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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dethklok" data-source="post: 6134196" data-attributes="member: 6746469">There is a simple reason why rogues have never been very effective throughout any edition of D&D that I have played. That reason is this:The rogue's primary combat advantage is the ability to attack by stealth and surprise. Being attached to an adventuring party makes this as bit difficult, since a group of noisy adventurers shining the lights around will attract attention. But when going alone, the rogue's odds don't get better. They get worse.Now, people tend to assume this comes from the rogue's low HP or restricted armor options. And it is true that the rogue could be made more powerful simply by giving him more HP. But I'd like to suggest that the real problem isn't that the rogue's HP is too low, but rather that everyone's HP is too high.In a fight where the first one or two blows decides the outcome, getting that first blow in is critical. This is why, in real life, the spear was virtually ubiquitous throughout the ancient world, and why polearms were so heavily relied upon even into the age of gunpowder. But I'll go even further: Being able to sneak up on an enemy in real life and attack him by surprise, even once, is usually enough to incapacitate him with nothing more than a dagger and little to no combat expertise. So if everything in the game had between 1 and 20 hit points, whether a creature happened to be immune to criticals wouldn't make any difference at all - a rogue could sneak up, attack by sheer surprise, take initiative the next round, and end the battle without even being attacked!Now, in a heroic fantasy game, we generally dislike having our adventurers so ruthlessly slain. So we play with large hit point totals, and the monsters take them, too. And it's even more fun to take on gigantic enemies who take more than twenty hits to kill. But when we need that many hits to slay an adversary, whoever it was who had the first hit doesn't matter anymore, and the rogue loses his advantage.What I'm leading up to with all of this is that you are throwing out monsters that are intrinsically rogue-resistant. Yes, you can give rogues half sneak attack damage even against monsters that are immune to criticals, and I don't mean to discourage that. But it is the very nature of the rogue to be weak against large, horrific monsters, and compromising this too far is not likely to be a good thing.What I suggest, instead, is you as DM should work out weak points in any given scenario where David can beat Goliath.Think about the way Luke Skywalker drew the Rancor halfway into its cell and then threw a rock at the button that closes the gate. Think about how a well timed avalanche, a good trip into a pit, or a taunt that draws an enemy out of position has made a difference in books you're read or movies you've watched. I haven't played your games, so I don't know how they run, but your mentioning a huge plant made me wonder whether that huge plant might not have a weakness, say, salt, which its creator wrote about in his diary along with a mention for where a large pile of salt was kept, in case he needed to kill the monster himself. If a rogue can find the diary, and then get past the locks and guards to the big bags of salt, well then he's given the entire party the fast track to killing that plant monster.This is just an idea, but that's the point - you should come up with these kinds of ideas to allow a cleverly played rogue to defeat monsters without walking up and killing them. Because, really, that's what fighters are for.</blockquote>

Verification