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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9374758" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I ran a published adventure in AL, the Sunless Citadel adventure in Tales From The Yawning Portal.  I had a Rogue (Mastermind) and a Barbarian (Bear, natch) with the Urchin background.The Rogue decided to take Expertise in Perception, thinking he would find all the traps and, upon hearing that someone else had taken Thieves' Tools proficiency, figured he could always just use his Mastermind Help Action to give them advantage, and used his expertise on Stealth.  His plan was to use Darkvision to skulk about and ambush enemies on the regular.What he failed to account for, because none of his previous DM's had either read the rules or enforced them, was that disadvantage/-5 penalty to his passive Perception- and the fact that several traps in SS required Investigation, not Perception to find.  That still left him with the highest Investigation in the party...at +2!So they ran into a lot of traps, and this became especially annoying to him in the Kobold section.  He'd try to sneak ahead, I'd tell him he encountered a trap, he'd remind me for the 17th time that he had a passive Perception of 17, and I'd tell him what the DC was (and some of the DC's are pretty high in that adventure, which really confused me for a so-called Tier 1 module!).Eventually he conceded to using light spells after he was the one who got ambushed by some Bugbears, grumbling the whole time.Because his bonus Action was tied up with his subclass, he could not regularly benefit from Steady Aim or Two-Weapon Fighting, and when he did get into melee, he found that he still needed to rely on that same bonus Action to Withdraw after he'd get in a good hit and the melee monsters would plaster him, not particularly impressed with his 15 AC (Kobolds are just plain mean for low level enemies!).Before the adventure was even over, he switched to a Monk (who, incidentally, was the first character I ever saw die in 5e, due to a critical hit).  He kept calling me a "Killer DM" even though I was simply running the adventure by the rules.Something I think a lot of people overlook in this discussion is that a Rogue isn't particularly great out of the box.  Your AC options are terrible, you're levels away from Cunning Action, Uncanny Dodge and Reliable Talent.  You're only a little better than most other characters at two skills, some of which are very adventure-dependent, and rely on a DM who understands you can't make every DC a multiple of 5 and that asking low level characters to hit DC 20 reliably is a big ask.You need light to function effectively, which makes it difficult to employ stealth to being with (not including DM's who use group stealth checks when you got heavy armor users about, monsters who have special senses other than darkvision, and the fact that a low roll can get you into a fun solo encounter while your allies might have to dash to catch up with you, and of course, having a DM who remembers to put usable cover on maps).Now I'm not some Rogue hater.  The 5e Rogue is probably the best version of the class I've ever played, and they have some great abilities.  But it is way too easy for those abilities to simply not matter or not be enough in a situation.And then suddenly at Tier 3, they're breaking the skill system in half.  It's not a design I'm fond of, where it's hard to be effective at doing anything other than firing a crossbow from the back of the party every round, all so you can become a massive headache later on.  You know, where the Wizard used to be.Now that being said, I wouldn't want them to be where the Wizard is now, but there is a way to carve out a niche for the Rogue that doesn't revolve around big skill numbers and not have people thinking "hey, do we even need a Rogue? Class X can be built to do anything they can do, and be better in other situations".</blockquote>

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