Re-doing the thief for a "pre-supplement I" D&D

[ffilz]

I like the idea of re-working the thief. Getting rid of the percentile skills has an advantage, though I think it would be nice for the skills to advance.

One thought I have is let the thief have the same hit dice as a cleric. Allowing them to fully fight as well as a cleric (except for armor restrictions and some weapon restrictions) would make the class less of a 5th wheel in combat.

Since I want to have the non-human races, I don't want to trample all of their abilities. Of course dwarven trap detection is different than thievish trap detection (not that Greyhawk thieves actually had any trap detection). The sneaking and hearing may overlap the other races, but those aren't primary abilities.

Frank

[Zulgyan]

One thought I have is let the thief have the same hit dice as a cleric.

The HD of my version of the thief is somewhere bewteen the Magic-user and the cleric.

I'm using d6 HD for all classes, with some amendments. This has enabled me to put the thief class HD progression in a middle ground between Magic-user and the Cleric.

EDIT

[cooper]

I love the idea.

Instead of saves at +4, why not the best saves of all three cleric/fighting man/mu similar to how an elf fm/mu does his saving throws. He's the best at dodging, at cheating death and against spells, or at least as good as the other classes. That way he maintains the best saves of any class without the blanket +4 which is pretty hefty at low levels (which demi-humans pay for with heavy xp penalties).

For picking locks. There is already a system in place for opening doors, but it's noisy. Simply allow thieves to open doors like any other class, but silently? aka picking the lock. You can apply the dexterity adjustment to the open door roll instead of strength. Being able to open a door silently is boon enough using the normal mechanic without introducing a level based one.

[aldarron]

Sounds good to me Coop, best of saving thorws and using the dex bonus for locks make sense for this thiefy type character. Silence is probably less useful, and hardly ever so against chest locks and such, but maybe a"thief" bonus could apply to a saving throw when attempting to avoid a trap.

[Necropraxis]

Feb 10, 2008 9:06:47 GMT -6 Stonegiant said:

My suggestion would be for the Thief to be at least passable as a thief starting from first level. The method that was talked about in another thread where the thief got to choose abilities like a magic user gets to choose spells was an interesting concept and a possible solution to this problem.

Here is the link to that thread LINK

Hey, anyone know what that thread was called, or have an updated link? That link is broken. I was just thinking about a similar system for thieves using abilities that are spell-like powers (if not actually spells) originally prompted by THIS.