Furthermore... It's Thief-a-palooza '15!

Following on yesterday's thief-related post, here are a few more of my thoughts on thievery in D&D:

I'm totally in line with Hill Canton's "bonus skill levels" as I understand them: rather than improving skills in all thief abilities uniformly with each new level--essentially all 5th level thieves are equally good at all thief abilities, before racial and/or dex adjustments--the player is allowed to allocate which thief abilities they want to improve and by how much.  So a 5th level thief might actually still pick locks as well as he did when he was a 1st level thief but be as stealthy as a mo fo and read languages with remarkable literacy.  HC and I differ in that whereas he doles out 2 Bonus Levels per thief level I'm handing 'em out at a rate of 6/level.  But then you consider that 1 bonus level for HC thieves represents +1 on a 6-sider for a 16.667% improvement while one level for Dice Chucker thieves reflects a mere 5% improvement.  We're looking at 2 x 16.667 = 33.3% vs. 6 x 5 = 30%, so, dang, I actually look kinda' stingy by comparison.

I'd actually take the process one step further allowing first level thieves to divvy up 6 levels amongst their abilities, meaning that some of their abilities are going to be 0-level (+0) to start.

Other oddities of Dice Chuckerian thieves:

Read Scrolls: Rather than being linked to the character's overall thief level, i.e., you can start reading scrolls at 9th level, reading scrolls would just be a Very Difficult read languages roll: you're rolling d20 + level against 6d6.  You can try it at first level--or even 0-level--just don't expect a good result.

Hear Noise and Detect Traps: While the PC may declare his or her intent to use one of these abilities as per usual, the DM should also roll automatically against these anytime a trap or noise is worth noticing, though the challenge should be bumped up a few dice.