D&D 5E Rogues & damage...

[Celtavian]

We get it. You're a monty-haul GM who can't accept that the experiences of the rest of use 30+ year veterans don't match yours.

You're the outlier, by the way. Which tends to imply you're wrong.

The only times in AD&D that I've seen thieves doing lots of damage was when they were multiclassed fighter-thieves. Using a d10 or d12 weapon with a x5 backstab was always a big hit, but it's also not a pure thief role.

Many GM's didn't give away magic items like candy. (I did, for a while. I got over that real quick.)
Many GM's didn't let thieves get more than 1 backstab attempt, and even then, required a check on move silently.

My group is hardly the outlier. I've played with a ton of groups over the years. Our group is about the middle for magic items.

Getting a girdle of giant strength at the higher levels wasn't hard. I gave the rogue a fire giant girdle because the fighter or other martial usually handed it down after he got topped out. It was fairly common for a bunch of kids playing D&D back in the day to want to have nice magic items. Maybe you were already an old man or played with a particularly mature group, but stop pretending that all of the young D&D players of that day somehow had the sense to limit magic items and the like. It certainly wasn't the majority as you claim. I went to many a table where our magic item selection appeared meager because we usually handed out what was in modules.

Our group, ,like many others, was a bunch of young kids playing D&D in our teens. In the course of having fun, we liked getting magic items. Those old modules which you seem to have forgotten, handed out quite a few, including girdles and +2 weapons.

I am indeed talking about higher level thieves. They had it tough at lower levels.

 

[Celtavian]

All I can say is maybe some of you are far older than I am I guess. I was a kid playing D&D. My memory of the rogue is them being feared for the backstab. Why? Because as an opening attack it did a ton of damage.

Yeah. We let the rogue do the backstab if he made his Move Silently and Hide in Shadows. Sorry if some of you were full on adults or kids that decided to make sure the rogue had to have shadows we use it. We did not. It was his best combat ability and the other young players I was with didn't spend our time worrying about whether the rogue was in shadows or what not. We wanted that rogue player to have fun playing his character. So we made it easy.

That rogue loved doing big backstab hits. I'm not going to worry about whether you think of how my friends and I played when young. I know the rogue hit hard when he opened up an attack. I know the kids I gamed with liked the rogue because he hit like a truck with that opening attack as well as the other nifty stealthing abilities. We loved finding magic items in modules made by Gygax and his cohorts. It was good times.

Glad to hear some of you are adult (or maybe you were adults) enough to make sure not too many magic items were handed out and that the rogue could only use his capabilities when there were shadows present. My group was not. We were kids having fun playing modules that handed out maybe too much treasure. Oh well.

Whether you want to recall or not, the rogue did a truckload of damage on that opening hit. It was a feature of the class. It made him one of the most feared damage dealers in the game. It was definitely worthwhile to allow the rogue to make an opening attack because he could actually kill something doing it. Monsters didn't have as many hit point as they do now.

That's the last I'll say on this given it was so long as to not matter for the present edition.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

I've been playing a little longer than that and I can tell you they were vicious damage dealers. So what's your point? They did things other than damage. Sure. But they did a huge amount of damage and hammered extremely hard.

My main character in AD&D was a Fighter-Thief and I can count the number of times I got a decent sneak attack off on two fingers. It was very DM-dependent.

 

[aramis erak]

My main character in AD&D was a Fighter-Thief and I can count the number of times I got a decent sneak attack off on two fingers. It was very DM-dependent.

Same here, tho' luck was equally important, because the rules implied strongly the requisite HIS and SM rolls to not alert the target first, blowing it.

I don't recall ever seeing a Girdle of Giant Strength in play once I got over my Monty Haul phase, in about 1982...

The game's just much more interesting when magic items are rare and sought after rather than simply part of the disposable loot.

 

[Saeviomagy]

It just looks like every group in this thread except Celtavian had a DM hell bent against letting thieves do anything. Apparently every dungeon is well lit, every monster has eyes in the back of their head and it's impossible to move quietly and be in a darkened place at the same time. If backstab was so weak, why does it seem like every DM was petrified of it?

 

[the Jester]

It just looks like every group in this thread except Celtavian had a DM hell bent against letting thieves do anything. Apparently every dungeon is well lit, every monster has eyes in the back of their head and it's impossible to move quietly and be in a darkened place at the same time. If backstab was so weak, why does it seem like every DM was petrified of it?

More like every DM other than Celtavian played it closer to how it was written. Hell, the DMG even had advice that certain creatures couldn't be backstabbed because they had no back, and if a monster was too big for the thief to reach its back, then backstabbing was impossible.

It's not about DMs being petrified of it rolleyes, it's more like most DMs preferred not to give the thief any more freebies than they gave anyone else.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

Played AD&D 2E a lot. In fact, before the last playtest packet, AD&D 2E was my edition of choice, and I wouldn't run anything else. Backstab is cool and all, but as written, it's clearly not intended to put the rogue in the pantheon of the top damage dealers. The first edition to give the rogue a reliable backstab attack was 3E, and we never saw the rogue in the damage dealing role before that. In 2E, not only warriors were better combatants, priests were more effective as well. People who played rogues in our games did so because of thieving skills, backstab was always a "plus".

 

[MrMyth]

For myself, 3rd Edition was my first real exposure to the 'high DPS' rogue. And it was a very binary sort of damage: Is the enemy vulnerable to sneak attack? Have you set up the conditions to ensure your sneak attack? If so: [Massive Amounts of Damage]. If not: [Accomplish Nothing].

4E took this and was explicit about making the rogue a striker, and making them reliably effective damage dealers, but it definitely wasn't the origin of the idea.

 

[Ellington]

Rogues can still deal immense damage. A level 20 rogue with the assassin subclass using purple worm poison (bit pricey per usage, but hey) can deal over 320 damage during a surprise attack, which is enough to kill almost anything in the Monster Manual. The example is a bit extreme but assassins make better use of poison than anyone else (except maybe fighters).

A rogue with the thief subclass can pump out a lot of damage if it gets its hands on a wand that includes a blast spell. Since thieves can activate items as a bonus action they can sneak attack and blast in one round which can ramp up quite quickly.

 

[txshusker]

To the original poster, I think it was 4e - when the rules makers decided to divide combat needs by controller, striker, defender, etc instead of by class. It was in 4e where I think the preferred rogue players used it as a striker. And a striker of any class put out pretty much the same high damage. I mean, sliding every turn to flank while a defender took up the front face meant you got bonuses to hit and damage buffs on basically every turn with a sneak attack. Unlike backstabbing in earlier editions, which could not be used on every combat turn, the striker rogue could put out high damage on every combat round in 4e.

In earlier editions, if a thief got a chance to make 2 backstabs in the same combat, that combat was not going well for the players and meant that the MUs and fighter classes were fumbling their turns. If a BS did 1/2 a creature's damage in one round - which it totally could, the other members could normally take that creature down the rest of the way by the time the thief repositioned himself for a second backstab. Certainly the thief could put out some high damage - on a crit backstab... double damage or full damage, depending how you played - but consistent high damage round to round was not the thief's forte.