Rogue vs Thief

For various reasons, I've been noticing the Nissan Rogue on the streets a great deal recently. The rogue (or rouge, as he's often mistakenly called online) has been a D&D class for a long time, although the rogue replaces what was once called the thief. For whatever reason, old-fashioned types make a big deal out of the name change, and point to it as evidence of the "softening" of D&D over time. One camp will tell you that rogue is a synonym for thief, and that the name change is immaterial. Others will say that rogue has become a good word due to semantic shift; while it may once have meant the same thing as a thief, it now tends to be seen as a likeable, charming maverick rather than a villain. They often point to the Nissan vehicle, and suggest that if rogue actually meant the same as thief, there's no way that a popular corporate brand would be named after it. I tend to agree with this, in part because I'm a hobbyist about linguistics and find instances of semantic drift interesting and maybe more consequential than someone who doesn't care as much about it. However...

I disagree that that's a problem. A big part of the reason for this is that the thief character class or archetype is too pigeon-holed, and the rogue character class is meant to represent a broader suite of archetypes than the thief. One reason I dislike the use of thief is that I don't believe my "thief" characters need necessarily be thieves! Not because there's any reason why they can't be; I'm not talking about 2e style censorship and sensitivity editing of concepts in D&D that were seen as "edgy"; I'm just talking about having a much broader paradigm of what the game is about. If "thieves" aren't necessarily back-stabbing sneak-thieves and lockpickers, are they thieves? What if they're con artists? Spies? Scouts? Some other kind of expert adventurer who focuses on the (admittedly stupidly named) "skill-monkey" concept? Well, that's as good a reason as any to talk about changing the name from thief to rogue. In fact, arguably the name (and scope) of the archetype wasn't changed enough.

For my own "OSR adjacent" ruleset, I've actually declined to include role protection in the form of classes, and instead have an a la carte "build your own class" process. Because I like edgy, grounded "low fantasy" or even "grubby fantasy" as the early Games Workshop guys used to call it back in the 80s, all characters are really kind of rogues, and many if not most of them might be thieves, if not necessarily beholden to that label by class. All the more reason to not be concerned with the label and what it means. This is one of the reasons I call myself old-fashioned, but not old school, and also say that I'm somewhat OSR-adjacent without being really invested or aligned with the actual OSR. Although, I think that we've actually arrived at a point where the OSR as a movement in general is moving into new directions that are more "OSR adjacent" rather than "classic OSR". However, given that the "dungeoneering" paradigm is still very central to the OSR, and it is not at all what I'm interested in, let's not go too far in that direction quite yet. My paradigm is very much a more investigative swashbuckling horror fantasy; like a Call of Cthulhu scenario, but set in a fantasy setting, and  maybe a bit more swashbucklery and action-oriented than CoC tends to be. (Although how "pulpish" CoC is in actual play is subject to a lot of variation, often more of perception and at the table variation than of anything specific in the rules.) I recently finished (or nearly so) re-reading Cubicle 7's Enemy in Shadows RPG campaign book, part 1 of 5 of the even bigger Enemy Within "director's cut" full campaign. While there are plenty of things not to like about this campaign, including it's somewhat railroady nature and tight cleaving to the Warhammer Old World setting, which makes it more difficult to adopt to another setting, it's still worth reading as a great example of what an investigative/horror adventure that has no dungeoneering at all whatsoever could look like. 

It's a little frustrating sometimes to think that D&D players, and even WotC themselves, have been so reluctant to move out of the dungeon and offer alternatives. As an aside, that is still a big part of my dissatisfaction with the Cityscape environment book from the 3e era. Given that investigative urban adventures, even in a D&D-like fantasy world, have been around since the first publishing of the Enemy Within campaign, if not even earlier, then it's a bit odd to think that nobody at WotC can figure out how to run an urban game without somehow making it still a dungeon-crawl at heart. If you're less concerned with it being a D&D-like setting, then the Cthulhu game was doing it already years before Games Workshop did it with WFRP. 

In any case, if you can get ahold of the campaign to read it, even if you don't ever run it, I recommend that you do. It is not only a great example of a non-dungeon-crawl type campaign, such as Dark Fantasy X games will be, but it is also a great example of characters that are more "rogue"-like without necessarily being thieves, thus again suggesting that the name change is actually a good thing. Not because it's D&D losing its edge, a la pandering to B.A.D.D. as happened in 2e, but rather because the thief as an archetype is too restrictive, too proscriptive, and the class—at least since  3e—has been broader in scope than the thief label suggests. I think that the OSR guys who complain about the label change don't tend to acknowledge that reality, either because in their games the role hasn't changed, and rogues are still obligatorily thieves, or because they don't want the role to expand in such a way and they're pushing back against it. Whatever the cause, I don't think I've really seen any of them acknowledge that with a more expansive suite of archetypes that the class mechanics are supposed to represent, a more broad label is certainly appropriate, and then make their case with that idea acknowledged and rolled up in their case for either keeping or reverting the label. It's perfectly fine to suggest that you don't want the role to be more expansive, and therefore thief is what you prefer. But I've never heard anyone specifically state that.

Random June 1st Hot Take: If you have to try so hard to convince yourself and everyone else that you're proud of who you are, then you're not. You're in denial. That said; Shame Month hardly has the same ring to it, does it? More accurate, though.