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Post by Scott Anderson on Jul 22, 2017 1:38:53 GMT -6
This is tangential. I dislike the thief class because it discourages the other players from having their men searching, sneaking, trying doors and locks. Even picking pockets and climbing walls.
Yes, the thief's exceptional abilities set him apart, but if you have The Thief Guy, then the table tends to leave thief guy tasks to him. Meanwhile everyone else is waiting for him to do stuff instead of doing it themselves.
The "obvious" answer is to tell the several players to participate in the thief activities. But if you do that, why even have the actual thief class?
My preferred solution is to eliminate the class, but not the challenges and say "now what?" You end up with everyone doing thief things.
Which suggests that whether Gary imagined the thief class beforehand or not, you don't need it to simulate a Thieves guild or Thieves quarter.
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Post by murquhart72 on Jul 22, 2017 8:36:38 GMT -6
All I'm saying is you can have a thieves guild without a classification of a Thief character. The guild would be made up mostly of normal men with perhaps several Fighting-Men and even a few Magic-Users, all of whom can cut purses, scale walls, break and enter or con the gullible. Classes are to establish who can use magic and who cannot (in my opinion) and not about nit-picking every aspect of a game into playing a thief, woodsman or candlestick maker.
EDIT: I hope this doesn't sound argumentative, I'm just stating things the way I see/play them in an effort to make things more simple for others.
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Post by howandwhy99 on Jul 22, 2017 16:54:02 GMT -6
EDIT: I hope this doesn't sound argumentative, I'm just stating things the way I see/play them in an effort to make things more simple for others. You're not being argumentative. I'm being argumentative! argh! -- J/K PS: I see classes as social roles and the whole game radically shifting depending on which one you play. Thieves get XP even if they steal from other players, so not the best class for a co-op game IMO. (Let's not even mention the Assassin)
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Post by peterlind on Jul 22, 2017 18:17:01 GMT -6
The Assassin and the Spy are listed as NPC's that can be hired as "Specialists." See Vol. III p. 22. Why not add Thief to the list of Specialists? If so, how much should it cost to hire them? Assassins cost 2,000 GP per mission, and Spies cost 500 GP per mission . . .
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oldkat
Level 6 Magician
Posts: 431
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Post by oldkat on Jul 22, 2017 18:37:21 GMT -6
There are a couple of things about this passage in the book.
First is the context. "Whenever the referee finds that some player has committed an unforgiveable outrage this rule can be invoked to harass the offender into line." TU&WA p.24
The purpose of this is clear. There are bodies/segments of a given population that will not tolerate shenanigans from the characters. To discourage players from having their characters do anything as suggested, the Angry Villager Rule provides the campaign referee with a means to do this. It might come in the form of an angry mob with pitch forks, or armed militia, or wiley thieves more than willing to part foolish characters from the loot they have likely just obtained from a dungeon expedition; keeping parties from getting too rich for their own good!
Second, there is no mention of a thieve's guild in the paragraph; a quarter! but that is not the same thing.
Third, was this mechanic (the Angry Villager Rule) present in the 1st printing of TU&WA? Or did it appear, as we see it, in 6th and later printings? I'm kind of curious about that.
There's also a lengthy discussion about the Thief as a class over at DF in the ODD subforum. Worth checking out.
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