Quick Post: The Thief-Acrobat

Snipped from a video in a UPI story about the
"Spider-Man" burglar in China in 2015.

People I know who play AD&D don't, for the most part, really want to use Unearthed Arcana anyway, but I was involved in a discussion that was pretty down on the Thief-Acrobat. Some were even saying that it was useless in a dungeon, which, uh, how can a parkour expert not be useful in a dungeon? I guess their DMs didn't really use traps and obstacles?

Anyway, the discussion got me to thinking, and I do agree that some of the class's abilities should have been boosted slightly to make the class competitive with the other classes in the game, especially some of the overpowered UA monstrosities like the Cavalier or Barbarian—though I think that the Thief-Acrobat is mostly in line with the original 10 classes in AD&D and I'd be happy to include it, unlike the Cavalier and Barbarian. So, here was my suggestion:

I do agree that some of the abilities should have been boosted a little to make the split class more competitive with the other classes, but those are simple fixes like making the pole vault equal to twice the level (12' at 6th, 14' at 7th, etc), standing broad jump equal to level+2', running broad jump twice that, and make falling so that the T/A simply automatically subtracts 1d6 from falling damage at 6th level, and increase that subtraction by 1d6 per level (as an aside, I'd stick to the simple 1d6 per 10' of falling damage, to a maximum of 20d6). I'd probably also allow bonuses in areas with good geometry for things like tic-tacs and the like. (Then I included a link to a list of parkour moves in case the people involved didn't know anything about the art of movement.)

So, yeah, just a quick thing to throw out there for  AD&D 1.X edition games.