RED_NOVA'S PROFILE

Out of bounds is typically a good place to stash events out of sight during cutscenes or other similar situations. I like Boundary Break since I'm interested in how event placement and other similar problems were solved by pros back in the day and less out of the thrill of exploration. I've felt that way ever since playing Metroid Prime as a kid and accidentally going out of bounds in a place I wasn't supposed to visit yet. Watching Samus fall into a deep aquatic void in morph ball form was too scary for little babby Nova's mind to handle. The one exception to that feeling is finding Ada's shotgun in Leon's campaign in Resident Evil 4, but even that doesn't go far beyond a feeling of "huh, that's neat."

For RPGMaker games, since it's pretty difficult to go off world unless you were really careless with wall collision settings, the only way for players to go off world would be to deliberately make a passageway. I remember Doom Eternal's devs made a comment when reacting to a speedrun that they were interested in adding in little easter eggs specifically for people who go out of bounds in a speedrun. If you do that, though, then technically you're not really entering areas you weren't supposed to enter, which goes against the idea of exploring areas you weren't supposed to.

Whenever I compare the thief and warrior, I see warriors as simple and reliable damage dealers who don't require much brainpower to utilize effectively, and thieves as the more technical, strategy-oriented damage dealer that requires a player to have a deeper understanding of the system mechanics than a warrior would. Problem is not every player is willing to engage with those mechanics. Especially first time players who don't really know what the mechanics are, let alone willing to engage with them. If you just compare thieves to warriors, you can even look at the two classes as a sort of pseudo difficulty selection.

Low damage
Whenever I compare the thief to the warrior in a traditional RPG setting, my preferred dynamic is "warrior is tank, sub-DPS, thief is main DPS." So to compensate for the low damage, I usually like to make up for it with multiple hits per turn.

South Park, the Stick of Truth has a cool idea where, when attacking, you can choose to hit once for big damage or 3 times for small damage. You would hit once if the enemy can negate a certain amount of damage per turn, and would hit three times if an enemy can negate a certain amount of hits per turn. You could split up those two attack functions to the warrior and thief class, respectively.

High dodge

Sure, dodge rates that aren't 100% means you're relying on luck to negate an attack, but there are still benefits to building a good dodge tank. Attacks that inflict debuffs/ailments will still land on a warrior, meaning you're already relying on luck to avoid getting hit by those ailments. You can create a damage sponge tank and also a dodge tank and have the party switch between them depending on the necessity with an aggro control skill.

In addition to dodging, you could implement a counter skill where the thief would use a skill every time they dodged. These skills could deal damage, inflict buffs/debuffs or even steal automatically from the enemy to help solve the last bullet point. A warrior could then learn a skill to step in and take damage for low HP allies in case the squishy thief gets squashed more than they'd prefer.


First turn order

I think this mostly boils down to other skills beyond the common thief toolset, but a thief could use that first turn to use a buff/DPS setup skill on the first turn, or scan an enemy to learn their weaknesses. Like you said, though, this point is going to vary wildly depending on how battles are structured.


Steal

Solving the problem of the steal skill not stealing anything useful can be solved with a single mechanic change: let players view the item(s) that can be stolen before the actual steal attempt is made. Housekeeping's Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass handles this perfectly. Enemies can have multiple items, each with their own chance of success. You can view the list of stealable items and know exactly what you can steal before you waste a turn potentially falling for a gacha scam. For more instant gratification, it could be set up for the thief to immediately use the item that was stolen, or equip and attack immediately if the stolen item was a weapon the thief could use.

Aside from that, thieves are a more practical bunch who usually have a set of tools they use to open locks and infiltrate buildings, right? Why not have thieves use attack items on an enemy that you can retrieve using the Steal command? Example, have a thief throw a shuriken at an enemy, then use the Steal command to take the shuriken right back for use the next turn. Sure, you would lose a turn of damage by retrieving an item instead of hitting the enemy, but it would help alleviate the age old problem of not wanting to expend useful items just in case players might need it later.

What about turning the whole "steal" concept on its head and implement a "reverse" steal where a thief would dive into an enemy's inventory and plant an item of their own instead? For example, the thief could plant a bomb in an enemy's inventory which would explode during the enemy's next action, interrupting their action and inflicting damage at the same time.

Thanks so much!!