D&D (2024) Rogue's Been in an Awkward Place, And This Survey Might Be Our Last Chance to Let WotC Know.

[UngeheuerLich]

d20 is so swingy and totaly not good for skill checks that are few per session as oppose to attacks/saves, that d20 needs to either be replaced by 3d6 or rogues reliable talent should be applied to lesser degree to all proficient characters.

I.E:

untrained: normal d20 roll + modifiers.
proficiency: min d20 roll is 5.
expertise: min d20 roll is 8.
Rogue with reliable talent and proficiency: min d20 roll is 10.
Rogue with reliable talent and expertise: min d20 roll is 12.

this way, max and average roll(except rogue with talent and expertise) is kept the same, but all proficient and expert characters can avoid fumbling easy tasks in things that they should be competent.

The DMG has an optional rule along the line. Along with passive roles of stat - 5 for auto pass. And also rule for close failures.

I use the "stat - 5" rule for trivial tasks (DC 5) and Easy tasks (DC 10) and later for medium tasks (DC 15), which nicely sets important steps to scores of 10, 15 and 20:
10 = not dumped (= average).
15 = well above average
20 = the best you can be.

I would have no problem with your rule either.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

I think they need to make it so you get Reliable Talent with specific skills at a much, much lower level than 11. If someone wants to make it so it's virtually impossible for them to get a really bad Stealth roll or the like with Expertise and Reliable Talent on the same skill, more power to them. I forget if 2024 is actually doing that.

Yeah, they moved that to lv7.

 

[Stalker0]

I think they need to make it so you get Reliable Talent with specific skills at a much, much lower level than 11.

What extra flexibility? As I've demonstrated, Rogues aren't actually very flexible.

Your in luck then, the playtest rogue currently has reliable talent at level 7.

So in terms of flexibility, lets take a look. Rogues can:

• Skills: We can argue all day how important skills are to a game, but rogues get more skills and have better bonuses in them than almost all classes.
• As a bonus action, they can dash, disengage, and hide. they are therefore the stealthiest class in the game. They are the second fastest class in the game (now that monks also can dash as a bonus they take the crown).
• They now have ways to poison, trip, and disarm foes with cunning strike....or can choose prone, push, or impose disadvantage on enemy attacks using weapon masteries should they wish to.
• Look at some of the subclasses. The thief can use two objects a round which has all sorts of combo possibilities, and has a climb speed letting you get all sorts of places right at 3rd level.
• Whether its melee or ranged the rogue is perfectly positioned to do both.
• The rogue often has one of the highest initiatives in the party, so often they are the ones going first and deciding the start of the combat.

That is a lot of combos and things you can do when you put all those pieces together, and the rogue can do all of this all day every day. So yeah they can be quite flexible.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Your in luck then, the playtest rogue currently has reliable talent at level 7.

So in terms of flexibility, lets take a look. Rogues can:

• Skills: We can argue all day how important skills are to a game, but rogues get more skills and have better bonuses in them than almost all classes.
• As a bonus action, they can dash, disengage, and hide. they are therefore the stealthiest class in the game. They are the second fastest class in the game (now that monks also can dash as a bonus they take the crown).
• They now have ways to poison, trip, and disarm foes with cunning strike....or can choose prone, push, or impose disadvantage on enemy attacks using weapon masteries should they wish to.
• Look at some of the subclasses. The thief can use two objects a round which has all sorts of combo possibilities, and has a climb speed letting you get all sorts of places right at 3rd level.
• Whether its melee or ranged the rogue is perfectly positioned to do both.
• The rogue often has one of the highest initiatives in the party, so often they are the ones going first and deciding the start of the combat.

That is a lot of combos and things you can do when you put all those pieces together, and the rogue can do all of this all day every day. So yeah they can be quite flexible.

I'm failing to comprehend how most of this makes them genuinely "flexible". Flexible implies you can do a variety different things, serve a variety of different roles. That is one thing a Rogue cannot do. They are a skill monkey (a slightly better one in 2024 thanks to L7 reliable talent meaning it'll be seen in 5x as many campaigns as at L11) and mediocre to bad damage dealer and that's the end of the story. That's not like a Wizard who can pull out a bazillion different spells to do a bazillion different things - hell, unless that RIDICULOUS Wizard ability from packet 7 got zapped, Rogues going to get made to look even worse in 2024 (the innocuously named "Memorize Spell" aka never memorize a utility spell again). Nor like a Bard who can do skills, cast spells, fight, and talk. Rogues are a relatively specialized class. There's a grade curve here, and Rogues are getting a C- at best on flexibility, where others are getting As and Bs.

And almost any martial can do the ranged/melee thing - just remember to pack the right weapons. Looks like they lost the 30ft limit which made them objectively worse at Ranged than other classes at least.

Re: Cunning Strike, sure, and what does it cost them? Damage. So they're going to be doing even less damage, and acting even more as assistants to the "real" damage dealers like the Fighters, Barbarians, Warlocks, Sorcerers and also now Monks it appears. It's a bizarre conception of a Rogue - not deadly, not death-dealing, but helping out people who do that!

I will say the Thief-specific use object ability, now it longer sucks (there was a period in the 2024 test in which it didn't allow magic items) does offer some real flexibility so long as your DM hands over enough magic items that it can actually be used. But that's one subclass.

 

[Pauln6]

The guy in my main group who habitually played Rogues since early 2E finally quit playing Rogues in 5E, because they were just not very effective and he wasn't having much fun when even with Expertise he was missing rolls. We got to 15 with that party and Reliable Talent was really nice for a while but we had casters in the party and magic resolves so many problems that it wasn't as big a boost as one might expect.

I think they need to make it so you get Reliable Talent with specific skills at a much, much lower level than 11. If someone wants to make it so it's virtually impossible for them to get a really bad Stealth roll or the like with Expertise and Reliable Talent on the same skill, more power to them. I forget if 2024 is actually doing that.

No, it isn't, because we're talking about how Rogues are balanced mechanically, and perceptions are subjective anyway. One man's "Fun class!" is another man's "Why the hell are you calling 2E Mystic 'fun'"?

Uh-huh, but when a class isn't very good, fewer people who actually play it think that. What I've seen if that people who don't play Rogues, don't want them to be changed or improved, and often think they're overpowered. People who do actually play them are much more likely to want them improved, and to recognise the issues with them.

What extra flexibility? As I've demonstrated, Rogues aren't actually very flexible. That's one of the curious things about their design in 5E. Their damage is mediocre to bad. They thus fail to fulfil the "class fantasy" of the deadly assassin or the like (and D&D 5E has no mechanics to support that outside combat). In combat, they have some mobility, but don't have OA protection which limits it's value, and have to be constantly focused on making sure their bonus damage (Sneak Attack) is available at all, whereas for most classes, it's just a given, because it's coming from multiple attacks. Rogue is a class that has to work hard just to stay worse than other classes who do not have to work hard. Outside combat they face the fact that at lower levels, D&D's skill system doesn't really reward skill investment very well, it primarily rewards lucky rolls, and whilst the gap between them and others increases at higher levels on skill rolls, they then start losing out to magic simply invalidating the need for skill rolls, and that magic works 100% of the time, doesn't even require a roll.

I think at the very least Rogues should be hitting the class fantasy of being able to totally murderise a single target, but they really aren't.

I agree that expertise doesn't work that well. Level Up has an interesting twist whereby Expertise is available to everyone to one degree or another but you roll Expertise dice instead of your proficiency.

 

[Stalker0]

I agree that expertise doesn't work that well. Level Up has an interesting twist whereby Expertise is available to everyone to one degree or another but you roll Expertise dice instead of your proficiency.

Having just finished running a long LU campaign, my players actually straight up said they hated the expertise die. They liked the simple and consistent bonus that you don’t have to think about. We will be going to regular expertise in my next game

 

[Stalker0]

I'm failing to comprehend how most of this makes them genuinely "flexible". Flexible implies you can do a variety different things, serve a variety of different roles.

I think of flexibility as “handling many different situations”.

Things like:
1) sneaking into a base
2) scouting
3) persuading a person to give you info
4) race ahead of monsters and grab the mcguffin
5) get to a location before the enemy does.
6) get past the trapped locked door.
7) disable the device that’s buffing the BBEG
8) long ranged combat

These are all things the rogue does well that many standard combat classes aren’t as good at. Now I’m comparison with spellcasters, it’s true that the rogue can’t beat a wizards magic if they have the right spell for the job. The balance is and always has been…having enough variety of scenarios so the wizard can’t cover them all.

We can argue if that is enough of a balance element (and on these boards we generally think casters are favored), but at the end of the day the rogue does their niche well, if you want to argue casters are still stronger feel free but that’s not going to change with the rogue, that needs to change with spells themselves

 

[CapnZapp]

Whether you add d8 or just +4 (or +5) can't change much. I don't see how the variability solves anything. I do see how rolling a second die in order to know by how much you should add can be viewed as an unnecessary mental step.

The old pre-3E (or is it post-AD&D?) module-slash-game Dragon Fist did such variable "stunt dice" right, though.

 

[CapnZapp]

Who is outdamaging Fighters? In 2014 an optimized Fighter is one of the highest DPR classes. Even a Fighter who just takes GWM and uses it will be doing very good damage compared to a lot of classes. Rogues are should be doing comparable or better single-target damage than most Fighters, because it's their main deal in combat (they can't take a hit, but they should be dealing big ones), but they're not.

There should be at least one build strategy that sacrifices skills and versatility for cold hard sneak damage.

 

[Horwath]

Your in luck then, the playtest rogue currently has reliable talent at level 7.

So in terms of flexibility, lets take a look. Rogues can:

• Skills: We can argue all day how important skills are to a game, but rogues get more skills and have better bonuses in them than almost all classes.

they are overvalued at class resource at 1st level.
+1 skill and +1 expertise is half feat.
so is every armor proficiency and martial weapons.
1 HP per level is also half feat.

fighter gets:

martial weapons, rogue gets some; so that is 1/4 feat over rogue
heavy armor: 1 feat more
1HP more per level: 1/2 feat
rogue gets: 2 more skills and 2 expertise: 1 feat
some tools: lets call it 1/4 feat

just in proficiencies, there is half a feat more than a fighter.
sneak attack? let's be veeeery generous and call it half a feat.
fighters fighting style?, half a feat. So a wash with sneak attack.
then there is second wind. let's also say half a feat.
mastery is better with fighter as 1 more, 1/4of a feat more??

fighter at 1st level get's a whole feat more than a rogue and change.