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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9875982" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is going to be a work in progress.  I never liked the Assassin class back in the day and generally forbade it at my table.  No one seemed to miss it, and I only once played with an Assassin in the party (a single session with a group that all claimed to be Satanists for the shock value I suppose).  The class in general seemed to exist as an NPC class for world building purposes, with mechanics that were focused on PC and NPC interactions and NPC with NPC interactions as I saw them, and it's general "must be evil" and eventually "must be member of an evil organization" made it far more anti-social than a Paladin in the groups I generally played in which were focused on heroic narratives and being the good guys in the story.  The assassin even more so than the thief seemed built for solo play as the center of his own story, and not as part of a group of travelling adventurers, with abilities that just didn't contribute to group sessions.It's mechanics were also very clunky, in that as I mentioned in the revision of the Thief, being a subclass of thief made you extremely weak with the linear progression of a martial class, but at half the rate of fighters and fighter subclasses.  You very quickly got left behind, and the slower rate of progress, lack of bonus XP, and most of all the fact you didn't even get any thief abilities until 3rd level made you mostly an incompetent fighter at low levels.The signature ability of the Assassin, the "Assassination Table" was likewise clunky and to my mind ill thought out.  It seemed to run entirely contrary to solo play to abbreviate an adventure to the point of just describing the plan and dicing to see if it would be successful rather than to play it out in detail as a "heist".  It was also generally imbalanced, in as much as that it could mean a player death with no interaction if you used an assassin against a PC - with an assassin rolling only a surprise check and then on the table before you'd announce to the PC "Surprise, you're dead no saving throw."  It was also heavily subject to DM fiat in a way basically no other class ability was, in as much as the GM was exhorted to adjust downward the chance of success if the victim is "wary, takes precautions, and/or is guarded".   A wary surprised victim?  Taken literally the assassin table did next to nothing, since under "perfect conditions" (such as a sleeping victim) you didn't even need to be an assassin to get a 100% success rate.  As such, to my mind it was best used only to loosely adjudicate the PC's hiring an assassin to kill someone on their behalf, something that just generally wasn't going to happen in my games.  I mean the number of times that the PC's hired spies and assassins on their behalf was probably less than the number of times pick pocking came up.As such, I'd never even thought about revising the assassin except to revise it out of existence (as 2e perhaps wisely did) until someone in the thief thread brought it up.  This set me to thinking about it, and while thinking about it I got a cool idea (well I think) that I'm still working on which would potentially give the class a lot of its own flavor.</blockquote>

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