Thief Skill Rolls

Another quick post. Thief skills and the method their success is determined have been discussed many times on either blogs or forums. This particular post is aimed to improve upon Jack's idea of using the "hear noise" column for everything instead of the complicated and quite arbitrary percentile tables, about which Brendan of Necropraxis (earlier Untimately) also posted about.

A simple rule for thieving skills was introduced in Delving Deeper: each attempt succeeds on roll greater than three on a d6. However, its simplicity also takes away the empowering feel of advancement. Jack's suggestion of always using the Hear Noise column keeps the simplicity (only one number needs to be kept in mind for all skills) and the advancement of skills.

Brendan's sole problem with this approach was that it makes distinguishing between "no progress and catastrophe". He apparently ruled that, with percentile skills, failures simply mean no progress, while rolls 96+ result in a critical failure (as with a natural one on a d20).

To circumvent this problem, I propose the following: when a failure is rolled (according to the Hear Noise column), another d6 should be checked, and on a roll of 6 a catastrophe occurs. I have put the chances of such critical failure into this chart:

Level	Hear Noise	Catastrophe
1-2	1-2	11.11%
3-6	1-3	8.33%
7-10	1-4	5.56%
11-12	1-5	2.78%
13-14	1-6	0%

It is obvious that there is a higher probability for catastrophes than in Brendan's original house rule; however, it also scales with level. The only downside of this that I can see is that it involves another roll, albeit a pretty straightforward one.