Basic Fantasy RPG Forums

looking over the new r77, i figured i'd crank out a few half dozen or so monsters ffor ya..
i've noticed a few things:

Assassin Vine is in the core monsters. You can reuse my pic for that.
Bee, Giant is in the core book. You can replace the royalty free illustration with the one used in the field guide.

I'll have the elementals done tonight or tomorrow.

Here are some basic ideas for Move Silently, Hide and Climb for non-thieves:

Climb: Any character can try to climb a relatively surface at half movement by rolling a 1-2 on a d8 for easy areas, d10 for complicated ones and d12 for difficult ones. The character can add his Str bonus to the number needed to succeed.

Move Silently: Whenever a character tries to move or advance on a stealthy manner he can accomplish this by moving at half rate and rolling a 1 on a d10, characters with 15+ Dex needs a roll of 1-2.

Hide: A character can hide form sight by hiding on shadowy or obscured areas and by rolling a 1 on a d20 for lightly obscured areas and a 1 on a d12 on highly obscured areas.

Note that I still have to work on the results of a failed roll...

viewtopic.php?p=18937#p18937

(working on the Fire.)

on thief skills for non thief (and in general skills)

I would so much prefer an expansion on the ability roll rule - and I should take a moment to praise it as it transform ability check in the same rule system of Saving Throw a thing that I praise and love

as for improving the probability of success with level I think it's a very good thing, (only we must remember the ability bonus) obviously we must look at numbers a non-thief will never be better of a thief even if the thief have a few level short of the character.

As one can see from the table below it's a tricky problem since the thief progression is very particular but with skill penalty I think it can be done (after all this is all in the GM section so). I would go for the following ruling:

"Non thief character can try to emulate some of the thief skill with great risk, since they are not trained in this skill they must make and ability roll (using the right ability as shown in the table) with a penalty to the roll (the ability are taken from the thief options supplement r2:
Thief skill............Related..........Non-Thief
........................Ability...........penalty
........................................to Ability roll
.......................................................
Open Locks.............Dex...............-5
Remove Traps...........Int................-5
Pick Pockets............Dex...............-5
Move Silently...........Dex...............-2
Climb Walls.............Str................-2
Hide.................... Int................-5
Listen...................Wis................-2

(and maybe also the race table for dwarf, elf and halfling?)

As for condition the mod should be the same as for thief characters (converted in d20 mods obviously).

as reference in attach you will find a table that compare Ability rolls rule page 141-142 of r77 vs Thief skills by level, I converted everything in % (17 or more on d20 is 20%, than ability rolls get +5% each 2 levels), we must not forget that on ability rolls one get from -3 to +3 on the roll based on his ability!

after the table I must say that maybe the Ability Rolls table should slow down at higher levels

You could also extrapolate a hypothetical 0-level thief and use the numbers for that. I might see what I can do about that in the morning.

I'm against non-thieves doing thief stuff in the Core rules (or ever actually).
Why not write a supplement?
BTW Librarylass suggestion seems good, I'd extrapolate 0 level thief percentages as well.

artikid wrote: Why not write a supplement?
BTW Librarylass suggestion seems good, I'd extrapolate 0 level thief percentages as well.

it would be nice, but here the idea was to give simple suggestion for the GM on how to use Ability Rolls

I am all for giving in an half paragraph a few ideas on how to use Ability Rolls for various tasks with penalty for un-trained skill use, rarely used ones and so on (broad as they may be)

LibraryLass wrote:You could also extrapolate a hypothetical 0-level thief and use the numbers for that. I might see what I can do about that in the morning.

That wouldn't be hard, as the progression is mathematical with brackets. The optional Thief rule in the GM section gives the progression rate; you'd just reverse 1st level using those numbers. 30 percentiles, I think.

But...

artikid wrote:I'm against non-thieves doing thief stuff in the Core rules (or ever actually).

I'm of the opinion that non-thieves should not be able to perform thief abilities, in the strict sense. A thief can hide in almost plain sight, move noiselessly like a ninja, climb sheer walls. Things that seem like magic. A non-thief can hide when given a good place to hide, move quietly if the environment has some background noise or the person he's sneaking past is distracted, or climb a wall with some handholds or a favorable slope. The thief should always be able to exceed the abilities granted to non-thieves where they overlap his or her own; in situations where non-thieves have the opportunity to try to do the same thing, the thief should be getting bonuses because it's easy.

Solomoriah wrote: I'm of the opinion that non-thieves should not be able to perform thief abilities, in the strict sense. A thief can hide in almost plain sight, move noiselessly like a ninja, climb sheer walls. Things that seem like magic. A non-thief can hide when given a good place to hide, move quietly if the environment has some background noise or the person he's sneaking past is distracted, or climb a wall with some handholds or a favorable slope. The thief should always be able to exceed the abilities granted to non-thieves where they overlap his or her own; in situations where non-thieves have the opportunity to try to do the same thing, the thief should be getting bonuses because it's easy.

yeah, this is it.

I think that the idea behind it is not thief skill, it's to give some guideline to GMs on what character can attempt with Ability Rolls and what kind of penalty or bonus they can dish out

The way I was doing it non-thieves can try only a small quantity of thief skills, namely Hide, Climb and Walk Silently, finding traps already exist on the book for non thieves.

Open locks and disarm traps requires of mechanical knowledge that only thieves have, but maybe dwarfs can try to do it at a lesser chance of success.

Thieves have 4 things in which they are better at performing those activities:
1- Better chance of success
2- A broader use of the skill (climb almost any surface, hide in almost any place, etc)
3- They do it better: If time is needed they use halve of that time, if duration is require they double that value, they Climb and Move at normal speed while other must do it a half speed.
4- They suffer less negative effect on a failure: When climbing they don't fall on a failure, when hiding or moving silently they don't get caught automatically on a failure; and if you allow others to search/disarm traps they can activate them on a failed roll.

Things like allowed movement while moving silently and climbing should be added to the description as the time needed to open locks and disarm traps.

One idea for Hide is to allow a thief (and thieves only) to move as long as he is covered by darkness by making a move silently roll.

Using the Ability Roll system is a good thing if one wants to have an "umbrella rule" to cover for any sudden situation but requires to make the rule a standard core rule instead of an optional one.

I must say one final thing, it has been said that thieves should have better base chances, not only they have it compare to "other games" but they don't suffer the "succeed or suffer damage" effect of the "other games" where if the thief fails to climb he suffers falling damage, if he fails to deactivate a tramp he activates it (and some games goes to the point where a failed search traps set them on).