The Thief has always been one of my favorite classes, but DW’s Thief playbook didn’t really do it for me. A lot of the base playbooks suffer from the “+1 forward” syndrome, and there are a lot of combos that can make the PCs invincible or capable of dealing insane damage. So I tried a little “remix” of the Thief playbook, just to test the waters. If this is popular, I may do some others.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwbHes6iNuGrRnhxeHE2bEVJRzg/view?usp=sharing
I see you added Cutthroat, Assassin, Silvertongued, and Shadow Stalker, and improved Backstab and Trap Expert. Not sure what you did to reduce “+1 forward syndrome” or to make the character less capable of combos or insane damage (besides, isn’t that the Fighter?)
Fair enough. I was thinking about +1 syndrome when I was planning out a revised Paladin. What I did was add some utility that I felt the Thief didn’t have, got rid of a couple of moves that had very limited utility, and tried to lessen the over-reliance on Dex.
Seems solid.
May i suggest a version with origin and motivation instead of races/alignment?
What about a death move?
Shadow Stalker or something like it is definitely missing from the RAW thief. Pondering the replacement of Trap Expert (DEX) with Danger Sense (WIS), I think I like it. It’s good to have a signal to the young thief that WIS is actually an important stat for them.
I’m not sure about buffing Backstab so that it always does +1d6 damage. I’d have to see how that plays. I suppose +1d6 is almost always one of the choices picked, so that the net effect is to give an additional choice, likely +1 forward or -1 armor. Which is not huge – I’m just not sure it’s necesssary.
I’d be curious to see in play if Assassin+Envenom was too good a combo. Assassin lets you make an attack on an unaware target from range, ie, an auto-hit. Envenom would let you apply the sleep oil to the blade. Being able to take out any one foe at range without a roll is powerful – not sure how easy it would be to abuse.
All the other improvements seem good. The remaining utility that still seems badly missing is Climb Walls. I might suggest that Connections is now somewhat redundant with Honor Among Thieves, so you could ditch that and replace it with a spider monkey move.
Thanks for the feedback!
My reasoning behind including both Connections and Honor Among Thieves is that Connections gets you things, whereas Honor Among Thieves puts you into contact with a person. As written though, I can see how there could be overlap.
Good catch on the Envenom/Assassin combo. I’ll have to reconsider that.
I quite like it. I’d either reduce the bass health or hit die though. He just feels like a deceiving fighter instead of a sneaky glass cannon.