Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9376787" data-attributes="member: 87792">Meanwhile to be a decent swashbuckler you really needed the Tumble skill. Fighters could barely manage the jump and climb skills.From level 3+ 3e did it as a rogue. It just for whatever reason gated an essential feat. But it's laughable to talk about requiring the rogue to be level 3 to get weapon finesse and in the same post trying to defend the miserable failure of the fighter-duelist bring up an explicitly optional prestige class that required a BAB of +6, and five ranks of Tumble (a cross class skill for fighters so they couldn't get in before fighter level 7) and a further 3 in Perform (again cross-class for fighters) to get into. Meanwhile rogues didn't need to contort themselves and burn the majority of their skill points on cross class skills to get in; they just needed to reach level 8 and take the most obvious swashbuckling feats (Dodge, Weapon Finesse, Mobility). I was going to comment about how fighters don't have any problems fixed by going duelist but it's pretty redundant when you're looking at a prestige class that is a natural progression for a swashbuckling rogue and build contortionism for a swashbuckling fighter.Meanwhile a high Dex low STR melee fighter using PHB options was a miserable failure. There was a feat to let you attack with Dex - but no feat to let you damage with Dex (again in either PHB) so you'd always just be doing papercuts. The rogue didn't care because their damage source was Sneak Attack.Nah. It's simply that the 2e rogue was ditched for being incompetent at everything. The 5e rogue is closer to the 4e rogue (Cunning Action is a simplification of 4e abilities and it has inbuilt Finesse) than the 3.x rogue - and those three are way closer together than the backstabbing silo'd skills thief.5e did it as both. The rogue version was the version that didn't suck, even using the PHB. Because they fit the rogue archetype better.TSR possibly didn't want swashbucklers or thieves at all - but WotC has always made Swashbuckling high damage rogues. And in every WotC edition there have been specific tools for swashbuckling rogues. And I believe that every WotC edition makes swashbuckling fighters a failure.WotC appear to have always wanted swashbucklers to be rogues - which is why rogue swashbucklers just about work in every WotC edition. Meanwhile WotC has normally tried to include options to allow you to just about force fighters to be swashbucklers - but in all editions where they have tried it has been a failure with 5e being the only edition where melee fighter swashbucklers are even vaguely close to a thing.WotC weren't so much "bad at designing it" as didn't even try to put a melee fighter swashbuckler in the core in 3.0, 3.5, or 4e because the rogue could already do that job. They just got one by accident in 5e because they turned Dex into a god-stat. But in every edition the fighter has been intended to have strength as it's primary stat and in every edition the thief/rogue has been intended to be the Dex primary class.And it's not that WotC were bad at designing it - it's that they weren't even trying to as a primary thing. If you could make it work that was fine by them - but they made sure the rogue worked.</blockquote>

Verification