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Originally Posted by Kromm
All of which said, a bigger problem than the basic build is casters upstaging thieves with all their detect this, avoid that, neutralize the other thing spells. They can seek out and negate traps and poisons, open locks, find treasures, etc. My feeling is that in a world where such casters are all over the place, nearly any hiding place, lock, trap, or trick of importance would involve copious amounts of anti-magic, be it mini no-mana zones or meteoric iron . . . sort of how modern-day locks of any quality are tempered steel and not iron, good security cameras are in little armored-plastic cases and bubbles rather than being fragile webcams, and so on. However, GMs seem to prefer the logic "Why would the spells exist if they're useless?" to "Why would security measures rendered useless by spells exist?"
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Fortunately, in a game that's all about dungeon crawling, one valid rationale is obvious: such spells are a recent invention (magical TL 4ish) and the dungeons you're crawling through predate them (magical TL 3 through 3+4^). This also explains why adventurers can use such spells in dungeons but not in town.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
Likewise, the dungeon needs casters because there are things there that no mundane force can confront. These casters probably specialize in spells other than those that upstage thieves . . . spells for buffing, counter-magic, divination, healing, etc. However, there are doubtless all kinds of third-rate casters in town who learn Lockmaster and go around stealing from grandmothers and bakers.
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For thieves as a dedicated profession, the issue is that it's entirely too easy for other professions to cover the same ground as a thief, even non-magically. A swashbuckler with DX-15 and one point in Lockpicking-14 may not quite compete with a specialized professional Thief who's got Lockpicking-17 due to High Manual Dexterity, but he's good enough to open most doors as needed--and as others have pointed out, iconic fantasy heroes like Fafhyrd and Conan don't need to be specialized in thievery to fit the stereotype! Furthermore, if the Swashbuckler really needs to succeed, Luck generally does a better job than high skill anyway, and the swashbuckler has that built in whereas the thief doesn't, so the thief is only slightly better at opening relatively unimportant locks.
It's actually relatively tough to come up with scenarios where a dedicated thief couldn't be replaced by a handful of quirk points on two other delvers, such as a Swashbuckler/Scout/Martial Artist (Lockpicking, Traps, and... Pickpocket?) and a Wizard/Bard/Cleric/Druid (Traps, Disguise, Observation, and... Streetwise maybe??). The person who spots the trap doesn't have to be the same as the one who disarms it, for example.
The fundamental issue with thieves is that skills are cheap to acquire in GURPS, by design, so being good at skills is not a niche.