D&D 5E Is there a good Faceman option for rogues?

[JPL]

I would love a playable full-PC Expert that picks up Feats at a Fighter's rate (or better) and is the worst, without a doubt bad, at combat.

I like having some options like that --- way back in 1st Edition, I read the part about sages, and said, I wanna play that guy.

For this sort of character, I like features such as "Bonus Help" and other "lazy warlord" features --- the character ends up enhancing the overall combat effectiveness of the party, even if in narrative terms, he's not out there smiting and slaying and so forth.

 

[Fenris-77]

I've spent the last six sessions fighting down sadly realistically narrow corridors with two different campaigns with different DMs (sometimes 5' or less, everyone loves squeezing!), so I am aware. But you've going to have to be REALLY hard-up before using your main Action to do Help is something you're considering ahead of say shooting a Light Crossbow and just eating the +2 AC the monster has from people being in the way. Maybe if you're having to shoot past two people or more? And there's like literally nothing else you can do. I would definitely be asking some questions about the party composition and movement order that lead to this situation though!

Bonus Action making it worthwhile in a lower bar, I think I outlined the conditions above, and yeah narrow corridor fighting would sometimes make that the case (but if your party positioned right, you could be doing some really good melee Sneak Attacks with Bonus Action disengages even in a 10' wide corridor - you just need to stagger the two people up front (Shield Masters, albeit rare at low levels, can help a lot by shoving monsters to create space too).

Yeah, that's all very fair. I was just throwing out a suggestion. I am far more fond of the Swashbuckler because he's way more functional in combat. If I was actually building a Mastermind it would probably be a Rogue/Warlock MC for Eldritch Blast and at-will Disguise Self, and that's a whole different kettle of fish.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

For this sort of character, I like features such as "Bonus Help" and other "lazy warlord" features --- the character ends up enhancing the overall combat effectiveness of the party, even if in narrative terms, he's not out there smiting and slaying and so forth.

Ok, like I know I've been over this a lot, but I'll give it one more go. The Mastermind, if he uses the Bonus Action Help a lot, and really the main Action Help, like, almost ever, is not "enhancing the overall combat effectiveness of the party".

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make here - if you want to increase the "overall combat effectiveness of the party", definitely do not be a Mastermind, because the Help action, used to grant Advantage in combat, but at the cost of your action economy, is typically going to reduce the "overall combat effectiveness of the party", when used from a Rogue class chassis.

Lazy Warlords were totally different. You typically had a mediocre at-will attack, which you would give up, in order to cause another PC, with a much better attack, to make an attack. Thus the overall combat effectiveness of the party increased.

Advantage isn't worth anything like an actual attack. Even a relatively low-damage attack (i.e. without Sneak Attack) is usually worth more than granting Advantage. Advantage, when you actually calculate how much it's helping, often translates to 1-4 damage (effectively, over time). This is why True Strike is a totally terrible cantrip whose only genuine use-case is casting before you try to Plane Shift someone (as discussed at extreme length in another thread).

There's no non-caster that can do "Lazy Warlord" or "enhance overall party combat effectiveness without attacking" stuff in 5E. There just isn't. It's not in the rules. Battlemaster Fighters can play at being a Warlord, but only the non-Lazy kind - they have to attack to activate Commander's Strike, for example (so at 5th an above must necessarily still make attacks).

If as was discussed earlier, you could grant your Sneak Attack to another (this was possible in 4E and possibly also 3E, I note), things might start looking pretty different.

 

[JPL]

I don't claim that a character whose default strategy each round of combat is Dodge + Bonus Help is going to help a party win fights at the same rate as a combat-optimized Rogue. I just like that it's an option for a character who is essentially a non-combatant who somehow keeps ending up in combat. He's still maybe drawing fire without getting hit too much, and he's helping the more aggressive party members score hits.

 

[bedir than]

That role is also quite present in the fiction that the game is built from

 

[JPL]

That role is also quite present in the fiction that the game is built from

Indeed.

And getting back to the Faceman idea, there maybe isn't a rogue subclass that is built around that archetype, but if you do Expertise (Bluff and Diplomacy) and then go Mastermind or Swashbuckler, you can at least get close (and Inquisitive kinda works too, for a guy who listens as well as he talks).

In the alternative, that Expert Sidekick could be a variation on the theme. I'm thinking a recurring character along the lines of Salmonious from "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" --- the fast-talking trickster who periodically crosses paths with the heroes and always has a new set of problems. Heck, every party should have one . . . maybe a family member? Because that's a story engine, right there, as well as someone with a specialized skill set they can call upon as needed.