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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3826889" data-attributes="member: 4937">More or less, yes, that's what I'm saying.  But additionally, he's playing a 'martial' class in which he's done basically everything he can to reduce his martial combat prowess when critical hits aren't available to him.  He's taken a small sized race.  He has no strength bonus.  Ergo, his character is very one dimensional in combat.  A rogue doesn't have to be one dimensional in combat.  He could be playing a medium-sized race and have some sort of bonus due to strength.  A fifth level rogue with a 12 STR with only a +1 rapier would be doing 3-8 damage per attack.  At fifth level, that's a significant contribution itself, to say nothing of assisting the party by helping the tank flank or any other sort of useful tactic.But if he wants to be more martial than that, then he should do as many of my players have and multi-class into a more pure martial class like fighter, barbarian, or ranger. Five levels isn't enough to invest in multiclassing?  I've seen a Barbarian2/Fighter2/Cleric1 by that point.  Granted, it was that players second attempt at a character in my campaign once he saw all the specialists repeatedly get hosed by my frequent calling for skill checks, varied opponents, killer traps, and my general RBDM style.  But its a good example of covering all your bases (except reflex save, which is ok if you have good hit points) while min/maxing at the same time.Let me tell you what I see going on here.  From your description I'm guessing that the character has maxed out DEX and gone the weapon finesse route.  He's probably nearly maxed out CON.  He's min/maxing a narrow strategy and now he's got a character with abilities that are very one dimensional.  Poor, poor, player.  His DM doesn't only give him challenges that exactly fit his probably highly pre-planned out character design.I really do want to be sympathetic.  More than any other class with the possible exception of Bard, rogues are highly dependent on the meta-game.  If the DM isn't planning on alot of skill challenges, isn't planning on alot of monsters that can be critically hit, and isn't planning on running many traps then there isn't alot that a rogue is going to be able to do.  (You may note from the above the rogues generally do really well in my campaigns.)  So maybe if you presented the problem as, "We haven't been asked to make many skill checks.  We haven't met anything that could be sneak attacked, and we haven't encountered a trap.", I might have responded with, "Oh, so you are playing the Age of Worms adventure path, eh?  Yeah, someone should have warned you about the fact that a rogue is almost useless."  But you've got a really extreme case of playing to a narrow skill set, and the player shouldn't be surprised to be in this situation.</blockquote>

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