Recent content by Thomas Shey

I suspect "skill monkey" is not what they're talking about, but you're not wrong that what exactly counts in the archetype is a pretty moving target.

Well, the problem is that the class originally called "Thief" has changed in both name and function over time in D&D multiple times, and who some third party used as their inspiration has changed with it. The farther you go back, the less distinct "Thief" was other than in having certain...

I was just curious. I backed SotWW, but it may well be that I'll never play/run it, and I did play a whole campaign of SotDL so I wondered.

Except I was around when the thief came into existance, and other that whatever they called secret strike back then, it was nothing but skills. Seriously. There was nothing else distinct about it, and it was, when if first arrived, unique in that way. Basically, I don't see your...

Yet they clearly do in a lot of places. Ask why the D&D magic system has propagated so many places.

I'm theoretically a boomer, but never really associated with them.

Ironically, as a movie, I think Rocketship X-M was the better movie. Destination Moon was arguably better as science fiction since it cared a whole lot more about the science actually resembling what we knew at the time (though XM was better in this regard than it gets credit for) but the...

The oddity of the thief as it originally was created was it was the first skill oriented class, but was only going to really be good for that or something really close to it. Unlike some later things such as the True20 Expert, you couldn't build an outdoorsman or a scholar with it.

I suspect their point is the dedicated class/role called "thief" is largely a D&D artifact that, to the degree its elsewhere is because of the shadow D&D casts, you don't have to have a dedicated mechanical hook for that to have that ground covered. I'd argue the only reason D&D even had one...

I can see an argument for a general purpose skill monkey in a class system where most other classes are focused on special abilities and the like, its just that neither "thief" nor "rogue" seems to necessarily describe those, and "thief" at least could fairly describe a character with a more...

Back when I was training to become a lapidary specialist for a jeweler a long, long time ago (it didn't stick), one of the first things he told me was to let people know that some stones were simply more durable than others, and while the others might be okay for earrings or necklaces, you...

Well, you can set up your class system so it chokes off much skill access to everyone but the skill monkey, but that usually ends up creating its own problems (the difficulty with getting enough skill points for a 3e era fighter to be able to climb, jump and ride competently being the poster boy...

Out of curiosity, have you played Shadow of the Demon Lord in that range? If so how different (if at all) did the two games feel to you?

Its notable that as a fan of what's often called "50's SF movies" that the look-and-feel there doesn't quite start to trail off until 1964. On the other hand, Rocketship XM came out in 1950 proper, and likely has much more the feel of that than most movies of the prior half-decade I can find...

Trying to keep supplies coming in without interacting with computers at all would be a heck of a challenge.