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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Al" data-source="post: 1568650" data-attributes="member: 2486">I've very rarely heard of rogues which are too "finely divided" and moaning about skill points.  Rather than expecting to "have a rogue that has both thief skills *and* social skills", you have to pick an archetype.  Cat burglar, charming conman, spy, scout, whatever- the fact remains that one has to diversify.  Arguing that a thief should de facto be good at thief and social skills is liking arguing that the fighter needs more feats in order to be good at melee *and* archery. Invisibility, Silence?  A rogue should maintain UMD at a respectable level, and wands of these are easy to come by by mid-to-high levels.  Moreover, due to the divergent nature of class vs. cross-class skills and the rogue's principal stat being Dex, it is very rare for a mid-to-high level rogue not to succeed, especially once skill-boosting items are factored in.  A well-equipped, well-built and stealth-focused rogue should have a +5-+10 advantage over those with Listen and Spot as class skills, and a +15-+20 advantage over those with them as cross-class.  Against opponents with no ranks at all, beating both checks is almost a dead cert.Moreover, Hide and Mv Silently interact differently with various spells and effects.  Why not roll Silent and Still Spell into 'Stealthy Spell'?  How about dealing with a character blind and/or deaf?  Sneaking past a guard who has no line of sight (say, in an adjoining room)?  All of these scenarios need the Hide/Mv Silently dichotomy. Deploying special ability and whining that class abilities are negated is specious.  Undead and constructs negate sneak attack, golems negate spells, DR potentially negate physical damage, SR potentially negates spells, etc. ad nauseam.  Neither are all of these "automatic rogue detectors" insurmountable- Blindsense still allows sneak attack, Scent can be foiled with alchemical substances or low-level illusions, Tremorsense thwarted by Boots of Levitation and Blindsight conceivably defeated by...er...Move Silently (being another reason why the two oughtn't be amalgamated).And yes, I'm running a high-level campaign.  My NPC rogues, shadowdancers, monks, assassins- you name it- almost always manage to surprise the majority of the PCs, and my stealth-focused PCs can almost always depend on a surprise round.  The anecdotal evidence of Wulf's story-hour is not definitive: many high-level opponents (high-level NPCs, undead, fiends) do not have "automatic rogue detectors", which are not automatic in any case (see above). Pure assertion.  I've not found Hide to be useless at all.  Could you care to elaborate? True, but the answer is to HR Invisibility.  I use a +20 to Hide if moving and a +40 otherwise, and maintain the DC 20 Spot to see an invisible creature in combat.  It's a clarification that might not map precisely onto the (needlessly complicated) RAW, but it works and is consistent with the spirit of the spell. I'll grant you this.  Whilst there are very minor mechanical quibbles (such as effectively giving stealth-focused classes +1 skill point), the two major changes are that I'd argue that under the new rules Stealth is a 'dead-cert' skill.  Hide and Mv Silently are always decent skills, but Stealth is now the best single skill in the game.  Wizards, sorcerors, finesse fighters, druids, barbarians and their uncles will want this skill.  For just 1 skill pt per level, you too can have at least a decent chance of getting a surprise round; and getting one of the detection skills comes a close second in the hierarchy (since everyone has Sneak, everyone will want either Spot or Sense).  Buying the whole suite of skills at 4 points/level was prohibitive, but at 2 points/level it's definitely a bargain- far better than Knowledge (history), Craft (alchemy), Jump, Knowledge (nature) or Climb (to think of what other exciting skills the above selection could buy).The other major change is not mechanical.  It's simply a one of making the game clunkier.  There are a multitude of scenarios whereby a single Hide or Move Silently check is appropriate, but a generic Sneak not.  I've outlined a few above, and I'm sure you have the imagination to conceive of others.This is a far more significant change than it appeared, since it effectively halves the number of skill points needed to access stealth and detection, two of the most useful skills in the game.  This disperses these skills into a much wider population, and makes take a stealth-based class for the higher skill caps extremely attractive.  The finesse fighter who doesn't take a level of ranger or rogue under these rules is probably a fool.  It sets a clunky precedent: combine Open Locks and Disable Device (even though the two are not only separate but even having different primary abilities), Spellcraft and Knowledge (arcana), Climb, Jump and Swim into "Athletics", Balance and Tumble into "Acrobatics", Bluff and Intimidate into "Con", Diplomacy and Gather Information into "Speechcraft", all the Perform skills (as per 3e), etc.Given that no core problem exists, and that some will arise, I'd argue that this is a poor change in contrary to the spirit of 3.5e- which is, after all, about making things less clunky by e.g. subdividing Perform.</blockquote>

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