works just as well, if it is understood to be that. I feel however there was quite a bit lost in translation over the years since D&D came out.

So the question is to keep a legacy fail-safe system, or to alter it into degree of success system (where obvious auto-successes outside the randomizer range are waved away) to represent Professionalism. There's a trade off for both. But the main question of Premier's secondary example -- how to represent professional level understanding: through dialog jargon or a roll -- asks of us how do we conceptualize a higher level of success if we choose to roll instead of dialog.

And thus the conundrum of resolving Degree of Success situations through a predominantly Pass/Fail class system.

Opaopajr: very insightful post, I read through it couple of times to let it sink into my brain.

I think you've touched on two important problems: the tendency to try to find rules solutions to play style problems (which I've been as guilty of as any) and more attention paid to being your character than being in the world (Bob the fighter whose personality is "I like money" can be a great PC if the player is focused on being in the world and the best acted PC can be boring if they ignore the world around them and focus on in character quips).

Thinking over what you said, one thing I think I've been doing wrong as a DM is not doing a good enough job of letting the players "see the world."

To use the kids as an example again (kids make the best RPG lab rats since they come in with no preconceptions) the dungeon I ran them through was a version of In Search of the Unknown and I had the statue come to life and attack them after they stole a +1 dagger. They heard it smashing down a wall to get to them and then saw it stomping towards them. I wasn't about to use the module text of it being a beautiful naked woman so I said it looked like "a Greek goddess." They asked which one and I said "Hera." They discussed negotiating with it but decided that Hera was "the meanest one" so they'd just smash it to bits while having their dog hold on to its foot to slow it down and the cat climb on its face to blind it.

They did a great job of really thinking about the world and interacting with it (despite some pretty mediocre DMing on my part) and I learned a few things here. If I DM with kids again I'm going to telegraph all of my punches but pull none of them. What I mean is always give the kids a warning about dangerous things before you spring them on them in a way that give them a chance to think up solutions. For example in the future if I have a falling ceiling trap I'll have a bunch of smashed up bones on the floor below it and the classic see a bunch of terrified-looking statues before you run into medusa shtick. But more generally instead of hiding stuff unless they look for it, provide a bunch of obvious environmental handles for the PCs to interact with. If I'd included a big bookshelf in the room I'm sure the kids would've pulled it down on the statue's head. Also being able to convey information about the world in a concise way is golden, saying "Hera" was worth a whole paragraph of boxed text and a lot more interesting to kids who love Greek myth.

Asking "how" like you say is also important. One thing I want to avoid though is to have the answer to the "how" be window dressing. For example if the player says "I hit the orc with my axe!" and you ask "how?" it doesn't really matter what the player answers, it's an attack roll either way (with maybe a small bonus if the player gave an awesome description). For skills I really want the "how" to matter. Some players have told me that they play is they go through the mechanics and then narrate in world terms what just happened in mechanical terms. I hate that, it puts thing backwards.

OK, after all of that random how's this for a thesis: it's vitally important for the environment that the PCs are in to matter, for the DM to convey the environment in a way that gives the players ideas about how to interact with it and for players interacting with the environment to be the core of gameplay.

Now how can I apply this to the rules? Well basically in RPGs there's some stuff on your character sheet that is basically useless unless you think carefully about the environment and other stuff that's pretty useful no matter what context you're in. I'm going to try to have as much of the first as possible and as little of the later.

Of course a lot of this can be done through DMing (asking "how" like you said) and only call for rolls on more specific things (for example not let them roll to disarm unless they've gotten their hands on the actual mechanism) which might call for renaming a few things to make this clearer. Also I'll try to put in more specific stuff that cries out for interaction with the environment and less broad general application. The problem is how to have a lot of specific stuff without causing bloat.

TLDR: most things on your character sheet should be environmentally dependent, meaning that for the players to get much use out of an ability they have to think about the environment and how to use that ability in that environment, which makes the world seem more real. In the games I did with the kids having "cat" on their character sheet did this perfectly, having "remove traps" not so much. Of course I can go and explain to kids that they have to explain how they're disarming the trap and yadda, yadda, yadda but I want to set things up so that that is obvious enough that I don't have to explain it, just like with "cat."

Maybe what works is keeping stuff very general (Intelligence) or very specific (cat) and avoid the bits in the middle (Diplomacy)?

Ooof, sorry for the verbosity guys, but your posts are really getting my brain cycling in a good way.

Premier:

Mostly agreeing here, I try to strip out rolling in situations that don't fall under those two conditions as well. I also like things that are very useful but that don't require rolling to use (bag of holding would be the gold standard here as I've said before).

QuoteThe problem with the Thief as a class is that its abilities don't make a clear distinction between these two different sorts of situations. It just lists "Disarm Traps 35%" and doesn't care if some traps ought to be disarmable without any randomness with a simple set of actions.

Yup, that's more or less what I'm stabbing at here. I mostly want to:
-Remove rolling for the stuff that you don't think there should be rolls for.
-Clearly define the stuff that falls under "stuff you've really gotta roll for" (like opening locks in your example) and make thieves good at that. Make the difference between the stuff you've got to roll for and the stuff that you can just describe your way through as clear as possible so that kids can get it intuitively by just looking at their character sheet without me explaining it to them.
-Give thieves some nifty abilities (mostly of which would be used without rolling) that they can figure out how to use (like "can walk on shit like tightropes, no roll"). How to do this without causing choice paralysis when a newbie is choosing from a list what stuff they want on their character sheet is something I'm thinking about. I do not want 4,000 feats to choose from.

Opaopajr (post #16):

Gotta think over what you said a bit more but gotta work soon so a quick note:

The info about how thief skills were originally basically a saving through against fuck up is interesting, which I think they work well as. The problem is that people started using them as the front line means to adjudicating stuff instead of the back-up since it how thief skills were used were a lot more concrete than the other stuff. Quite usable, but not sure if it's what I want to do specifically...

As for degrees of success I think that's doable:
-Fumble: fail by ten or more (no natural 1 = fumble).
-Success: as normal.
-Critical: succeed by ten or more or roll natural 20.
-(Maybe) Double critical: get critical, roll again, get another critical.

So maybe something like PC is jumping across Chasm of Doom:
Fumble: die.
Success: just barely made it, fall on face or clinging to the edge or something.
-Critical: make it and plants a perfect landing.
-(Maybe) Double critical: as critical but perfect landing is on orc's head.

Margins of success are fiddly but if the threshold of a normal success is printed right there on the character sheet (like a saving throw) adding or subtracting 10 is pretty damn simple.

I just wanted to write that I absolutely love the "Hera" example. It speaks directly to estar's Bag of Stuff he constantly talks about.

There's just a huge handful of mutually understood tropes and tidbits when any group of people gather (though it changes from group to group, naturally). Using that stuff for an RPG session is such a timesaver for the GM. And it really helps players develop a sense of world familiarity. That's essential for making the environment mentally approachable and thus manipulable, of course.

I also love the "telegraph the punch, but pull no punches." I think it's good for adults as well as kids. Playing with kids is perhaps more enlightening to GM skills than veterans. I certainly know brand new RPG players really get into the world easier and tax any of my GM descriptive laziness. As a GM guideline "telegraph the punch, but don't pull it" is probably excellent overall advice.

Bravo to the kids. Sounds like all of us veterans can (re)learn a thing or two from new players.

(PS: I use degree of success in skill mechanics as groups of +/- two. i.e. Dex roll -4 because it's hard? Pass by 6? That's 3 "successes." Sometimes I let it matter, like the rule-of-cool; sometimes I ignore it. It's a good enough system as any. But your fumble/critical equalling pass/fail by 10+ is KISS solid. However, it's good you're thinking about skill presentation as well.)

Yup, the Hera bit was good and completely an accident on my part. I think I learned more about how to be a good DM from playing two hours with kids than ten hours with adults. You can really get things straight and see what works and what doesn't much more clearly.

Agreed completely about the bag of things that are instantly familiar. One of the best things about the first Star Wars movie is how adeptly it does that (Westerns + Hot Rods + Samurai + WW II + Flash Gordon + just about everything else I can think of pretty much seamlessly) which is really something to aspire too. Certainly when I play a full campaign with kids I'd just use the Greek pantheon and do my best to wiggle away from "pin the Satan on the god" that too much modern Greek myth-inspired stuff seems to do with Hades or the Titans.

I played a game of Burning Wheel today (in which everything, absolutely everything, your character can do seems to be a skill my character even had a skill to know stuff about goats) which drove some of what we've been talking about home. Some basic conclusions from this discussion:
-Don't try to fix bad DMing with rules. Giving people an engaging world with lots of handles to grab onto is more important than the rules.
-Anything that average Joes can do should get yanked out the skill system.
-Make the tasks that the skill system covers more specific and discrete is useful so players have to figure out how they're using their skills not just wave their skill modifiers at the general direction of the problem. This means that for stuff like finding stuff, sneaking around, dealing with traps and social stuff there might be skills that help deal with those issues but not skills that can solve those problems by themselves without the player using creative thinking.
-Keep the math simple. Dead simple. Kid who can't read can get it simple (the advantage/disadvantage mechanic from 5ed might be useful here).
-Have the presentation intuitive. Make sure that just by reading the character sheet the player has an idea of what the skill can do and cant' do (so no kids declaring to empty rooms that they haven't searched yet, "I remove a trap!").

Quote from: Daztur;619826Yup, the Hera bit was good and completely an accident on my part. I think I learned more about how to be a good DM from playing two hours with kids than ten hours with adults. You can really get things straight and see what works and what doesn't much more clearly.

Agreed completely about the bag of things that are instantly familiar. One of the best things about the first Star Wars movie is how adeptly it does that (Westerns + Hot Rods + Samurai + WW II + Flash Gordon + just about everything else I can think of pretty much seamlessly) which is really something to aspire too. Certainly when I play a full campaign with kids I'd just use the Greek pantheon and do my best to wiggle away from "pin the Satan on the god" that too much modern Greek myth-inspired stuff seems to do with Hades or the Titans.

I played a game of Burning Wheel today (in which everything, absolutely everything, your character can do seems to be a skill my character even had a skill to know stuff about goats) which drove some of what we've been talking about home. Some basic conclusions from this discussion:
-Don't try to fix bad DMing with rules. Giving people an engaging world with lots of handles to grab onto is more important than the rules.
-Anything that average Joes can do should get yanked out the skill system.
-Make the tasks that the skill system covers more specific and discrete is useful so players have to figure out how they're using their skills not just wave their skill modifiers at the general direction of the problem.
-Keep the math simple. Dead simple. Kid who can't read can get it simple (the advantage/disadvantage mechanic from 5ed might be useful here).

Average Joe is a funny thing though right as an average Joe from a big UK or US town can probably read, do basic maths, drive a car, open a laptop and connect to the internet.... An average Joe from Mali probably can't.
So in a fantasy game if the PCs come from a town then maybe they have a knowledge of some city stuff maybe some readign or heraldry or whatever if they come from a rural town they might have animal husbandry or know about farming, if they come from the steppes they might be able to ride etc etc so average joe is a depends....

I like your conclusions so far.
Bolded, for my pleasure...

Quote from: Daztur;619826Some basic conclusions from this discussion:

-Don't try to fix bad DMing with rules. Giving people an engaging world with lots of handles to grab onto is more important than the rules.

-Anything that average Joes can do should get yanked out the skill system.
I'd like to phrase it, "Assume base Competency, Remove Redundancy."

-{Skills as tools for task resolution, not skills as a hot button for conflict resolution.}

-Keep the math simple. Dead simple. Kid who can't read can get it simple (the advantage/disadvantage mechanic from 5ed might be useful here).

-Have the presentation intuitive. Make sure that just by reading the character sheet the player has an idea of what the skill can do and cant' do (so no kids declaring to empty rooms that they haven't searched yet, "I remove a trap!").

My favorite is still, "Don't try to fix bad DMing with rules." Bad DMing is naturally subjective, however the warning implicit is crucial for game design. It's just like the saying, "Nothing's foolproof, for fools are so ingenious!"

Further it places the burden upon the user to aspire for personal improvement. Which for a game about presentation of one's pretending it's a crucial faculty to develop. Communication issues are often at the heart of so much, and a social game like RPGs highlights areas in need of improvement.

Quote from: jibbajibba;619830Average Joe is a funny thing though right as an average Joe from a big UK or US town can probably read, do basic maths, drive a car, open a laptop and connect to the internet.... An average Joe from Mali probably can't.
So in a fantasy game if the PCs come from a town then maybe they have a knowledge of some city stuff maybe some readign or heraldry or whatever if they come from a rural town they might have animal husbandry or know about farming, if they come from the steppes they might be able to ride etc etc so average joe is a depends....

You're absolutely right.

And yet, it might be a hard thing to emulate in a class-based RPG... I worry about things lost in translation: how to customize such a mechanical system to a GM's setting, signal to noise ratio, etc. If you have a clean universal solution to offer, I'm all ears.

It's something I do keep in mind when I run my skill-based RPGs, however. For example, in my IN SJG games I summarize a base pool of Regional Skills. Then I give players PCs' native to that region a free fixed bunch of skill points to purchase from that Regional Skills pool (with max starting caps). Allows for diversity while still retaining regional competency.

At some point there's just some things between class and skill based systems that I don't know if they can be shared. Well, not with any KISS presentation perhaps.

Quote from: Daztur;617693-Black box it. Don't tell the thief player what thief skills are and just apply the thief skill rules behind the DM's screen.

That is what I'd do. It takes the least effort and fixes the problem.

The problem she's running into is a common one with RPGs these days, and has gotten worse over time, where players start to see their character sheet as a Menu of Limited Choices, and get locked into choosing from that list. This is especially true of new players.

For new players, some of the best advice is to tell them not to worry about the mechanics, but just describe what they want to do and as GM you'll fill them in on what they need to roll. Taking the skill list away from the thief will help here. Just make it clear to her that thieves can do all kinds of sneaky/climby/stabbity/trappy things and let her run.

Quote from: Daztur;617813As for making skills based on saving throws I like that, I like that a lot.

There's a few Retroclones and other D&D inspired games which work like that, Saves as Skills, and it's a fine way to go. Nice, simple, easy.

In my two most recent niche games, I made a theft "style" class in one, and thief in the other.  One bonus they have is the ability to use theft skills without buying them for their character (in my long and short character build process still being tested).  What I found in play tests are people getting more unarmed and weapon skills to give the character some punch, and still get a good quality thief in play.  One newbie to RPGs picked up on creative theft skill use by saying, "I use lock picking to undo the belt of my attacker".  I had to hand it to her for originality, and she made the roll.  It's not so much that the thief is a hard class to play, but that we tend to put them off as a secondary class.  There are very few games that give great examples of original or even good uses for their thieves.  As a GM, it should be our responsibility to encourage them (as was stated before) not just drop the class.  My humble opinion.  Now I will furiously type away at the changes I need to make to Waverly and Tribulation, as my comments are ripped to shreds with a x2 back stab... (comment made in all good fun.  tongue is in cheek as we read)

Quote from: jibbajibba;619830Average Joe is a funny thing though right as an average Joe from a big UK or US town can probably read, do basic maths, drive a car, open a laptop and connect to the internet.... An average Joe from Mali probably can't.
So in a fantasy game if the PCs come from a town then maybe they have a knowledge of some city stuff maybe some readign or heraldry or whatever if they come from a rural town they might have animal husbandry or know about farming, if they come from the steppes they might be able to ride etc etc so average joe is a depends....

Yeah the basic thinking would be to have all skill checks be a saving throw (kind of like B&T I think, haven't read B&T so I don't know how close I'm aping that) but instead of having different DCs keep the same target number but ratchet up and down what hitting the target number does depending on what's on your character sheet (same difference math wise but easier, especially for kids, if the target number you have to hit on the d20 stays stable).

So for example if your Dex saving throw says 10+ (due to attribute and class/level) you'd be able to auto-succeed on a lock if you have the relevant skill and on a roll of 10+ otherwise. If it's extreme lock picking (awesome dwarven lock or have to pick a lot RIGHT NOW BEFORE THE OGRE GETS HERE!) the guy with the open lock skill would need to roll a 10+ and the guy with no skill would need a crit.

For smaller modifiers you could throw in some small +'s and -'s or use 5ed's advantage/disadvantage mechanics, but I'd want to have the target number stay as stable as possible.

TL:DR use save as skills (maybe six saves one for teach stat kind of like C&C only without the bits of the SIEGE system I don't like) try to keep save as skill target numbers as stable as possible, thief skills modify what you auto-succeed at and what hitting that target number does.

QuoteThe problem she's running into is a common one with RPGs these days, and has gotten worse over time, where players start to see their character sheet as a Menu of Limited Choices, and get locked into choosing from that list. This is especially true of new players.

Yeah which is why I like starting as a zero. If what you think is your menu of limited choices all suck (I suck at fighting and get just one spell, wtf? well I've got this pony, that can I do with it...) then that encourages people to look off the menu.

What was interesting was that of my kids only the thief player (who's probably the smartest/best at English of the lot) treated the character sheet as a "menu of limited choices" so I'm thinking something about the thief skills or at least the presentation thereof needs tweaking and the rest really doesn't (was amazing how intuitive old school dungeoneering was).

Quote from: rway218;620282One newbie to RPGs picked up on creative theft skill use by saying, "I use lock picking to undo the belt of my attacker".  I had to hand it to her for originality, and she made the roll.

Made of Win!

I dig it. I myself relabel Pick Pockets into Legerdemain so people can open up their thinking about it. However as such an attack sounds core to the discipline of the School of the Seven Bells (not the band), I'd let the unbuckled belt attack be under Pick Pockets personally.

(Now I need to pair a thief and fighter NPC for some naughty tricks. Fighter engages, thief holds attack then lunges in to 'pants the orc!' Ha ha, let's see 'em fight or chase with their trousers around their ankles!)

As alternative expansions on the Open Lock skill, I would let it remove wax seals and reapply them without damage. A wax seal is a locking security measure.

I'd also let Open Locks let a thief rifle through a desk and then leave things almost identically the way it was found. Essentially the "familiar order as an alarm system" is circumvented.

If you caught me a few drinks in and charitable I might even let Open Locks allow one to socially pry secrets from NPCs in conversation. Basically it'd be knowing how to deftly maneuver conversations into unintended revelations.

Quote from: rway218;620282It's not so much that the thief is a hard class to play, but that we tend to put them off as a secondary class.  There are very few games that give great examples of original or even good uses for their thieves.  As a GM, it should be our responsibility to encourage them (as was stated before) not just drop the class.  My humble opinion.

Very true. It's almost a topic unto itself. If you have no one showing you how to use something creatively, you tend to stagnate. This might be one of the greatest tragedies in the transition from old school, "Gygaxian," perambulating, rulebook prose to modern, "Dragnet," just-the-facts-ma'am, rulebook prose. While the former is circuitously verbose, its style does dream.