Why Thieves are Anti-OSR, 3 Thieves That Aren't, & why we Love them Anyways

When I was first asked by my fans to 'fix the thief', I had had no idea that it was broken. 

I was surprised by the ask, for multiple reasons. 

Firstly, because Jesse Ross (yes. The one who wrote Trophy! I was as surprised as anyone. He apparently reads and enjoys my work? I talked to him, really nice guy) directly asked me to do this. He's obviously a man who knows a thing or two, so I gave this a lot of weight.

Secondly, because I held two polls to see what people wanted. In the first, I asked whether they wanted a class or an optional rule. They said they wanted the former, which is odd, because my optional rules sell better than my classes. My follow-up asked them if they wanted my take on the priest, the wizard, or the thief. I had plans for the wizard, and I had plans for the priest. I had no plans for the thief. I put it in because twitter polls allow you four options, and it felt weird not to include the thief. 

(I have already done two separate takes on the fighter) 

So, confused, I sat down and got to reading through dozens of old OSR publications. It turns out that there was a lot already written on this. What I found went as far back as the late 2000s, and included both blog posts and magazines.

By the end of this research, I was completely on the side of the thief haters. What I found was that many people had come to the same few points, again and again: the thief was broken, in three big ways and two small ones. Many of them had proposed solutions for some of these problems, none (that I found) had proposed a solution that worked for to all of them. 

The three big ones, each of which poke fundamental wholes in the game:

1. Every dungeon is a weird heist. Having one class be 'the one who does heists' makes no sense. They're all 'the one who does heists'. Just conceptually, the thief seems deeply at odds with the other classes. It's like having a PC class that is just 'adventurer'. Having an explicit thief there means that one PC is more thief-y than the others.
2. The existence of the thief, with backstab and B/X-style skills, means that it suddenly feels wrong to give the other PCs bonuses for ambushing or the ability to do things in line with those skills. This is especially weird, because of point #1. I want to make this extremely clear: every PC should get bonuses for strategizing so that they can hit someone from behind, and every PC should be rewarded for hiding or finding a way to move quietly. These are activities that anyone can do, and probably should do if they find themselves deep in enemy territory. 
3. Each of the thief-type skills does two, or sometimes three, awful things: 
   1. they take what is potentially a cool diegetic puzzle for the players to have fun solving... and solves it for them with a die roll. 
   2. they are character powers that solve very specific in-game problems, and only those. I want to see players take weird not-intrinsically-useful powers and find ways to make them useful. 
   3. they are simply more mechanized versions of things that other classes can already do. This greater mechanization results in the thief either being only slightly better than the other PCs at what is supposed to be their core thing, or (if miscalibrated) actually being worse at it. 

The two small ones, which are just annoying: 

1. The thief has no special reason for adventuring, other than the acquisition of wealth. While this can be an interesting motivation, it is often one shared by the rest of the party, and so isn't very special. This is a bigger deal than it might seem. XP for GP is a core trope of the Old School experience, as it ostensibly incentivizes exploration over destruction, and aligns player incentives with what their character's would be. An analysis of this is besides the point, so let's just take this as true without question. Every other class of the core four (fighter, magic user, priest) has a secondary narrative for why they are adventuring: glory, knowledge, to serve the will of their god. Every class I have published also has a non-gold motive for adventuring, because they are all intended for sandbox play, and sandbox play generally requires PCs to be initiating plots (rather than waiting for them to come to them) as much as possible. The thief does not any of these second reasons for adventuring. It just has gold. As such, it is doomed by design to generally follow after the other PCs in the party. 
2. They give players a very valid reason for why their character would steal from other members of the party. This is a minor flaw in comparison to the rest, and some tables might actually enjoy this dynamic, but it has been specifically cited to me as an issue with the concept of the class. 

Each of these issues results in everyone at the table (the GM, the other players, and maybe even the thief's player) having less fun than if the thief class wasn't present at all. 

I've seen attempted solutions at these problems, such as B/X thieves whose abilities fail less often, or simply giving everyone thief-style skills. These solve a few of these problems, but not all five. The easiest way out of the issue is simply not to include anything like the thief. Yet, the thief has continued to be included in our games for the past 48 years. 

The question then becomes: why?

We know that the thief sucks. We have all those reasons, which so very many in the OSR agree on. Clearly, though, something makes thieves worth playing. If that wasn't true, then it would be discarded by players and GMs in practice. They've had no issue discarding many other parts of the game, many of which might be seen as more worthy from an OSR perspective. 

I wasn't quite sure why, so I searched for the answer in my own (perhaps overly practical) way: by designing things that felt thief-like, but that didn't suffer from those same five problems.

What they had in common was that they all were still about finding ways around the usual problems of the dungeon, as opposed to the somewhat more direct focuses of the other three classes of the classic four. Part of this is in the simple joy of feeling cleverer and more skilled than your friends are. Part, I think, is in embodying certain archetypes from fiction. 

I also think that there is a role-playing draw to the thief. A certain kind of player loves playing an artful dodger, a lovable trickster, or a dark and edgy loner. Whether or not this is fun for the other players at the table can be a bit of an open question, of course. But it is definitely fun for that player... and it is always difficult to say no to someone else's fun. 

Finally, there's the joy to how the thief fails. It is amusing to watch all the thief's attempted cleverness and guile blow up in their face, even (especially) if you are the thief in question. This is especially true given that you know that they are probably going to use the same wits that got them into trouble get them out again. 

For these reasons, and likely more, we love the thief anyways and have kept it around for these past 50 years. In the process of realizing these things, I came up with not just one, but three different classes (compatible with all versions of D&D and most OSR games) that fill this same niche as the thief, but without falling afoul of the same problems: 

• The Noble: this class deals with the three major problems of the Thief by having them assist on heists through massive quantities of money and hirelings, gives them abilities that hand them knowledge and opportunities to solve problems through roleplay but does not directly make those things useful without further player input, and uses their die rolls to create diegetic puzzles out of unsolvable problems… without those puzzles necessarily then having obvious solutions. The two minor problems are dealt with by making this a support class that gains levels when others do, and making it’s greed interesting and distinctly driven by ties to the wider world.
• The Time Thief: this class deals with the thief’s three major problems by having them assist on heists through using various other abilities that give the party breathing room and the ability to feel significantly more in control of events in the dungeon, lets them do this through abilities that no one else could possibly have access to, and leaves the powers vague and strange enough that applying them in any given situation requires player creativity. It solves the two minor ones by giving them metaphysical things to steal in the course of their adventuring, and focusing on these metaphysical items rather than the party’s normal possessions.
• The Kleptomancer: This class deals with the three major problems of the thief by having them assist on heists through a series of weird powers, ensures that those powers are weird skill-inspired spell-like things rather than things that just anyone could do, and makes each of them weird enough and broad enough that (with enough creativity on the part of the player) they can be used to solve a wide variety of problems, rather than feeling tailored for set-pieces that then feel obligatory for the GM to include. The kleptomancer’s thefts are directed at the world outside the party by the mechanics of the class, and those same thefts drive them to adventure to fuel their abilities.

This was brought to with help from my Patreon patrons. Those who contributed $5 or more received it for free. Special thanks to Chris, Joe, and Sage.