That's actually an intersting idea, though I think I would trade the Wis bonus for Int, since Dex and Int are supposed to be a rogue's primary stats.
The reason for wisdom is that the skill of the attack is concieved as being perception based. Also, I'm not a big fan of taking the idea of a class having a 'primary stat' to mean, "Everything about the class should depend on the primary stat". That leads to specialization being much much better than generalization which in turn leads to one dimensional characters, johnny one-shots, and so forth. My design strategy is more geared around, "Every attribute should be highly useful, and there should be a successful build for every class with an emphasis in any attribute (if not necessarily to the extent that they can ignore the more typical emphasis)". So, the idea of creating a wisdom centered feat tree for Rogues appeals to me, because I don't have one of those yet.
Pathfinder actually has a simmilar set of feats...
I have no knowledge of Pathfinder, but I'm not surprised. I think the general mechanic makes alot more sense than the ambush feat mechanic, and that the general mechanic has probably occurred to alot of people looking at the problems with 3.X.
...except when the crit happens no save is nessissary
This isn't entirely true. Some of the pathfinder feats you link to have saving throws, and some of the suggested feats I listed don't have saving throws. (The pathfinder feats tend to be 'save partial' though.)
I'd like you to note several important differences between the pathfinder feats and what I offered.
First, Pathfinder concieves the feats as high end feats. Notice how they aren't even available until BAB +13 or higher. However, I conceived the feats as low level feats - for example, my 'Bleeding Strike' is available from 1st level for a human Rogue. Pathfinder says, "At high level, you ought to do big splashy things." My approach is more, "Even a 1st level character can deliberately attack a weak point in order to inflict a condition."
Secondly, Pathfinder approaches the problem of balance here in exactly the opposite way that I would approach it. Pathfinder balances the feat by making it have a 'feat tax', in that the 'Critical Focus' feat is fairly weak and the sort of thing you'd only take if you were going for one of these really powerful strike feats later. I would do the opposite. I'd make the strike feat available early, and then make available at high levels feats that enhanced the strike feat and the capacity to do criticals. Thirdly, I'm much more conservative than Pathfinder seems to be about how I balance things. Anything that bypasses the hitpoint system has to be treated very carefuly -whether its a feat or a spell.
I guess pathfinder figured that a crit is hard enough to do that there's no point in making the effect happen even less often by letting the enemy have a save to get out of it.
You are probably right. However, my approach would be the opposite. I would assume instead that as level increased a crit would be easier and easier to achieve because as level increases the crit becomes relatively less and less important because the hit points are increasing to compensate. This is the idea behind feats like 'Improved Critical'. So my approach to balance here is, "At low levels, you can take these feats to recieve occasional small benefits. At high levels, these small benefits are recieved more and more often both because you make more attacks per round AND you are more likely to make a critical hit with each attack."
I believe saying that a rogue would have to get a sneak attack critical hit, and hope that the enemy fails a saving throw, just wouldn't happen often enough to be worth a feat unless the effect was absurd.
I disagree. We have to make some assumptions about the DC each system assumes for a saving throw, but for now, let's assume that however we are generating DC the resulting number means that a creature with a weak Fort save fails about 50% of the time and a creature with a good Fort save about 25% of the time. Let's assume that the rogue makes sneak attacks 75% of the time and that the rogue scores a critical 15% of the time. If the effect is absurd, then what you are saying is that on 1:20 attacks, the rogue wins the fight outright.
My prefered approach would be to make the effect weak, and then play with how common it occurs in two ways. First, by increasing the frequency of critical hits. Second, by doing something like this:
Ambush Mastery
No one wants to meet you in a dark ally.
Prerequisite: At least two ambush feats, Dex 13+, Wis 13+, sneak attack 5d6
Benefit:
Benefit #1: You really know how to hit vital points. Whenever you force a saving throw as the result of successfully employing any ambush feat you know, the DC of that saving throw is increased by 5.
Benefit #2: You know how to make the most of a target's surprise. Whenevery you attack a flat-footed target, you recieve a +4 bonus ony your to hit roll.
Benefit #3: Whenever you catch the opponent by surprise, you move with such startling swiftness and terrifying ferocity that your opponents mistake you for some sort of supernatural force. Whenever you catch an opponent flat-footed, you can make an intimidate check as a free action.
Then again, I'm doing a pathfinder campaign where a pure lvl 20 rogue has Master Strike, and can automatically kill anyone whom he sneak attacks that fails a save with out even sacrificing damage dice
Rogue (Pathfinder_OGC). Though, at least he can only try that on any one person once per day.
Yikes. I see several problems with that. First, it tries to solve the 'save or suck' problem by simply saying, "Well, everyone ought to recieve save or suck effects.", rather than saying, "Well, we want to keep these in the game because they add something interesting (variaty, versimilitude, tactical richness, fear, whatever), but we have to find a way to keep them from bypassing the hit point system entirely and dominating play completely so that the character's don't feel like their success is entirely luck dependent." And second, I hate the flavor of metagame balancing rules like, "You can only try that on any one person once per day." Why? It makes no sense at all except in game terms.
