Recent content by Thomas Shey

It was probably an extrapolation from the various suprise and secret door checks that were applied in various situation. I would not be at all surprised if that sort of approach was used for some of the less expected things people would have probably tried to have characters do prior to the...

Just as a side note, the first version of the ranger I saw (admittedly in the SR rather than an actual book, but the TSR people seemed to treat those as at least semi-official classes at the time) had Tracking done as a thief style percentage skill too. (I also seriously, seriously doubt most...

You can make a distinction between things that simply "work" (in that if there is a resolution roll associated with them, they are modifiers to how the situation resolves rather than whether it resolves at all). The early thief backstab was actually a pretty good example here; you had to still...

Just wanted you to know, @Baron Opal II that I had a somewhat longish response to your post (agreeing with a few things, disagreeing with some others) that somehow got nuked by a combination of the board software and some sort of misclick that I lack the werewithal to try and reconstruct. I'll...

You really feel like opening the can again about whether that's an informed prefence in most people? Because that's where this kind of claim goes.

Well, at the end, because a lot of people like class systems with their baked in niche protection. Whether you prefer a class system approach, an individual skill approach, or some hybrid thereof can't, in the end, be anything but preference informed by your priorities.

At the very least, I'd expect that to make some of the "talking past each other" arguments less common. (There's a complex argument about whether someone can participate in a discussion based on premises they don't share. I suspect how useful/productive that is turns on A) Can they avoid...

Yes. I suspect its an artifact of them, essentially, looking at how things need to be in the system they're designing while being bluntly unwilling to share too much about that system. It turns a certain amount of what they post into a voice from the void.

Its like my note that the combat capability in the Hero System is acquired being distinct from the way other kinds of skills are is an evolutionary artifact; it didn't have to be that way, as the redesign in Fuzion showed.

Well, some of that gets back to how you're structuring characters in your system. In a purely skill based system, or one with skills and special abilities bought seperately, the answer of course is "You don't." A lot of it turns on how, if you have them, special abilities are acquired in the...

One of the things often embedded in bad faith arguments is both the assumption and the insistence that the other party share all the same basic premises you do, and unwillingness to cede any of those premises or step back and consider them first (admittedly, sometimes that gets so into the weeds...

Yeah, the gamifying of their arguments is what gets tiresome right quick.

My old boss was talking more about brittleness than softness. As you say, a scratch is one thing, having the whole stone shatter or at least have a massive chip off of it was something else. Yeah, that's an intrinsic issue with stones with siginificant metallic content (though the beryls have...

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...