D&D 5E What should Rogues do?

Neonchameleon said:

More like:

Rogue Stealth: You appear to blend wherever you are. Even if someone's looking straight at a painting behind you they'll reflexively walk past you and never think about you standing in the way.

Rogue Climb: You're spiderman. Or an expert free-climber turned up to 11.

Rogue Bluff: The target believes whatever you are telling them to do. And no detect magic is ever going to find out otherwise. They aren't dominated - they just believe that their best interests align with whatever you've convinced them. (Think Suggestion on steroids with no magical trace).

Rogue disarm traps: You hold a button in your hand that can control the pit trap - it only now triggers when you press it. Or you've just spring-loaded the door and have the posoned needle trap facing outwards.

Rogue Disguise
The rogue can convincingly pass himself off as nearly anyone with a little time and preparation. To use this ability, 1/day the player temporarily stops playing. His character is presumed to have donned a disguise and gone “off camera”. At any subsequent point during play the player may choose any nameless, filler character (a villain’s minion, a bellboy in the hotel, the cop who just pulled you over) in a scene and reveal that that character is actually the PC in disguise!

Rogue Master Disguise
You inhabit your disguises so completely that you can actually fully inhabit another persona and unlock hidden skills and knowledge you don’t normally possess. While in a disguise, you may roll your Deceit minus two (so Fair if Great, or Good if Superb) instead of any other skill the disguised persona might reasonably possess. If you are outright imitating someone specific, sometimes this might give you a higher effective skill than they actually have – which is fine. You’re not a mind-reader, you’re simply so good at pretending that you can actually, temporarily unlock a skill that you believe your persona could have. Any time you use this stunt, you must roll a DC-10 saving throw. If you miss that target, you become lost in the persona for a time...

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You must spread some experience around before giving it to Neonchameleon again.


But seriously, I think you're onto something.

Rogue Movement: Your nimble feet and acrobatics allow you to travel across any terrain however you choose. You may move up to 30'/round over any sort of terrain with no difficult terrain checks taking no damage from any hazards and provoking no opportunity attacks. This terrain may include chasms and pits of any depth.

Rogue Jump: After focusing your attention you may perform a stunning leap that seemingly defies gravity. After concentrating for one round, the Rogue may leap up to 40' in the air. He may remain there for 2 rounds, and may follow any flying creatures while up there. He takes no falling damage on return.

Rogue Backstab: Disliking long drawn out combat, the Rogue carefully targets an enemy's weak spot. The creature must make a constitution save or instantly die.

Tony Vargas said:

Merge with the Fighter.

Seriously, the Thief and, later, Rogue, has been an inadequate class from the get-go. It's combat abilities are barely worth considering, and it's non-combat abilities don't stack up to spell-casting. It's an inadequate class.

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I agree with the gist of your argument. Fighter and Rogue are both mundane "skillful guy" classes, and it is more useful to think of them as variants of a larger single concept.

By thinking of them as truly separate identities, they end up fighting each other for niche space, thereby accentuating the mechanical problems of both classes.

However, I do think there should be two classes. But rather than being two truly different things, we are separately them for mechanical convenience. A good working example would be the "heavy" and "lighter" fighters from Arcana Unearthed (forgot what they are called). A so-so example would be 3.5 Fighter and 3.5 Swashbucker -- that captures the idea, but the details should be worked from the ground up.

Yes, we could have Sneak Attack options for the "New Swashbuckler". Likewise we could have heavy armor and heavy weapon options for the "New Fighter". We should have leadership and out of combat skill options for both.

MortalPlague said:

Another idea that someone put forward in a different thread was for rogues to 'gamble' on skill checks. So instead of a boring "minimum result of 10", you have the immediate option to reroll a failed skill check. If you take the reroll, you get another shot at success, but if you fail, you fail in spectacular fashion. It models the highs and lows of rogue luck in such a fun way.

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DEFCON 1 said:

To me... there's a simple way to accomplish it that's already in the game:

Rogues roll all Ability Checks with Advantage.

The elves get to roll all their WIS checks for perception with Advantage and so far I have not found that to be too over the top... so why not give the Rogues the same thing? They will usually always have pretty good rolls (like you'd want from Skill Mastery)... and yet they occasionally still can fail. It'll be rare, for sure... but unlike Skill Mastery, its possible.

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I like these ideas. My first thought on the first one was "Cool concept, but we'll have to have some sort of fumble table and introduce a clunky component."

But the more I thought about it, the consequence of failure could be something as basic as provoking a reaction from the target (or springing the trap) and/or granting advantage on attacks against you and suffering disadvantage on saves until the start of your next turn.

Since this is the rogue gambling with his luck, the dice results and the accompanying cheers and gasps from the other players when they see the result might be enough drama, even if it's kind of metagamey. They still all see it in their mind as the character being daring and it either working out or utterly failing.

Li Shenron said:

To me the quintessential Rogue is Indiana Jones, who never wants to be in a combat, and when he's in one, he always manages to win with a trick or sheer luck (e.g. the enemy gets stuck in a crushing machine, distracted while the airplane blades get him from behind, or Indy wins a fight against a master swordman by... pulling out a gun and shooting at him).

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Can't XP you, but this is an awesome explanation. Some of the best parts are when Indy is just as shocked as the bad guy that it worked.

Kamikaze Midget said:

IMO, the first thing they need to do with rogues is to get them the heck out of combat.

Don't get me wrong, stabin' tricky goodness should absolutely be an option. But I don't think it should be the rogue's identity. The rogue isn't the guy you turn to when you need something stabbed. Usually, that's the Fighter.

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Li Shenron said:

In a nutshell, I am very much in the same league.

To me the quintessential Rogue is Indiana Jones, who never wants to be in a combat, and when he's in one, he always manages to win with a trick or sheer luck (e.g. the enemy gets stuck in a crushing machine, distracted while the airplane blades get him from behind, or Indy wins a fight against a master swordman by... pulling out a gun and shooting at him).

For me the Rogue is not so much the competent guy but rather the guy who knows how to make up for its incompetences:

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Much as I'd absolutely love to agree with you, combat is too central to D&D (and from the playtests takes too long) for this to work. If you put a non-combatant who tries to stay out of fights as much as possible alongside a class literally called "fighter" then you automatically have party tension and someone is really not going to get what they want.

I love the archetype and playing Spirit of the Century would more than happily play such a rogue. But my first rule of making a good campaign game is to not unintentionally* encourage jackass behaviour (which is why I'm adamantely against lawful anal paladins and the like).

* Diplomacy is a great game and absolutely does encourage screw-your-ally behaviour. This is a feature of the game

The wizard class traditionally has spells like teleport, scry, spider climb, and fly, but he also has cone of cold and fireball. If you choose to play a diviner who never ever casts combat spells that's your choice.

Likewise, the rogue is good at mundane skills and also at sneaky combat. If you want to never use Sneak Attack that's your prerogative. But the class doesn't have to be designed to suck at combat to make it possible.

I'm with the vibrant colour-changing lizard and the undead cybernetic assassin on this one.

Requiring the rogue to be bad at combat is every bit as flawed as requiring the fighter to bad outside of it. They both unnecessarily leave (some*) players frustrated in a major component of the game.

Note that it's the non-magical classes that bear this burden of sucktitude. Wizards are perfectly capable in and out of combat. So are Clerics. Rogues and Fighters though? Apparently they only get to be good at one, because it's somehow verboten to be decent in both without the use of magic.

* Yes, some other players are perfectly happy to have their flimsy rogue and social deadweight fighter, but it's easier to take a chassis that can be good in both areas and build (or even just play) them as incompetent than it is to go the other way.

Tony Vargas said:

Merge with the Fighter.

Seriously, the Thief and, later, Rogue, has been an inadequate class from the get-go. It's combat abilities are barely worth considering, and it's non-combat abilities don't stack up to spell-casting. It's an inadequate class.

The fighter's been nearly as bad, it's combat-focused to, and far beyond, the point of bone-headed stupidity. No one could really be as utterly worthless outside of a fight as the D&D fighter. Again, and inadequate and incomplete class.

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:facepalm:

While we're at it, lets merge the cleric (who is a boring healbot anyway) with the wizard and only need two classes! Won't that be fun!

Kamikaze Midget said:

IMO, the first thing they need to do with rogues is to get them the heck out of combat.

Need a dragon slain, hire a Fighter. Need a mystery solved, call in a Rogue.

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I want to agree, but combat's too vital to D&D to have a class sit there twiddling its thumbs. I'd like to see rogues have a few additional options to replace backstab; acrobatic/swashbuckler dueling, avoidance/cowardly/get-me-outta-here maneuvers, decent dual-wielding, archery, etc. Rogues shouldn't be strikers per se, but they need something to do while the fighter slashes, the cleric heals, and the wizard nukes from orbit.

Sherlock Holmes .... (RDJ version)

So, lets brainstorm the D&D rogue.

First off, its mythical origin. There are plenty of "thieves" and "rogues" in fantasy, literature, myth and movies. Han Solo. Aladdin. Bilbo Baggins. Robin Hood. Taken together, a rogue is good at doing things naturally, but not magically. Han in nearly as good a pilot as Luke without the Force, for example. He's NOT a warrior by trade, but his life is rough enough for him to understand weapons and armor. He's a sneak, a scout, a con-man, an acrobat, a burglar, a pick pocket, and an opportunist.

That said, lets see him in the light of the three pillars.

EXPLORATION: This should be the rogue's bread and butter. Rogues aren't necessarily diplomats (see below) or sages (which better fit wizards or bards) but they are masters of both physical skills (climb, jump) and navigation skills (find traps, stealth, open lock) as well as roguish talents (forgery, pick pocket, etc).

Right now, Next reflects this with a 2nd background from a limited list, but I think its too restricted. As of this playtest, you can be either a thug or a thief, which means you can be either a sneak/scout or a brute. Even when you couple it with another background, you're way too limited. As it stands, you cannot even be good at the classic thief skills (pick pocket, open lock, find traps, stealth, climb, listen read languages), and if you don't use real backgrounds, you're even more hamstrung.

At this point, I'd like to see rogue's get a choice of additional rogue skills out of a pool of skills. Something like: "Choose your background, and pick 4 of the following..." You can still do knacks, but divorce them from backgrounds. Rogues should be versed in around 8 skills starting, and have the option to gain more as the game progresses.

Next, skill mastery right now is too good. The 10 floor (which is really a 13+ floor) is too good. I'd rather skill mastery grant advantage, rerolls, bonuses to non-trained skills (IE: +1 to all untrained skill checks) as well as the bonus or +3, whichever is higher benefit. I'd also like to make sure not all spells are automatic wins. Here is a good place for that take 10 floor: Invisibility grants a floor of 10 on dex/stealth checks, open lock grants a 10 floor on open lock checks and allows magic locks to be opened, etc.

Social: Rogue's shouldn't be THE BEST diplomats (bards should own that role) but I still want to see the option for rogues to be good at bluffing, insight, or intimidation.

Combat: I'm not a giant fan of Sneak Attack: its far too feast-or-famine. Still, rogues need something(s) to do in combat. If SA is our only option, I'd like to see rogues be able to do more than dump d6s. SA that can weaken, stun, silence, slow, cripple, or other nasty things should be involved. Rogues should also be good at getting out of trouble; things like evasion or defensive roll. SA should kinda work like Combat Superiority: trade dice to do cool things. Lastly, either lessen the SA dice or make it harder to use. If mixed with using the dice to dodge blows, feint, use dirty tricks, or backstab, rogues get something to do other than stab, hide, repeat.