help building the ultimate second story thief

[Noxangelo]

I'm having a little difficulty building an NPC/Drop in character for players who don't have/bring their own character.

i'm trying to make the ultimate mundane second story professional thief, the problem is that i want him to have little to no combat potential and not even carry a weapon which makes the rogue to powerful for my needs. the best I can think of is maybe the urban ranger with the no spellcasting variant from complete warrior maybe moving into dungeon delver later and want to see what you guys can come up with.

I want to actively avoid improving combat potential as much as possible, also he has a pet kestrel, whether it is a trained animal, familiar or animal companion is unimportant.

also i'll be starting at level one so I would appreciate a rough 1-20 outline.

any source is fair game, books, web articles, dragon mag, etc. and i'm not too hung up on it having to be the most recent version of something.

[liquidformat]

So first off you will need Trap Expert ACF from doungeonscape, you will also need to pickup open lock somewhere so I would suggest going with human and taking human paragon 1 (though level 2 &3 are great too) and having open lock as your adaptive learning skill. I would also not take urban ranger if you want to go into Dungeon Delver as you will loose Knowledge (dungeoneering) which is needed to get into Dungeon Delver. Take Urban companion and your Kestrel can act as a familiar (probably use a hawk for the stats if you don't already have something) also urban companion provides you with Alertness feat. The only Skilled City-Dweller skill I would swap-out is ride for tumble, tumble is an important skill for your thief to stay out of melee combat. Voice of the City is a flavorful choice for your Thief and very worthwhile. Take Track as a feat (since you dumped it for trapfinding and disable device), since you are DM I think it is also fair to rule that taking Track makes Survival always a class skill and taking Urban Track makes Gather Information always a class skill. I would leave spells on there and just ignore them.
Maybe try Ranger 4/Human Paragon 3/Dungeon Delver x. Ability scores: Int>Dex=Con>Wis>Cha>Str

An alternative is to use the UA alternative rogue replacing all of his SA with Feats and taking Wild Companion for your Kestrel.

Another cool PRC to checkout that might be right down the flavor you are hoping for is Hoardstealer from Draconomicon, it does have spells but they are all utilitarian and most are focused on usefulness outside of combat.

[TheCount]

what a coindence, i was making a thief as well....well, i do love them:P
Do take it with a grain of salt though, as i only got to chosing some components for it....

Changeling Rouge 1 with the substitution level and exra feats instead of sneak attack for a start, with able learner as one of the feats,
2 level of totemist, for blink shirt
+2 rouge
thief acrobat 1 bacuese its both flavorfull AND pretty handy though, a bit demanding on skill points....
monk 3 so you can trade evasion from 1 source and the wall runner acf at lvl 3 with monk abilities keying from int
umbral disciple 3 for hide in plain sight
stone dreamer 5 for earth glide and to see through stone
and i have no idea for the last 3...maybe uncanny trickster?
hope it helps you out.

[Noxangelo]

thanks guys, great ideas and i'd forgotten about both thief acrobat and human paragon :)

edit: lol, where is the rogue acf from?

[Maat Mons]

Most thief-y stuff is just skills, so an Expert could have all that covered. If you need to have Trapfinding, you can get it with one level of Rogue. Just use the Feat Rogue variant to get rid of that pesky Sneak Attack, and make sure the feat you take is absolutely useless, like Combat Expertise. Then it's Expert the rest of the way, and you'll never become good at anything other than dealing with traps, and whatever you spend your skill points on.

If you just want the character to be physically unimposing, and it's okay for him to contribute in fights as long as it doesn't take the form of using weapons, Cloistered Cleric could work. I mean, you'll have to be very sure to never cast any buff spells on yourself, or you could suddenly become good at fighting.

You could be a Kobold Cloistered Cleric of Kurtulmak with the Knowledge, Kobold, and Trickery domains. That gives you Trapfinding and adds Bluff, Disable Device, Disguise, Search, and all Knowledge skills to your class list. You don't have Open Lock as a class skill, but you can still put cross-class ranks in it like everyone else. And it's possible to take 20 on Open Lock checks, which means it doesn't take too much investment to be able to hit the DC of 25 for "average" locks.

[liquidformat]

thanks guys, great ideas and i'd forgotten about both thief acrobat and human paragon :)

edit: lol, where is the rogue acf from?

It is from UA and can be found here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/variantCharacterClasses.htm#rogue) in the SRD.