Back on Christmas Eve my poor after school class kids had to study until eight so I ran each class through a 1 hour D&D game (more or less Holmes Basic with me not bothering to teach them most of the rules). It went very well with them adopting huge swaths of old school play style with zero prompting from me (right down to dogs being on the top of the shopping list and feeding ghouls their pony while making a break for the exit).

The only bit that wasn't immediately intuitive was thief skills. While all of the others players were thinking of cool creative shit to do (especially one quiet girl who kicked ass as a sneaky bastard cleric) the thief player (who's probably the smartest of the bunch) seemed trapped in her character sheet. She'd do stuff like say "I want to remove a trap" without having found a trap and generally treating the skills as a list of options to choose from and that's that for her turn rather than tools to do creative stuff with.

Not really a big deal and I'm sure she'd be fine if I tutored her a bit in how I see thief skills working (do things the same way as everyone else but thief skill give you back-up if you fail, sort of more of a failing throw vs. fuck-up than list of things you can do on your turn) but it was really striking that thief skills was the ONLY thing about D&D that the kids didn't latch on to and play in an old school way immediately. I think this sort of thing is relatively common with newbies as are stuff like non-thieves getting confused and thinking that their characters can't climb walls.

What would be some alternate rules for making thief characters more intuitive for kids and new players?

Some ideas:
-Just axe thieves and go back to the original three classes.
-Have having a skill mean that you can reroll failed ability checks give thieves more skills as they gain levels.
-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.
-Let thieves choose from a list of specific abilities. Stuff that cries out for MacGyvering would be the best. Would hopefully give rise to the same "this is one very specific thing I can do, how the hell can I apply it to this situation?" that you get with the quirkier old spells that I love so much. Could work especially for a ninja-themed thief, kids love Ninjago...

Thoughts?

One approach I have is sort of what you might call the blackbox approach: give the thief a bonus equal to level to surprise rolls and anything requiring subtlety. Then, don't tell the player, but handle the stealthy skills (move silent, hide in shadows, pick pocket) as surprise rolls, and use a similar roll for the manual dexterity skills (remove trap, open lock,) which are classed as subtlety. You can also count deciphering treasure maps and magic scrolls as subtlety, too.

All you need to write on the character sheet or in a class description is "good at doing anything sneaky or subtle."

when I ran a game for a bunch of 5-8 yuear olds I asked them to pick 3 special powers each. One of the older ones choice theives skills . i think she had played some D&D with her dad before.
The whole system was super simple 6 points to assign to Physical, Brains and Charm. All rolls 2d6 +stat target 8.

So I basically didn't let anyone else do theif stuff and I prompted her to 'do you want to check for traps first' or you coudl try and pick the lock... she soon got the hang of it.

We didn;t really have classes although we ended up with a Witch, a Fairy, a polymorphing Pokemon bird thingie (my daughter the evil min maxer), and an Elven Warrior that could run very fast and had a Lore skill.

I've been toying around trying to make a simpler version of Blood & Treasure, which uses the 3e style saving throws - reflex, will, fort and then uses the saves as skills. Like most thief skills are Reflex (plus dex modifier), though some are Will (plus Int)

It has a skill list, but I was thinking about just saying something like "If you think a class can do something, just pick the appropriate save and ability modifier and roll it"

Thanks for the ideas guys. I've found that black boxes work great for kids and think that letting kids choose some bits for themselves works great. For example in the sessions I ran equipment was weapons and armor that I'd selected, food and water and "two of whatever you want, as long as it's not too big or expensive" and that worked beautifully.

As for making skills based on saving throws I like that, I like that a lot. It not only making some mechanical widgets serve double duty but it avoids some of the things that annoy me about having ability checks be an important mechanic (makes stats matter more than I'd like and doesn't improve with leveling).

The more I think about it the more I start to think that skills need to be divided into solutions and tools.

What I mean by this is that sometimes I want skills to be something that you can just roll and if the roll's high enough the problem goes away. Stuff like "can I open this lock?" I don't want to role play out poking at tumblers so just let the dice decide.

On the other hand there's a lot of stuff in RPGs that I want to be able to roleplay through step by step instead of blowing it off with a skill roll. Combat would be the prime example here but the same goes for social interaction, searching for shit, sneaking around, finding and disarming traps, etc. This doesn't mean that I wan these things to be free form, skills can provide tools but I don't want them to be pre-packaged solutions to problems like "there's a trap in the hallway ahead of us, how do we get past it?"

Where skill systems have gone wrong, in my opinion, is using the same mechanics (roll once to see if you succeed or fail) for stuff like "can my thief open this lock?" and "can I BS my way past the guard?"

Just some vague noodling for now, will try to come up with more concrete ideas later.

Sounds like you want a difference between singular task resolution (roll to unlock) and multiple task resolution which may be contested (combat, social, sneak).

The latter is easily managed by multiple task rolls along with the occasional contested roll.

However I admit it has to be managed by GM creativity. I just don't think there's really any other way. You either know how to break up a conflict into its component tasks, or you don't. Sort of goes back to how to train a GM for sandboxes, when to use attribute checks, etc.

i.e. Sneaking up the Guard Tower and Silencing the Guard

At the edge of the nearest cover the thief wants to get to the base of the guard tower:
Thief player declares wanting to move silently and hide in shadows. DM rolls these off secretly. DM may also roll off tower guard's surprise check.

(For added challenge: Player notes tower guard's observation pattern; it's a routine panning around every 4 minutes (guard is bored). Thief will have to sacrifice moving silently on a round or two so as to reach the tower base for cover in time. DM rolls extra surprise checks for listening on those rounds.)

The thief makes it to the tower base. Needs to climb, but still quietly:
Thief player declares move silently, hide in shadows, and now climb walls. DM rolls off the first two secretly, along with guard's surprise check.

(For added challenge: There's wandering guards upon the ground that show up every 7 to 10 rounds. Thief needs to get to the far side of the tower and up to the hut within time. DM declares climb rate with and without moving silently, letting player to decide when and how many rounds -- and thus surprise checks -- he wants to risk as a thief.)

Thief is at guard tower hut, but on the outside. Needs to silently neutralize the guard:
DM offers weapon KO% rules for Sap maneuver (Complete Fighter, 5% per damage point, up to 40% KO), but along with backstab for a non-lethal KO. A backstab is a surprise attack, leaving thief with a free attack round before initiative roll.

(For added challenge: DM also offers that if thief is properly hidden inside the hut, the guard could be ambushed instead, giving two free attack rounds before both roll initiative. However the thief must be inside the hut before the wandering ground guard, coming back in X-1d4 rounds, sees him...)

Et cetera.

As interesting as making saves do double duty, there's only 5 of them (3 in 3e and 4e). There's 8 Thief Skills. Also saves are in fixed progression. That'd have to be changed, otherwise the thief would become a rather static class.

In theory it's tempting. I mean, build a thief of any level and there's your base thief skill lines. But there'd have to be a way to tailor it. That and consolidate several of the skills under the limited number of saves.

I just find my "thief skills = attribute over 20 as an expression in %" easier myself. That way the subsystem of thief skill improvement still works without altering the attribute scores. Just feels cleaner for me. But carry on!

Is this beast still in print or available from retailers?  What is the going price on Amazon/Ebay?

To the OP: I would suggest just getting rid of the Thief class altogether. It's main conceptual problem is that nominally its identfying feature is being considerably better at certain things than other characters, but in actual gameplay that gets warped into "it gets to do certain things everyone should be able to but are artificially prevented from in order to protect this class' niche".* And then new players - especially a young one who's not even familiar with the tropes of the genre - are totally lost, exactly like in your example, because the confounded thing is just so counterintuitive nonsensical.  

It's a can of worms best thrown out without opening it. Just remove the Thief and let everyone use formerly Thief-specific skills as long as they take the appropriate measures (removing metal armour and heavy gear for sneaking, securing proper illumination and tools for picking a lock, etc.), using either the Thief's percentage system or some other mechanism of your devising (a saving throw modified by the appropriate ability bonus has worked well for me).


*And for this thread, I'm going to entirely ignore any declarations of the tired old "But that's not true, everyone can move quietly, thieves move silently, everyone can hide, thieves can hide in shadows, it's a legitimately different thing" counterargument because it's assinine and not actually supported by gameplay as written or as practiced almost always.

Quote from: Kaiu Keiichi;618091Is this beast still in print or available from retailers?  What is the going price on Amazon/Ebay?

Holmes?
FWIW a new clone for it popped up recently.

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=25341

Quote from: Premier;618122To the OP: I would suggest just getting rid of the Thief class altogether. It's main conceptual problem is that nominally its identfying feature is being considerably better at certain things than other characters, but in actual gameplay that gets warped into "it gets to do certain things everyone should be able to but are artificially prevented from in order to protect this class' niche".* And then new players - especially a young one who's not even familiar with the tropes of the genre - are totally lost, exactly like in your example, because the confounded thing is just so counterintuitive nonsensical.  

It's a can of worms best thrown out without opening it. Just remove the Thief and let everyone use formerly Thief-specific skills as long as they take the appropriate measures (removing metal armour and heavy gear for sneaking, securing proper illumination and tools for picking a lock, etc.), using either the Thief's percentage system or some other mechanism of your devising (a saving throw modified by the appropriate ability bonus has worked well for me).


*And for this thread, I'm going to entirely ignore any declarations of the tired old "But that's not true, everyone can move quietly, thieves move silently, everyone can hide, thieves can hide in shadows, it's a legitimately different thing" counterargument because it's assinine and not actually supported by gameplay as written or as practiced almost always.

I agree with the last bit (bolded) thieves powers are not magic, however they are specialists. So if I am playing a modern heist game, all PCs can drive but The Getaway Driver can drive really well, all PCs can shoot but The Hitman can shoot really well.
In D&D anyone can roll an attack but fighters are better at it, similarly anyone can roll to move silently but theives are better at it. You wouldn't eliminate the fighter because everyone can roll to hit, likewise don't elimiante the theif because everyone can try and climb walls.

The problem isn't that thieves have skills. The problem is that the skill system is confused and there is no 'unskilled' option. So rather than use% and make the theif skill subsystem complex and different use a d20. Identify 6 thief skills - Stealth, Climb Walls, Pick Pockets, Open Locks, Disable traps and Appraise. Each level the theif gets 6 +1s to distribute with no more than +3 to any one skill. Target roll is a 15 for each skill give an unskilled modifier ranging from -1 to Stealth to -5 for open locks (details to be determined).
Now the wizard can move silently d20 -1 target 15, the thief gets d20 +2 target 15 so at first level they are already 15% better and by 8th level the theife will have +12 or something.

Yeah for the short term I think the best solution is just to ditch the thief class and use Holmes or one of the lighter retro-clones. If I run another game for my students that's exactly what I'll do.

For my own sons I'd like to build a skill system I can bolt onto a retroclone that does exactly what I want and there's no hurry there since they're just barely 4 and one a half so I have some time

What I want for stuff like sneaking isn't conflict resolution (roll sneak, if you roll high the conflict is over) or to have the conflict broken down into a bunch of component tasks that have to be rolled for separately. I'm playing a Burning Wheel game this weekend and I really don't think that stuff like BW's Duel of Wits social combat system are anything close to what I want for D&D.

What I'm looking for is more skills that work more like Bags of Holding than Swords +1 more like Control Normal Fires than Magic Missile.

So  what I want skills to do (except for ones like "open lock" that'd be boring to roleplay through step by step) is not be things that make it easier to succeed at a string of tasks that you need but things that spark creative ideas just like the Bag of Holding is famous for.

Kids are great at coming up with crazy off the wall plans and I'd like skills to be fodder for that.

So stuff like maybe:
-Contortionist: can fit in really small spaces (no roll just can do it).
-Nice face: when you talk to people they have your full attention, doesn't work on people who're already in combat or whatnot (no roll, it just works).
-Trap sense: whenever a trap's about to go off you get a bad feeling and have one second to do something about it (no roll, it just works).

Maybe that sort of thing. Less, "there's a guard so I'll roll stealth to sneak past him" more "there's a guard, if I try to sneak past him I'll almost certainly fail, what kind of crazy Wile E. Coyote plan can I come up with to get past him?"

The problem is how to do that without having high level characters have a big long-ass list of those sort of things, which'd get annoying.

Mostly just thinking out loud here, all ideas are pretty amorphous at this point.

The analogy I'm going for is old school D&D combat. If you break it down into a bunch of rolls, "roll to hit, roll for damage, repeat" it's boring as fuck. Old School D&D combat is the most fun when doing the straightforward thing will get you killed so you have to think up clever ways to use one-use magic items, figure out how to win the fight with enlarge object and control normal fires, using the environment and other fun stuff like that. Want to do the same sort of thing with skills so that skills give people fun toys to play with but don't turn things into "roll to find traps, now roll to disarm the trap" which is even more boring than "roll to hit, roll for damage, repeat."

You want utility abilities that spur open solutions. But that's incredibly individual-creativity dependent. It's still wholly available with Thief Skills (especially along with NWP). But it requires mentally decoupling skills from %, which confuses people terribly as it starts so low, and understanding skills are professional grade -- not permission grade.

Like take Climb Walls and Rope Use. Normally overlooked and, in the case of Rope Use, derided. Anyone can climb walls, anyone can use rope. But others cannot climb walls as well, especially without supports, or use ropes with such alacrity or elaborate complexity. Permission v. Profession. But how do you explain that to people, outside of examples?

I'd give examples pre-game myself, possibly use in-game NPCs as well.

i.e. There's a bar fight, the thief can climb the sheer wooden panelling (uses a dagger?) to then wall jump and perch upon the chandelier. Camping there he can fling daggers into melee. All at first level (Climb Walls starts at 60%). I wouldn't bother with rolls here usually.

i.e. Dressed in nice clothes and a silk scarf, a spy (thief) does letter espionage. He's about to be caught in the lord's room. He rapidly grabs a candlestick, makes a trick release knot (Rope Use) onto it with his silk scarf, slips it between the window table and window sill as an anchor, and rapidly descends out the window (Climb Walls). Grabbing the wall outside he shakes his scarf loose, attaches it to a rain gutter, and rappels down the manor smoothly (Climb Walls, Rope use) to quickly get lost in the crowds. Still at 1st lvl and just one NWP (Climb Walls w/o armor starts at 70%). Again, most likely wouldn't bother with rolls.

Further, a lot of your ideas can be made into NWPs and Traits/Disadvantages. Contortionist can be its own thing, or you could condense Tumbling + Contortionist into just Acrobatics. Nice Face can be the Etiquette NWP, or also both condensed into Diplomatic. Or further it can be the Alluring trait. Danger Sense could become the Lucky trait.

It's all already there, but it requires a conceptual shift (oddly enough to the RAW). NWPs by RAW are only used in tasks that would challenge a professional, otherwise you don't roll them. It's generally an automatic success. Otherwise anyone can attempt these skills untrained. When people get all pissy about NWPs limiting character Permission to attempt things, it means to me that they didn't really read that whole chapter.

Even D&D combat shouldn't be boring, and people should be working with the environment. But that requires people to think outside the box, which in turn requires a reassuring GM. Remind them that they don't have to roll for every little thing (let alone roll high), and that professional skills allows them to avoid rolling even more. This is one of the reasons that I disliked 3e so much; by quantifying everything with skill points and DCs, people felt obliged to use it for all tasks, and that eventually began to limit permission.

Quote from: Premier;618122To the OP: I would suggest just getting rid of the Thief class altogether. It's main conceptual problem is that nominally its identfying feature is being considerably better at certain things than other characters, but in actual gameplay that gets warped into "it gets to do certain things everyone should be able to but are artificially prevented from in order to protect this class' niche".* And then new players - especially a young one who's not even familiar with the tropes of the genre - are totally lost, exactly like in your example, because the confounded thing is just so counterintuitive nonsensical.  

It's a can of worms best thrown out without opening it. Just remove the Thief and let everyone use formerly Thief-specific skills as long as they take the appropriate measures (removing metal armour and heavy gear for sneaking, securing proper illumination and tools for picking a lock, etc.), using either the Thief's percentage system or some other mechanism of your devising (a saving throw modified by the appropriate ability bonus has worked well for me).


*And for this thread, I'm going to entirely ignore any declarations of the tired old "But that's not true, everyone can move quietly, thieves move silently, everyone can hide, thieves can hide in shadows, it's a legitimately different thing" counterargument because it's assinine and not actually supported by gameplay as written or as practiced almost always.

I think that RuneQuest answers this issue nicely,but then it doesn't play to D&D tropes.

Thanks for the detailed responses Opaopajr they were very helpful in thinking this through.

As far as what I'm talking about "requiring people to think outside the box." That's exactly what I'm going for. I want player skill to matter and kids and newbies generally suck at the tactical acumen/resource management half of player skill but do very well at the wacky outside of the box thinking half of player skill, so that's what I want to emphasize.

Your Use Rope and Climb Walls examples are just the sort of thing that I want. I think that's because most obstacles (except for the most boring ones that I wouldn't want to dwell on anyway) can't be solved by the simple application of saying "I use rope!" or "I climb walls!" so players have to think about how to use their rope-use or climbing skills as tools to solve the larger problem.

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. For example give players a skill that lets them move silently, give them a skill that lets them hide (if they find a good hiding place) but don't let them hide and move at the same time so whenever they're moving about people can easily see them. Then how to sneak past the guard? Make sure he's not looking at you when you're moving since if he is, he'll probably see you. How to do that? Dunno. You figure it out, you're the thief. Same thing for traps and social interaction, give them some helpful tools but leave big gaps that have to be filled in creatively.

My ideal would be something along these lines. "OK players you're all first level and you want to go kill those three ogres who'll destroy you in a fair fight. However, you've got this bag of holding. What do you do?" The players can't just say "I use the bag of holding!" they've got to fill it with rubble and dump it on the ogres' heads, or transport a disassembled ballista and sneak attack with it or fill it with oil and inundate the ogres' home and then light it on fire or whatever. I want skills to play the same kind of role as the bag of holding: grist for the outside of the box thinking mill that suck and make you die if you don't use them in a creative way.

OK some ideas for basic mechanics:

-Skill checks and saving throws get mashed together (kind of sort of like Blood and Treasure but with one "save" for each ability score as in C&C). To help you pass these checks you get a small bonus from your attributes and a small but ascending bonus from your class. To pass you've got to roll a d20 and hit a (default) DC 20 or hit a target number equal to 20 minus attribute bonus minus class bonus (same difference mathematically one works like 3ed saves the other works like TSR-D&D saves, am leaning towards the TSR-D&D option as it gives people a target number printed right on their sheets to shoot for, kind of like ACKS).

-Criticals are natural 20's or rolling 10 or more higher than you needed to roll, so if your target number is a 5, 15 or higher is a critical (criticals would work the same in combat and would be the way of handling called shots etc., you want a called shot, then roll a crit).

-People get Proficiencies (kind of like souped-up TSR-D&D NWPs with thief skills mashed in).

-Difficulties are broken up a few grades (will need better names): Average Joe, Professional, World Class and Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

-Everyone can do average Joe stuff without a roll (unless they're facing some horrible disadvantage).

-For Professional stuff (like, say, walking a tightrope) regular characters need to pass a Dex Check to do it (with failure often being "you can't move and are a sitting duck as you try desperately to balance" rather than "you fall and die" and people with a Proficiency in balance can do it without rolling.

-For World Class stuff (like, say, sprinting around on a tightrope while dueling with a flying demon) regular characters would need a critical and characters with a relevant proficiency would need to pass a Dex Check (although maybe a few proficiencies with prereqs would allow them to do it without a roll).

-For Are You Fucking Kidding Me stuff (like sprinting around on an iced tightrope in a hurricane) regular characters need something crazy like rolling 2 20's in a row and characters with a proficiency would need a critical (although maybe a few proficiencies with prereqs would allow them to do it with a regular dex check).

-Some proficiencies wouldn't be used to help with these kinds of checks but would give you specific bennies (like the 5ed one I liked that goes "if you don't know a piece of info you automatically know who does").

-If DM's feeling anal they can apply little -2's and +2 ad hoc.

-There'd be no proficiencies for things like "stealth," "diplomacy," or "remove traps." But instead proficiencies that give you tools to help you do these things if you're creative in applying them. In general there'd be a lot of stuff like that proficiencies wouldn't apply to and that players would have to use their own brains to figure out.

-Maybe label some nifty proficiencies "thief only"?

The main problem here would be proficiency bloat. I'd want to keep the options newbies have when it comes to choosing their starting proficiencies as few as possible. Helping newbies through assigning 3ed skill points was horrific and helping them choose 2ed proficiencies was bad enough.

Gotta think of some way to streamline it. The analogy I want to go for here is spells. A newbie wizard doesn't need to know what all of the spells in the book do and they never get to pore over them and choose which one they want for a long list they just need to know what the two spells on their character sheet do and then get introduced to new ones bit by bit by finding scrolls. Want something similar for this to avoid the decision paralysis that you get for "well you can choose a proficiency now" *shows player a list of a gazillion proficiencies.* I suppose templates would work but want to think of other options as well.

Addendum: As I'm sure you can tell, once you peel back the obfuscation a proficiency gives you a +10 bonus and DCs go up in steps of 10. That seems like a lot but it keeps the target numbers steady (easier to kids to remember) and these skills would be more like 2ed NWPs or thief skills in which the difference is between "have a good shot of succeeding" if you have it and "don't even bother trying" if you don't. These would also be a lot narrower and more finicky than WotC-D&D skills.

Thoughts?

when my daughtewr hit an exploding chest trap she did what all kids would do in the next room with another chest she dragged it against the locked door tied a rope to the handle and then used the chest to blow open the door.

I figured that the balistic effect probably wouldn't be strong enough but since she was only 5 at the time I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Not relevant but amusing