I've never thought of Thief as a class. I've always considered thief as skills you could pick up. Dungeon explorers should be able to find traps (Ala Indiana Jones), try to disarm them, and attempt to pick locks. A fighter could learn them, a cleric could learn them, a mage could learn them, but that wouldn't make them thieves.
Very good read and a good walk through history and the design of early D&D. I’ve been listening to Conan via audiobook off and on and the parallels between his adventures and that of an early D&D Fighter/adventurer is not far off from one another.
I’d make the argument that I ought to sit and meditate on Conan more in my planning sessions for my campaigns.
On a related note, I have a pet theory that one of the reasons literary Sword & Sorcery went through a slump in the 90s is 2nd edition AD&D getting rid of Appendix N and with Gygax no longer involved in the game to namedrop Howard, Lieber, Moorcock Vance et al, that was a good 10 to 15 years of newer fans of D&D coming in, and not discovering through it what influenced it and reading it for themselves, so the audience for those authors and any newer ones dwindled with no new fresh blood for authors and fans.
I think there might be some truth to this. When Erik Mona and crew came in on 3rd edition, they name dropped a ton of S&S. Then when Paizo got going, before Pathfinder, they launched a series of S&S books.
This is great! I’m cooking an article that touches on a lot of these topics and will work as a rebuttal to some points but I highly doubt It’ll be half as good. I’ll publish it on The Adventurous Axolotl if a a certain magazine doesn’t pick it up first. Great read! Thank you for sharing.
I've never thought of Thief as a class. I've always considered thief as skills you could pick up. Dungeon explorers should be able to find traps (Ala Indiana Jones), try to disarm them, and attempt to pick locks. A fighter could learn them, a cleric could learn them, a mage could learn them, but that wouldn't make them thieves.
Very good read and a good walk through history and the design of early D&D. I’ve been listening to Conan via audiobook off and on and the parallels between his adventures and that of an early D&D Fighter/adventurer is not far off from one another.
I’d make the argument that I ought to sit and meditate on Conan more in my planning sessions for my campaigns.
On a related note, I have a pet theory that one of the reasons literary Sword & Sorcery went through a slump in the 90s is 2nd edition AD&D getting rid of Appendix N and with Gygax no longer involved in the game to namedrop Howard, Lieber, Moorcock Vance et al, that was a good 10 to 15 years of newer fans of D&D coming in, and not discovering through it what influenced it and reading it for themselves, so the audience for those authors and any newer ones dwindled with no new fresh blood for authors and fans.
I think there might be some truth to this. When Erik Mona and crew came in on 3rd edition, they name dropped a ton of S&S. Then when Paizo got going, before Pathfinder, they launched a series of S&S books.
This is great! I’m cooking an article that touches on a lot of these topics and will work as a rebuttal to some points but I highly doubt It’ll be half as good. I’ll publish it on The Adventurous Axolotl if a a certain magazine doesn’t pick it up first. Great read! Thank you for sharing.