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Building a better Rogue
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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7183746" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>So the Rogue's an interesting, IMHO ironic, success story. The Thief started out in Greyhawk, the first new class in the game after the original 3. It introduced 'special' abilities, skills really, using % resolution, to do things that players up to then had simply been playing through, like searching for traps or sneaking around. </p><p></p><p>It was, in retrospect, a pretty terrible idea. It created this niche that justified an underpowered class that /seemed/ kinda cool, was set up to be a thorn in the side to the party, and played out as pretty crappy. It was the original 'Timmeh Card.'</p><p></p><p>The Thief languished for decades, it's rehabilitation started with a name-change, to 'Rogue,' so at least dishonesty and stealing from your own party was no longer so clearly implied. 3.x took some big steps to make the Rogue viable - Sneak Attack more broadly useful than Backstab, tons of skill points in a system that strongly favored full-investment in specific skills - but sadly took them in a system that did nothing to curb caster power, so Rogues were still stuck in Tier 5, and still desultorily niche-protected by the Trapfinding feature. 4e balanced the classes a lot better, and brought Rogues into the fold as Strikers, making SA almost universally applicable/dependable, it also dropped the niche protection - the Rogue was a very good out-of-combat class, but not so much so that no one else could do it's job if the party didn't have one. 5e's more or less stayed that course, the Rogue can still count on SA to boost it's damage, and, though it /does/ have an extra boost in the skill department, Expertise, it shares it with the bard, and none of its skills are off-limits to other classes.</p><p></p><p>So the Rogue is in longer a black mark against the system. </p><p></p><p>But, at the same time, it was never necessary in the first place. The problem is, if anything, clearer with the Fighter than the Rogue, at this point, as the fighter has come nearly full circle back to being a multi-attacking DPR beatstick Fighter, while the Rogue, in spite of re-claiming the name with a sub-class, has not returned to being a fragile/weak stealthy trap-finding own-party-ripping-off Thief. Neither does a good job at evoking heroes from myth/legend/genre, because those heroes usually encompass /both/ the fighter's general badassness and the rogue's cunning, agility, and skill - not to mention a lot of charisma on top of that, typically. </p><p></p><p>The game could have merged the Fighter and Rogue into a single class, benefiting from every feature* ever given to either in any edition, and still not 'broken' anything relative to 5e's other classes. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>* excepting multi-class stand-in features like the EK & AT.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 7183746, member: 996"] So the Rogue's an interesting, IMHO ironic, success story. The Thief started out in Greyhawk, the first new class in the game after the original 3. It introduced 'special' abilities, skills really, using % resolution, to do things that players up to then had simply been playing through, like searching for traps or sneaking around. It was, in retrospect, a pretty terrible idea. It created this niche that justified an underpowered class that /seemed/ kinda cool, was set up to be a thorn in the side to the party, and played out as pretty crappy. It was the original 'Timmeh Card.' The Thief languished for decades, it's rehabilitation started with a name-change, to 'Rogue,' so at least dishonesty and stealing from your own party was no longer so clearly implied. 3.x took some big steps to make the Rogue viable - Sneak Attack more broadly useful than Backstab, tons of skill points in a system that strongly favored full-investment in specific skills - but sadly took them in a system that did nothing to curb caster power, so Rogues were still stuck in Tier 5, and still desultorily niche-protected by the Trapfinding feature. 4e balanced the classes a lot better, and brought Rogues into the fold as Strikers, making SA almost universally applicable/dependable, it also dropped the niche protection - the Rogue was a very good out-of-combat class, but not so much so that no one else could do it's job if the party didn't have one. 5e's more or less stayed that course, the Rogue can still count on SA to boost it's damage, and, though it /does/ have an extra boost in the skill department, Expertise, it shares it with the bard, and none of its skills are off-limits to other classes. So the Rogue is in longer a black mark against the system. But, at the same time, it was never necessary in the first place. The problem is, if anything, clearer with the Fighter than the Rogue, at this point, as the fighter has come nearly full circle back to being a multi-attacking DPR beatstick Fighter, while the Rogue, in spite of re-claiming the name with a sub-class, has not returned to being a fragile/weak stealthy trap-finding own-party-ripping-off Thief. Neither does a good job at evoking heroes from myth/legend/genre, because those heroes usually encompass /both/ the fighter's general badassness and the rogue's cunning, agility, and skill - not to mention a lot of charisma on top of that, typically. The game could have merged the Fighter and Rogue into a single class, benefiting from every feature* ever given to either in any edition, and still not 'broken' anything relative to 5e's other classes. * excepting multi-class stand-in features like the EK & AT. [/QUOTE]
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