Building Bhakashal - Honor Amongst Thieves

There was a post recently on Twitter/X about the role of thieves in D&D, specifically, that PC thieves who steal from the party (or siphon off a share of the loot unbeknownst to their fellow PCs), are being jerks, and that this sort of thing should be agreed upon by everyone. In short, that it requires consent, otherwise it is a “dick move”.

I am generally all for players and referees being on the same page. So for example, if your game is to have heavy themes, it is a good idea to be open about that before you start. If I plan to run a game with big body horror elements, or analogies to real world events, I would telegraph that.

But this case strikes me as overcorrection, even more so if you look at how this would actually shake out at the table.

If a PC thief wants to steal off their fellow PCs, then there are generally two ways forward:

For example, they announce to the table that when the party is sleeping their PC is going to go through their things, and the ref rolls for results

They slip the DM a note to that effect without telling the other players

If they do a), the other players can call it out and they can all discuss it at the table. Easy.

If they do b), the DM can caution them against it, flat out say, “no, we aren’t doing that”, or let them do it and roll to see what happens. If they do it too often the will get caught out

At the very least the other players will notice when loot goes missing.

What often perplexes me about people who play D&D, is that they often fail to consider that it is different from many other games in that it has a referee, someone to adjudicate the game and deal with potentially challenging situations. There is nothing wrong with a player of a thief coming to the table at the start of the campaign and saying that their PC is likely to palm off loot and steal from their own party. But there is no need for this, and it isn’t a “dick move” to not do so.

Let the game happen. Let the thief go about their business. If they do it openly then no worries. If they choose to hide it, the party will notice that they are up to something eventually, through a failed roll, or due to the inordinate off channel chatter between the DM and the thief player. When they do, let the party deal with it in whatever way they like. It never ceases to amaze me how much people want to control what happens at the table. Let the PC do what they want and let the other PCs handle it! If the players get upset at what happened, talk it out like adults, and then move forward.

I suspect that there is some “real world” equivocation happening here, e.g., if the thief PC betrays the PCs by stealing from the party then the player of the thief has betrayed us.

Thus it’s “dick” behavior.

This is sheer nonsense, and caustic to the fabric of the game. What makes D&D and role playing games different and frankly more immersive is that they are more responsive, you can only do X,Y and Z in video games and most board games, etc. But in D&D the possibilities are almost endless. Your PC has a wide scope of action, and you are hindered in only the most ephemeral way by the rules. So when people talk about getting consent to do something ENTIRELY IN GENRE AND APPROPRIATE for the game, it smacks of getting consent to slay the dragon. It’s kind of ridiculous. Unless you have reason to believe that your gaming group will be PERSONALLY OFFENDED if the PC thief steals from others, just let it happen, and most importantly, LET THEM SORT IT OUT.

It is always more interesting, fun and unpredictable to just let in-game situations play out, again, unless you have good reasons to believe that this sort of thing would make the other players very upset. For what it’s worth, I’ve played in games where this has happened many times. And in every case, they eventually caught the thief, and responded in some way to the deeds, from reducing their share of the loot for a time, to a good non-lethal thrashing, to extracting the thief’s current wealth to compensate, to a good laugh and a few threats.

Treating it like something that needs consent implies you are doing something that has the potential to be real-world harmful, and that’s a bizarre idea. Take a contrasting example, say the party has no thief, but it does have a paladin. The party finds ill gotten gains. The paladin wants to return them to their rightful owner, but the party resists the idea. Eventually the paladin leaves the party and returns with the authorities to confiscate the loot. Would this be considered a “dick move”? I suspect some would consider it as good role play

What about the fighter who insists on challenging a powerful opponent and wagering all of the party’s loot. The fighter loses all their loot. Would this be a “dick move”, nahh, it would be cool RP and an exciting fight! All other things being equal, my approach is to let the players do whatever they want, and let them reap the consequences.

My worry here is that equating things like “thieves stealing from their own party” with “personal betrayal of other players” is a category mistake.

I wonder if the issue here is that people don’t play with friends, so when a virtual stranger does something like this it feels off, rather than just being an in-game thing. I can’t think of a single instance in 40 years of gaming when this sort of thing made anyone mad. At the worst it was irritating and a group discussion ended it moving forward, at best it was a “oh, well played” moment and a good laugh.

It feels a bit sad that this is getting characterized as hostile or inappropriate play. It’s a game, it isn’t real life.