The inevitable Swashbuckler vs. Thief showdown is gonna be ugly.
Usually is for the last two things. I'm pretty sure only Bard has had an absolutely runaway, slam-dunk victory.
It'd be kind of cool for
one of these threads to prop up something I actually liked from the start though. That'd be a refreshing change from the "ensure none of the top three things Ezekiel likes even make it to the final four" pattern that's held sway since after Cleric. Which was the first of these I joined. (Perhaps this better explains why I have such a dim view of certain maneuvers and have been something of a grouch in these threads.)
I don't know how Scout managed to beat Arcane Trickster, though. I suspect it was all the folks trying to level the playing field. Or maybe it was too many Trickster fans hoping to eliminate the Swashbuckler?
Well, I can only truly speak for myself. But I suspect it's primarily for the reason most people mentioned in the thread: "I don't want a
spellcaster rogue to be the winner." (Or "...the representative in the final round.") The underlying
idea of the Arcane Trickster is great, and a worthy inclusion in D&D. But having it be "the" Rogue is a bridge too far for me, and it would seem to be so for others as well. I know most of my downvotes went elsewhere because I knew the real threat was always Thief, which threatens to win purely by not actually
doing anything at all, the Caspar Milquetoast option.
And to think: some folks still think that the bard shouldn't be a subclass of Rogue.
Because...it shouldn't. I honestly can't tell if you're being actually facetious, "double ironic," or sincere.
But just in case you
are being sincere (or "double ironic"), the problem of shoehorning things together in this way is that at least one of the things involved is gonna get watered down as a result, at least assuming you ignore the slippery-slope problem that this sort of thing all too often engenders.* That is, make Bard a Rogue subclass, and now you have to fit in extra music proficiencies, spellcasting, Inspiration,
and the small bits like Song of Rest, all without overstepping the extremely limited space of a subclass. Or, you have to find a way to have "I'm a spellcaster" Bard cover "I'm actually not a spellcaster at all" Rogue in a way that won't alienate the Rogue fans who choose it specifically because it
doesn't cast spells. Either way, when you're faced with a problem like that, the temptation is, and always will be, "eh, it's fine, just cut some features or make a looser fit." AKA, watering down the archetype.
Now, of course, there is a risk of going the other direction here, and making a profusion of pointlessly over-narrow classes, but at least in the current design climate that's not really a risk worth considering. WotC has added exactly one new class to the game, and only tested two, in nearly a decade. That's a pretty good indication that new classes aren't getting added to D&D anytime soon. Instead, I find the bigger risk is in adding subclasses that suck, in part
because of the antipathy for new classes and thus the belief that all concepts, no matter how weighty,
must be expressed through the subclass lens. The failure of the proposed multiple-class subclasses, for example, was a pretty major disappointment to me, because it closed off one of the only other avenues for addressing the issues enforced by a "never, ever add any (more) new classes" rule. It's looking like the new 5e playtest is moving toward a more standardized setup for subclasses in part to permit such "generic" subclasses, though, so that's a spot of hope for me.
*E.g. when you've folded Bard and Ranger and Monk in, then say, "
welllll, Rogue and Fighter are
pretty close...let's make Rogue a Fighter subclass!" But that is a massive and
difficult undertaking when you have four different
full classes all bundled together, unless you abandon them entirely....which is what most folks who propose this end up doing.
