Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deset Gled" data-source="post: 7380851" data-attributes="member: 7808">Having played an assassin in 3.5 before, I feel your pain about the 3 round wait.  It's particularly annoying because it's measured in rounds, meaning you technically have to start combat to "observe".  There's not a RAW method for studying outside of combat.  This caused a number of encounters where I would force "combat mode" by doing something silly like throwing a rock at a bird to start a commotion, but stay hiding to watch the target.  Eventually the DM eased up on this restriction a bit just to make things easier on everyone. In general, my assassin used Hide in Plain Sight a lot.  It was my primary method of getting death attacks in - cheaper than burning invisibility spells.  The hide skill can be kind of annoying as its rules are a little on the fuzzy side, but once it started getting heavy use the group developed a rapport about it that seemed to work.Hiding also forced the group to plan combat out a bit more.  It caused two big problems.  First, if the other players killed the target I was going to death attack, it wasted all my effort.  This meant we had to know ahead of time who I would be focused on.  Admittedly, there were also a few meta-game moments where we discussed this when we shouldn't have been able to (in character).  Second, it meant that I would be absent from combat for the first few rounds.  The only real solution to this is to pay attention and just give up on the death attack if things aren't going to plan and you need to jump in to assist.  A hidden sneak attack can still be powerful.  I used the Arcane Strike feat heavily.  I burned more spells using it on sneak/death attacks than I did casting.  That's all I can think of right now.  Hope this helps.</blockquote>

Verification