Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9876790" data-attributes="member: 4937">Even if we were to liberally reduce the chance of assassination in most cases following the guidelines of the RAW (maximum chance involves a character at ease, presumably unarmored, not only surprised by unaware he's in a dangerous place, and alone), this is simply not true.  After 4th level or so, backstab simply will never kills another character of equivalent XP except in cases of unbalanced stats (an 18 STR assassin backstabbing an M-U with 14 or less CON).  The reason is pretty obvious.  In most realistic cases, a stab with a weapon eligible for backstabbing does about 1 hit die worth of damage.  A backstab initially does 2 hit die of damage but only increases in lethality by 1 hit die of damage per 5 levels the thief gains.  Thus, very quickly a backstab simply goes to 0% chance of lethal, whereas the assassination table even for a somewhat lower level assassin would still be yielding some percentage chance of being lethal.Again, the problem here is not that the assassination table might give a theoretical 90%+ chance of being lethal for a much higher level character.  If the party is 5th level, and the "optimal" situation described in the DMG could be achieved, you wouldn't need the assassination table.  Any sort of much higher-level character would do.  A 10th level fighter would easily kill a 5th level character they found alone and bathing in a bathtub.  The problem is that the table gives a 3rd level assassin a chance at a die no save situation merely by achieving surprise, and they may do so with a ranged weapon.  So you can literally as a DM do the, "You walk out of the tavern and there is a thunking sound.  You look and Sir Barthold has a heavy crossbow bolt protruding from his eye.  He collapses over, obviously dead before he hits the street."  That's a not impossible outcome if you are being ruthless as a 3rd level assassin RAW has a 35% chance of just one shotting a 7th level character, something you could not do with a backstab.  Now granted, a DM doing the above that gave a 35% chance of one shotting a PC is "doing it wrong", but the trouble is that the RAW do not specify how the DM is to adjust the table.  It's all fiat.  The RAW basically gives the DM fiat to kill a character of basically any level by little more than fiat.  That 3rd level assassin still has a 5% chance of one shotting an 11th level fighter.  I'm not particularly happy with fiddly modifiers either, but the problem is that as written by Gygax it's mostly an NPC class.  Gygax writes up disguise as highly reliable solely because as written it's about an assassin not being detected as an assassin while acting as a spy (after being hired by the PCs, per the DMG) or else pretending to be a farmer, priest, or prostitute to the PCs while not being recognized as an assassin.  But this is the absolute most trivial case of using disguise, and the one that is easiest to perform.  If you don't know me, then as long as I'm properly attired you have little reason to suspect I'm not who I present myself as.The problem of course is players being what they are, won't use disguise in this manner.  They will want to pull off the highly unlikely and nigh magical stunts seen in movies where the wife doesn't realize the nanny is her husband, no one can tell Clark Kent is Superman, and no one is aware Bruce Wayne is Batman, and so forth despite this being intensely obvious to the audience.  For that, you need rules.And there are basically two ways to go about this.  You can either do the fiddly modifiers or you can make a list as to when something is allowable.  For example, you could limit the assassin to disguising themselves as specific people until they hit 10th level.  I went the fiddly modifiers route, because it's reasonable to disguise yourself as someone who looks a lot like you from a reasonably early point.  AFAIK, this isn't a change.  That is RAW.  It works that way out of the box.  I've never seen anything that says an assassin can't assassinate when wearing armor.  I think the only clarification I've seen on this from that era is that it was ruled that you don't get the AC benefit of a shield on the round you backstab someone.In fact, by the rules that's how Assassins of 3rd level and under are "supposed" to operate - well armored and in disguise because their thief skills are literally non-existent at low levels. In reality, though the Assassin can learn any weapon, they really don't want to since most weapons can't be used to perform a backstab, the first weapon that they will want is something from the thief list that they intend to backstab with - which will probably end up being something light and concealable.  The only thing that having access to the full list opens up is superior ranged weaponry, say a longbow or heavy crossbow for performing assassinations and the general utility of such a weapon.  The three starting weapons an assassin gets is enough for say dagger, longword, and longbow - which is really all the weapons the assassin would ever probably actually need.  There isn't much else that is useful.  You could pick up garrote, net, and club perhaps, but that's mostly just gravy.  They point is that access to all the weapons on the fighter list won't ever get you functioning like a fighter because you aren't built as a class to go toe to toe with anything anyway.</blockquote>

Verification