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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 4996381" data-attributes="member: 94">Correct so far.Due primarily to legacy issues with backstabbing. In other words, the 1e "real world" considerations of backstabbing conflicted with the 3e design goals of backstabbing (rogue as damage dealer). They kept enough of the 1e restrictions that they crippled the 3e advances.Even if skills were on an even footing with combat utility (which they are not) rogue skills are quickly trumped by magic. Your argument that rogues should not be dealing damage and should be doing skill stuff, if correct, makes the class even worse.Huh. I always did. Again, perhaps I was lured down that path because one glance at the class features seemed to hint overwhelmingly that the class should be doing everything possible at all times to get sneak attack damage (including flanking, invisibility, fighting with two weapons, etc.) Actually the fighter/barbarian does less damage more consistently, and the rogue does more damage less consistently. No, they weren't.Skills do not make up for combat prowess. They are not measured on the same scale. It's perfectly fine for both to exist and for a player to make a value decision between a skill-based character and a combat-based character. But to say that the rogue is balanced against the fighter because rogues have more skills is comparing apples to oranges. Both the rogue and the monk are designed to be fragile strikers. They are lightly armed and armored, and have fewer hit points. That's their balance mechanism. Note that we are now comparing apples to apples-- combat to combat.Hey, looks to me like you get it after all. Very well stated.I think where we differ is that I look at the design goal of 3e-- rogues are intended to be fragile damage dealers-- and I see a failure in execution, and make changes to bring the result at the table in line with the design. You are looking at the results of the failed execution-- "These rogues don't seem to be doing much damage..."-- and therefore infer that must not be the design goal after all, so you want to bring rogues in line with some other design goal-- being really good at skills, for example.For the most part-- specifically with respect to the rogue, monk, and fighter-- the power bumps they get from Trailblazer are needed to bring the classes into parity with even the RAW spellcasters. I would use those Trailblazer classes without any reservation at all next to any of the other RAW classes.And the rogue doesn't really get much of anything at all if you hang on to the legacy restrictions of sneak attack (discernible anatomy and all that). The logic being, I assume, that hit points are abstract except when they're not. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /></blockquote>

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