Homebrew Homebrew: Fixing the Rogue

[Cap'n Kobold]

Huh? Cunning action is a combat ability. I'm really not sure why "social [pillar] encounter" came up in response to a post about the rogue's strong exploration pillar showing during a dungeon crawl compared to other martials like ranger & fighter∆. Did you mix up threads and confuse charisma based sorcerer/warlock with dex based rogue?

∆ie the two that rogue supposedly needs to "catch up" to.

Quite a lot of social encounters or situations have potential solutions using exploration-type skills or spells.

It all boils down to why you are talking to these people in the first place.

However I think that the point being made was that good non-combat abilities are not a good balance for poor performance in combat, and vice versa.

And someone should figure out what an exploration or social ability should look like that isn't "number go big, brr" that players will find useful.

They have. There are hundreds of these abilities.

They just need to come up with some that aren't spells.

 

[tetrasodium]

L

Quite a lot of social encounters or situations have potential solutions using exploration-type skills or spells.

It all boils down to why you are talking to these people in the first place.

However I think that the point being made was that good non-combat abilities are not a good balance for poor performance in combat, and vice versa.


They have. There are hundreds of these abilities.

They just need to come up with some that aren't spells.

"Your quick thinking and agility allow you to move and act quickly. On your turn, you can take one of the following actions as a Bonus Action: Dash, Disengage, or Hide".

Listing a bunch of powerful rogue abilities does not make a case for "poor performance in combat, [or] vice versa" though. I have seen players complain that various abilities are not as powerful as they would like and try to negotiate some improvement but cunning action is. Great ability that lends itself well to the rogue's high survivability high damage and high utility.

 

[James Gasik]

I remember a discussion on these forums some years back. A DM was opining that the time required to make an action was not necessarily 6 seconds outside of combat, and that he routinely had his players take long periods of time to open locks or disarm traps because that made "sense" to him*

I then pointed him at the Thief Rogue's ability to do that as a bonus action, implying that this was definitely not the intended case.

It's been awhile, but I think he made the claim that you don't use bonus actions outside of combat, meaning that this was only a combat ability (left unsaid is why you could disarm a trap so quickly sometimes and not others).

Of course, if you know anything about A) "medieval"* locks and B) have ever seen a YouTube video of someone tackling a modern lock within seconds, seems hilarious.

**I'm not saying D&D must be bound by what Earth technology was like at any given period of time, but a lot of people seem to think it should, yet don't bat an eye at complex clockwork mechanisms functioning perfectly while remaining fallow and without routine maintenance in dank, dark dungeons for decades or centuries, lol.