Age of Conan - Revised Thief

March 25, 2010

I have revised the way I'm going to run thieves in Age of Conan. Philotomy's version is great and works out well for games with just the "core four" classes and no multiclassing, but it falls apart when you introduce bards and assassins, both of whom get thief abilities at lower levels. There's not enough of a discrepancy between levels for that to make a difference, so bards and assassins get real, serious benefit over thieves.

In thinking of this, it occurred to me that I've made almost everything else in AoC work off of 2d6, so why not thief skills as well? I then found Doc's Bottom Drawer, an excellent OD&D resource site where he does exactly this. His take on the thief wasn't 100% what I was looking for, but it gave me a huge head start. So I flipped his thief skills table around to be roll over rather than roll under, made a couple minor tweaks (Age of Conan doesn't have demihuman races, for example) and placed it into the document.

As always, the current version of Age of Conan can be found here.

If you don't feel like re-downloading the whole document, here's the revisions to the thief class for you:

The Thief (Revised for Age of Conan)

Level Advancement, Alignment, Combat Ability: Per Supplement I.

THIEF SKILLS (TARGET TO ROLL ON 2 DICE)

Level	Stealth	Locks & Traps	Hear Noise	Climb	Sleight of Hand	Scroll
1-2	7	8	8	7	8	(10)
3-4	6	7	7	6	7	1^st level (9)
5-6	5	6	6	5	6	2^nd level (8)
7-8	4	5	5	4	5	3^rd level (7)
9-10	3	4	4	3	4	4^th level (6)
11-12	3	3	3	3	3	5^th level (5)
13	3	3	3	3	3	6^th level (4)

Sleight of Hand refers to picking pockets, palming small items, placing small items on another’s unaware person, or any other act that would require deft and subtle movements. Scroll represents the ability to decipher magical scrolls and unfamiliar languages; the parenthetical target number is the target to succeed, this modified upward if the writing is of a magical nature by the level of scroll being read; the indicated level is the maximum level of magical writing that can be deciphered. Thus, an 11^th-level thief could attempt to read up to a 5^th level spell scroll, the target to do so being 10, a 4^th level scroll with a target of 9, third with a target of 8, etc.

A thief gains maximum damage from a backstab at first level. At fourth it becomes d6+6. At seventh it becomes 2d6+6. At tenth it becomes 3d6+6.

Regardless of target numbers and bonuses, a natural result of snake-eyes fails. The consequences for this could be disastrous, humorous, or simply result in a chance for detection, at the DM's discretion.