Them Bones of Adventure - VI: Thievery

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

Bookending the set of skills that I’ve been covering lately – trap detection, stealth, climbing –, all of which were to some extent the traditional province of the Thief class, I now devote some attention to the remainder of the suit, though I have markedly less to say about these last few, their application being relatively straightforward and not meriting too much of an intervention systemwise, except to dispel a few misconceptions in GMing ethos.

This post comes more as aknowledgement that the fertile ground provided by the many facets of criminality is narrative in nature and not served at the table by abstraction into different systems, like having a rogue on the party enables license to access some kind of Magic: The Stealing gameplay that is otherwise walled-off.

As such, consider that taking flight with a bulging purse or assaulting the unwary will be an encounter but most other instances should be setpieces (or whole adventures) possibly enabled by a thief but requiring the whole party to come to fruition.

The Crunchy Bits

Lockpicking

- A simple [Dexterity (Thieves Tools)] check, requiring the respective proficiency to even be attempted, DC depending on the strength of the lock, with exceptionally complicated locks requiring iterated successes. This check takes ten minutes and can be repeatedly attempted as long as there is time, although a fumble will snap the tools and jam the lock.

Pickpocketing

Marks for Pickpocketing are an urban encounter all of their own. You just don’t find pocketable goods lying around unattended or hanging from fat purses like that. In this regard, the traditional declaration of a thief player that he “stands around the middle of the square until he finds something worth scoring” is not very conducent to a productive time. In fact, this is not behaviour that will lift anyone out of poverty. It’s what a thief might do to get by and make the ends (barely) meet, but make no mistake: this here troupe of strangers, the mythic underworld and the wilderlands beckon for a very good reason.

- If the opportunity presents itself, a target in a crowd being acquired, the standard steps of seeing if a theft is possible (only for palmable objects, as bulkier items will forcibly require some subterfuge), can lead to testing [Dexterity (Sleight of Hand)] against the mark’s rolled [Wisdom (Perception)], Disadvantage can be doled out for well secured or bulky possessions, and Advantage for thick elbowing crowds or the mark being inebriated.

Sticks, Stones and Broken Bones

Two things must be impressed upon the player, as follows: first, that depending on the location, currency money is not necessarily the standard means of value exchange; it is considered technology, much like a credit card would be today, used for convenience by a moneyed elite and not by the average village dweller. Money is the preserve of large towns and cities, as the barter economy is for the rural world.

The second thing is that risks must be assessed, for getting caught stealing is bad. Really bad. Appendage-severing bad.  Most DMs would try to awkwardly shift in their seats and give their sticky-fingered player some rope, some teflon suiting that always leads to the debacle of the player misbehaving as he stretches the rope more and more in an attempt to dice-leverage gains out of the setting.

I’m no moralist: Thieves will thieve. But players must know that there’ll be dues to pay if things go awry. As such, if an angry mob seizes the thief by the neck and drags him down to the wet mud, the player will be directed to roll on the dismemberment table promptly, so as to represent what fate has in store. The non-lethal results can then be interpreted as the usual cop-out fare of “we’re rather cross with you right now but for some reason we’ll just lock you up in this here minimum security box for a fortnight and hope you’re not running any backup”. Egregious thefts can command more than one roll. The exact nature of this penalty is always to be communicated ahead of time to the would-be thief, such that the player’s risk assessment can dictate how to proceed, instead of the usual “dive in there headfirst, make an appeal to the ref’s goodwill later if the rolls don’t pan as expected”.

This may come as a shock to some, but wealth is invariably guarded; sentries are on hand and they’re no pushovers. Bad come to worse, an angry mob of people who know each other and take a dim view of foreigners may well decide to take matters into their own hands; This is not the hollywood equivalent of shifty footing, where the heroes get some sketchy sidelong glances but things never really get out of hand; No, what I’m looking to impress is the downright likelihood that a thief getting caught can very well be done for and the party end up having to join the mob howling for his blood on pain of themselves being strung by the heels and fed to a rope noose and no funeral.

Closing Thoughts - Best of the Rest: Procuring, Smuggling, Extorting, Trafficking, Defrauding, Burglarizing, Robbing, Intruding, Fencing, Counterfeiting, Pawning, Spying, Loaning, Gambling, Begging and Shell Gaming

‘Whelmed much? So am I.

As par for the course of urban adventuring, it is of course expected that players might want to get into all sorts of trouble entrepeneurial endeavours. I can’t imagine wanting (or needing) systems for any of the above other than some downtime streetwising and the occasional opposed die-toss to convince a mark at a crucial point of an interaction or some discrete applications of the stealth, chase, ambush or combat rules.

These activities may thicken the lifesblood of urban adventuring but they’re not really begging for any kind of specific treatment by themselves. In any event, from a yield to effort perspective, why should I or anyone rush to systemize a caper that a party might be engaged in a total of once or twice in a whole campaign?

Suffice to say: the play’s the thing, and if a party ever sets the bearings of a running for illicit activity in an urban setting I’ll not be one to back down on them, it’s a wide open world after all.