How did thieves evolve into rogues (ninjas)?

[octavius]

Again, which games are you talking about?
In the Gold Box games you could backstab every round. In the IE games every second round; turning invisible or stealthed every second round is not that difficult.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Thieves stopped being a thing because pickpocketing was never, ever useful in any game ever. There's a reason the term is associated with starving children and not blinged out crimelords. Only a desperate person would even bother trying such a thing.

Sneaking is more useful but also something any adventurer should know how to do. Picking locks is very circumstantial. Chances are the good shit isn't locked in a gigantic chest. If something is useful, it's probably being used. Locked doors can simply be broken And besides, if something is locked, someone has the key somewhere (or they should... the number of games where there are locked chests everywhere filled with stolen loot... which the bandits themselves have no way of opening... is retarded.)

So yeah, in lieu of having a class whose only purpose is to quietly open locks, they made a class which is a glass cannon in melee combat. Which is probably more unique than something like a ranger or paladin, who are basically just warriors with slightly different skillsets and utterly useless spellcasting.

What I find more baffling is the association between rogues/thieves and archery. How is that a useful skill for someone sneaking around? Bows are large and clunky, and firing one is not at all stealthy. And it's a very different skillset than fighting with knives or swords or whatever, so you wouldn't expect it fall under the class of 'basic' weaponry anyone with a passing interest in combat would know how to use. I'd only expect actual warriors to be marskmen.

 

[J_C]

Again, which games are you talking about?
In the Gold Box games you could backstab every round. In the IE games every second round; turning invisible or stealthed every second round is not that difficult.

I was talking about the IE games. Maybe it was just me, but I never could do that in the middle of a fight. Maybe I was just not high level enough, or didn't have high enough hide skill.

 

[octavius]

Again, which games are you talking about?
In the Gold Box games you could backstab every round. In the IE games every second round; turning invisible or stealthed every second round is not that difficult.

I was talking about the IE games. Maybe it was just me, but I never could do that in the middle of a fight. Maybe I was just not high level enough, or didn't have high enough hide skill.

It takes some skill, but it's certainly doable. With potions you are guaranteed success unless the enemy casts a counter spell. Hiding is more difficult, but with high Hide in Shadows skill it's worth the try.

 

[Infinitron]

Hiding in Shadows in the middle of a fight in the IE games? Not sure that's possible.

There's also an environmental bonus to hiding in the IE games - easier to hide in the shadow. Fun fact: It wasn't originally in BG1, but was added in the's game official patch.

 

[Average Manatee]

What I find more baffling is the association between rogues/thieves and archery. How is that a useful skill for someone sneaking around? Bows are large and clunky, and firing one is not at all stealthy. And it's a very different skillset than fighting with knives or swords or whatever, so you wouldn't expect it fall under the class of 'basic' weaponry anyone with a passing interest in combat would know how to use. I'd only expect actual warriors to be marskmen.

That said I've never known of an association between thieves and archery in D&D. I guess it's alright for sneak attacks, but in PnP at least you take penalties for firing into melee and can hit your own side (not sure if sneak attack would work on allies, that would be pretty horrible).

Sneaking is more useful but also something any adventurer should know how to do.

Problem for sneaking in games is that:

Want to recon the enemy? Why bother? If the battle is hard enough you'll just load the savegame and know what to expect, otherwise you won and didn't need to recon and prepare anyway.
Want to sneak past the enemy? Either your whole party has to be rogues with good sneak skill or you can't. And if you do you probably don't get comparable experience or loot, so you are shooting yourself in the foot long term.

Hiding in Shadows in the middle of a fight in the IE games? Not sure that's possible.

I don't know what he's talking about either, but in BG2 at least there are like a dozen items that let you go invisible on a daily basis

 

[Caleb462]

Thieves stopped being a thing because pickpocketing was never, ever useful in any game ever. There's a reason the term is associated with starving children and not blinged out crimelords.

Pickpocketing is hugely useful in Fallout 1 and 2. Of course that's not a game with classes, but I pickpocketed the hell out of NPCs in those games.

 

[Abelian]

This is just a wild guess, but the archer-thief archetype could be due to Robin Hood or maybe due to the fact that both archery and traditional thief skills such as pickpocket and sneaking are usually dependent on agility/dexterity. Plus thieves are usually more fragile so it would make sense for them to use ranged weapons.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Dunno why you bothered, if you're going to savescum (and you obviously did if you found pickpocketing useful) you might as well just savescum the real challenges instead of savescumming pickpocket attempts to make other shit easier. You've already voided any sense of fairness or challenge, why go through the motions of becoming stronger so you cheat less on a particular part of the game?

 

[octavius]

Hiding in Shadows in the middle of a fight in the IE games? Not sure that's possible.

It is. But you need to head out of the melee and find a nice shaded spot around a corner or behind a tree to hide. Helps if the thief has good movement rate.
But of course using Invisnilty Potions is preferable once battle is joined.

 

[bonescraper]

Thieves became Rogues when Politicians became Thieves.

 

[Backstabber]

In the context of a CRPG, making the sneaky class into a glass cannon is more useful for a player-controlled party than making it entirely non-combat focused. You usally only see stealth-only rogues/thieves in games where you only play as a single character, like roguelikes and Deus Ex-style "choose between combat and stealth" games.

 

[Bio Force Ape]

My memories of playing AD&D with a very strict and hard-core DM (which meant a lot of deaths, which meant a lot of re-rolls since resurrection was unaffordable to most of our low-level characters) was that no one ever wanted to play the thief. Clerics, too, were considered pretty boring. But we always needed both to get through a dungeon, but everyone wanted to play a combat-centric character like a fighter, a paladin, a ranger or a fireball-blasting wizard. There was a reluctance to be the wimpy thief who could do very little in most fights and who was just kind of standing around waiting for a lock to pick, or the cleric waiting to cast Cure Light Wounds from time to time and contribute very little to most fights ("What? We're fighting zombies?! Finally, my cleric gets to do something awesome!").

I always felt like 3rd edition was meant to address that. It made both Rogues and Clerics much more powerful, much more combat-centric and so people now, finally, actually wanted to play them. And that's continued into CRPGs.

 

[Gregz]

...how and why did this happen? Some people were not satisfied with the thieves just doing their usual things?

This is a problem in PnP especially. The traditional Thief class is just like the Shadowrun Decker. During a PnP campaign all the action stops and everyone has to sit around while the GM and thief/decker negotiate their own minigame on everyone else's time. It's boring, and it just doesn't work very well. Hell, even the academy award winning film 'Dungeons & Dragons (2000)' had a set-piece scene about 10 minutes long involving the thief, and only the thief, navigating his way through a maze with his thieving skills...while the party sat on their asses and watched. Boring.

Sadly this translates into most cRPGs as well. In Dragonfall for instance, while your squad is hopping and popping the decker is all alone solving a matrix minigame, which at the very least breaks immersion because you're alternating between the gunfight and the matrix.

Any classic cRPG with the wizard spell 'Knock' made thieves essentially obsolete because, LARPing aside, pound-for-pound the magic user was simply more powerful and versatile than the thief. Also uber ninjas are not new, Wizardry had them, Dungeon Master had them, Might and Magic had them, etc.

I agree that the traditional thief is a lot of fun in the abstract, but in practice they are very difficult to assimilate into any party-based game.

This is why my favorite thief based 'cRPG' is ... Thief. The entire game is designed around the fact that the player is role-playing a thief, it's damn fun and it's a game about thieving...but the reason it works is because it's not about anything else.

The problem is how to make the thieving/decking minigame more streamlined so that it doesn't slow the rest of the party down. It's a very hard problem to solve.

 

[Zombra]

In 6th grade I wrote "Thief" on a paper asking what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't get what the big deal was or why I got in so much trouble. I just thought it was a D&D class.

 

[waywardOne]

My memories of playing AD&D with a very strict and hard-core DM (which meant a lot of deaths, which meant a lot of re-rolls since resurrection was unaffordable to most of our low-level characters) was that no one ever wanted to play the thief. Clerics, too, were considered pretty boring. But we always needed both to get through a dungeon, but everyone wanted to play a combat-centric character like a fighter, a paladin, a ranger or a fireball-blasting wizard. There was a reluctance to be the wimpy thief who could do very little in most fights and who was just kind of standing around waiting for a lock to pick, or the cleric waiting to cast Cure Light Wounds from time to time and contribute very little to most fights ("What? We're fighting zombies?! Finally, my cleric gets to do something awesome!").

I always felt like 3rd edition was meant to address that. It made both Rogues and Clerics much more powerful, much more combat-centric and so people now, finally, actually wanted to play them. And that's continued into CRPGs.

That's a problem with shitty DMs, then, not rules or editions. Thieves are (were) the only class to be able to instantly be able to blend in with the general population because their equipment was minimal and easily concealed. Fighters had armor and large weapons, clerics nearly the same but with necessarily obvious religious symbols, and of course mages needed their spellbooks and reagents.

They only truly needed one high stat, which means of all the party members, they'd be the most likely to be able to put points in INT and CHA to be able to do something outside of their strict class abilities. In at least half the campaigns I ran, thieves were the smartest behind mages, and the most charismatic by far behind paladins. They were often the party spokesman because, unlike paladins or druids, they had no required agenda to further.

Games, especially crpgs, not providing any character something to do outside of combat is just the accepted method of shitty design. It just hits the thief hardest because, at their core, they're the least combat-capable by definition.

 

[sser]

Thieves in The Dark Spire had a role that was pretty much entirely - find traps, disarm traps, pick locks. That was their function for about 80% of the game. Mages were also almost totally useless if they weren't using spells.


Ironically, they became Ninjas in the second half if you built them right

 

[Telengard]

The (d)evolution of the thief is something I've been following for a long time, since thieves were my favorite class to take way back when. And I have always been of the opinion that the changes can be sourced to the addition of skills to the game. That's not the main thrust of the changes, but it laid the foundation for what was to come.

See, thieves/rogues/intelligence officers - the only reason that that class has for existing is that they have access to skills that no other class has. They are the specialist class - weak at regular adventuring, but someone you cart around for when their specialty comes into play. Thus, they only realistically exist in rigid, class-based systems where no one else has those specialty skills. So, once you go skills, once you shift all of the class's specialty skills over to regular skills that anyone can take, then the class no longer serves a purpose, because those special skills can be shared out amongst the rest of the party and then that character slot can be filled with a more powerful adventurer who will make the party stronger. (Which is not to say that thieves could not still be effective in this new environment, just that the party is more effective if they aren't there.)

The designers surely realized that, though, when they added skills to the game. Because, in return for losing their reason for being, the class was awarded with a bunch of special powers that only they had access to. None of those powers were very thief/rogue/io-like, though, of course. Which means the class itself had already essentially disappeared, becoming what many call a skill-monkey, even if a skill-monkey with special powers.

Now, that's all the past (d)evolution. But it sets the stage, placing the class in a malleable position due to its overall pointlessness after the change. And thus, when the horrors of the Balance god were visited upon RPGs - where everyone has to be equal and everything has to be fair - the thief/rogue/intelligence officer was already ripe for being pushed into the role of DPS killer. And so he was pushed.

He is no rogue, though, nor assassin. Those names have no more relation to what he is now than "thief" does. Today, he is a martial artist, skilled in anatomy and the targeting of weak points in the body, thus allowing him to do mega-damage whenever he gets in a good strike, as well as potentially applying a myriad of effects when he does land that blow (such as bleeding, broken bones or a build-up of bile (poison) by striking a gland). No need to even use sneaking for such abilities, since it not through the means of stealth that these abilities are used, but are instead effects of distraction and combat control - ie the skills of the martial artist.

 

[Abelian]

So how do the bandit, burglar, brigand, robber and rapscallion fit in as subcategories of the "appropriators of others' goods" line of work?

 

[Gragt]

I need to read it again but I remember that the Blood Sword gamebook series handles the thief (called a Trickster there) rather well, and the whole adventuring party too in general. They have their share of special paragraphs where they can gather information, and also situations where they can easily solve problems that others need a few extra steps to resolve. I remember a situation where the group is confronted by a powerful sorceress, and the mage can choose to engage her in a magic duel but the thief can simply trick her into lowering her guard and take her hostage.

 

[buzz]

Using a class-based system at all instead of skill-based or job-based

 

[Somberlain]

Hiding in Shadows in the middle of a fight in the IE games? Not sure that's possible.

You can hide whenever there are no enemies in your field of vision. Funnily enough, it means that if you're blinded, you can hide even if there's an enemy right next to you. Otherwise, you can just run out of the battle, hide, then run back and backstab someone, then run away from battle and repeat ad nauseam. Works especially well when hasted or with Haste AND Boost of Speed, when it becomes quite laughable. Also, Shadowdance in EE has Hide in Plain Sight.

There are of course Sandthief's Rings, Ring of Gaxx, Ring of Air Control and other items that give you invisibility, but usually I spare them and just use the running trick. Potions of Invisibility would be the most useful tool, but if you backstab hundreds of times during the game, there aren't enough of them.

 

[DraQ]

Hiding in Shadows in the middle of a fight in the IE games? Not sure that's possible.

You can hide whenever there are no enemies in your field of vision. Funnily enough, it means that if you're blinded, you can hide even if there's an enemy right next to you.
Otherwise, you can just run out of the battle, hide, then run back and backstab someone, then run away from battle and repeat ad nauseam.

And yet people bash bethesduh's grorious coding.

 

[Delterius]

Equip the Boots of Blinding Light of Maximum Invisibility.

I think this is a case for the world being an illusion and the blindness of self leading to CHIM.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Maybe this is just personal prefernce, but I don't like this evolution. But how and why did this happen? Some people were not satisfied with the thieves just doing their usual things?

They needed a power up to stay competitive. Kinda hard to justify carrying around a guy that can pick locks and disable traps when you have people who can cleave dragons in half or vaporize entire orc platoons.

Spoiler

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