Rogues: essential class or sacred cow?

[Frostmarrow]

Psh, if they were fighting "level-appropriate" enemies. Which I doubt any of them did very much. (I am not familiar enough with Conan or Zorro; Westley was clearly higher level in game terms than Inigo or Fezzik; and the closest fight in the Fafhrd & Gray Mouser stories, besides the various times the two heroes crossed swords, was Mouser versus a mage. How's that for iconic swordplay?)

But in any case, if you have a class that covers both fighter and rogue, what do you do with the people who say screw the skills, I want to eschew those to become the very best swordsman possible? It'll happen, and then you're back to the fighter/rogue split all over again.

Conan fought level-appropriate enemies but he prevailed due to superior stats. Zorro fought mooks mostly.

The best swordsman is never without skills. Miyamoto Musashi was a writer and a painter but he still killed scores of samurais with a wet towel. Musashi was arguably the best swordsman that ever lived. A single minded fighter is merely a soldier.

You are entirely correct about the fighter/rogue split.

 

[Pickaxe]

I'm perhaps confused by what you mean by sacred cows. It seemed before that you were saying that sacred cows have no merit of their own. But, if everything in D&D that is not emulation of fantasy as a genre is a sacred cow, then I'm confused because that's what makes D&D be D&D. Could you clarify this a little bit?

Let's say we can divide up the elements of D&D into those things that ultimately come from other influences and those that originated with D&D. To use a biological analogy, these are "shared derived characters" that denote the uniqueness of D&D, at least in a historical sense. Of course, many other games have adopted these "characters", so they are no longer unique to D&D, but D&D did not get them from anyone else.

Any or all of these "characters" of D&D could be called "sacred cows". Usually, the term "sacred cow" is reserved for things that stick around because they've always been around, or things that we cherish not because of their utility, but because they are part of the history of the game. Of course, "sacred cow" is usually used in these forums as a derogatory term for suboptimal rules or elements that are retained in subsequent editions. "Vancian" magic is an example of something that is often declared to be a sacred cow.

Of course "sacred bovinity" is in the eye of the beholder, in the sense that the call that something is an unnecessary vestige is a subjective one. But whenever an element of the game looks less like a vital organ and more like an appendix, the term "sacred cow" is likely to pop up.

And this brings me back to the point of this thread. I'm arguing that what is essential to the game is what ties it to its original influences, and that ultimately determines whether an element (in this case the rogue) is something that should never be removed from the game. Others have argued that D&D is its own genre, and therefore everything that is identified with D&D (including the rogue) is essential. But this is the same argument for anything that's declared a sacred cow, and it's refuted by the fact that people house rule these things away without ever feeling like they're no longer playing D&D. (Note that I'm not talking about setting-specific house rules-- "There are no clerics in this world."-- but changes in how one articulates the basic elements of the game-- "We use vitality points and mana instead of hit points and Vancian magic.")

So, to answer your question, yes, all of these things are sacred cows. That doesn't necessarily make them bad; it just means that our reasons for resisting changing them may not have anything to do with optimal rules function nor with adhering to the archetypes of the fantasy genre. That's what I'm asking when I ask whether or not the rogue is a sacred cow: Is it a creation of D&D or of the fantasy genre in general?

--Axe

 

[Doug McCrae]

Others have argued that D&D is its own genre, and therefore everything that is identified with D&D (including the rogue) is essential.

I don't think the rogue is an essential part of the D&D genre. Of the four main classes, the wizard with memorised spells and the warrior priest who heals are the most recognisably 'D&Dy'. The rogue wasn't even present in the first version of the game and has altered significantly in 3e, changing from 'thief' to 'skills guy'.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

If you don't like the rogue, I say just do what Arcana Evolved does - let anyone search for traps, and introduce other classes to fill the role. AE introduces a new skill-monkey class (the akashic) and a mobile fighter-type (unfettered). Both can be a rogue-like characters by choosing the appropriate skills, and gain access to sneak attack as one of their special abilities (although akashics have a choice whether to take sneak attack).

Doesnt unfettered only get 4 skill points a level though? That was my beef with it. Theres no real rogue analogue, as while I live the class to death, the akashic certainly inst mundane enough to fit the bill.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I don't completely understand this mindset. Now, as a qualification, I don't know what "encounter traps" are, and it's possible that's more of what I'm used to.

An encounter trap is a trap that is meant to be sprung, and whose initial springing bears little ill consequence. Once set in motion, the trap is observed and dealt with. Despite my loathing of the module at large, the bleeding wall trap in Tomb of Horrors is an excelletn example. The doors slide shut and the wall begins bleeding. The room begins filling up with blood, and the players must staunch the flow or get out of the room.

Another example would be a hallway filled with mechanical slashing blades. The players might sunder them, jump on them or tumble past thenm (or just charge down and take the hits).

The difference is it allows intereaction. A spring loaded crossbow hits you and is done. A pit trap is usually just a few d6 and you climb out. Those are "zinger" traps, and to me, are what bog down play, as theres no way to deal with them once they have been activated (thus the higher incentive to find and deal with them before being sprung).

However; D&D tends to boil down to "who's turn is it?", at the very least when it comes time to roll the dice. Now, 3.x has done a lot to ensure that every character gets a chance to shine in combat. (This, unfortunately, can kind of suck for the Fighter, as he's pretty much the only character who really doesn't have many other times when it's "his turn".) But regardless of if it's in combat or out, usually one character is doing stuff, and everyone else is watching (hopefully ~ some players nowadays seem a bit "spoiled", at least to my perception, and can't be bothered to pay any attention unless they are actively rolling the dice. But maybe I'm just being a bit of an old grump...). So what you end up with, in trying to avoid instances where one character or another isn't likely to shine, is avoiding everything but combat. Not only is that, to my mind, an extremely boring way to run a game, but you still have each player waiting until it's their turn...

The other part of rogue/decker syndrome is scouting, where the rogue sneaks off, has his solo play, then comes back. Its just the combination of the two that makes the rogue feel at odds with the cooperative group play of the rest of the game. For the record, I feel the same way about the way social skills are divied up, in that it encourages some classes to do nothing when its not time to roll initiative (hence my making all skills class skills).

Now I'm not saying that every room has to have a trap... In fact, if you changed Trapfinding so that the Rogue gets an automatic check to detect a trap whenever any party member in LoS is about to walk into it, I think that would solve any problems very nicely.

It would certainly help.

But if you're gonna take traps out of D&D because they only involve one of the characters, why not remove all of the dusty tomes and lore of old. And anything that might require a Bluff or Diplomacy check. And Undead. And every other combat encounter while you're at it...

Undead can be killed withhout a cleric, tomes can be taken to a sage, and many classes get social skills. In core, only a rogue can disarm a real trap. And unlike a tome, you cant take it back to town to get a specialist to help out.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Pickaxe, are you saying you want to get rid of everything 'D&Dy' about D&D and make it a generic fantasy game?

 

[fusangite]

I say, remove the rogue as a class. Give fighters (and everyone else) more skill points.

One could just as easily get rid of the cleric and give easy, powerful healing magic to the other casters and make undead turning a feat chain. One could abolish the fighter and take everyone else's BAB and feat gain rate up a notch. One could make rage into a feat chain and nix the barbarian. One could just use clerics in place of paladins and rogues in place of rangers.

I'm just not grasping why it is any better idea to take the rogue package and distribute it amongst the other classes than it is to remove any other class and distribute its specialized abilities.

 

[Doug McCrae]

That's what I'm asking when I ask whether or not the rogue is a sacred cow: Is it a creation of D&D or of the fantasy genre in general?

Skillful guys are not a creation of D&D. The rogue's particular combination of abilities - skills plus sneak attack plus trapfinding, etc - is. But then every class's specific combination of abilities exists only in D&D and not in the wider fantasy genre.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Actually, I think an encounter trap is more accurately described as a trap that has been turned into a monster. A standard trap relies on being undetected for its effectiveness, and the challenge is to bypass it by finding it and disarming it before it is triggered, or, if it remains undetected and is triggered, to survive the damage it deals.

On the other hand, an encounter trap relies on being difficult to disarm for its effectiveness, with the added provisio that most, if not all, members of a typical adventuring party could contribute to "disarming" the trap. For example, an encounter trap could consist of spikes emerging from the floor to attack the party. The rogue could disable a 5' square area with a Disable Device check, or the fighter or barbarian could disable the trap by reading an action to sunder a spike that attacked him. Similarly, for a magical trap, the wizard or cleric could dispel the trap.

To put it another way, standard traps tend to be passive, and to put the lion's share of defeating the trap on the shoulders of the rogue. Encounter traps tend to be active, and to allow other characters to take action to negate or mitigate the effects of the trap.

Sorry; that'll teach me to post when I'm not concentrating! THat's right; an encounter trap has its own initiative turn, "action(s)," and so on, just like a monster. It usually requires multiple actions to deactivate, making the entire thing like a monster encounter. (I was thinking of the section in Dungeonscape that talks about combining encounter traps with monster encounters.)

 

[Delta]

...it just means that our reasons for resisting changing them may not have anything to do with optimal rules function nor with adhering to the archetypes of the fantasy genre. That's what I'm asking when I ask whether or not the rogue is a sacred cow: Is it a creation of D&D or of the fantasy genre in general?

I see two separate issues mentioned here: (1) optimal rules function, and (2) adhering to archetypes of the fantasy genre.

Regarding "optimal rules function", I do think that the Rogue class is the farthest outlier. That's due to the out-of-initiative, solo-play, no-resource-limit, slow-down-the-game nature of the skill system in general, as mentioned by many others in this thread (which historically grew out of the Thief class in the first place, of course).

Regarding "adhering to archetypes", then I think it is the Cleric class that is the farthest outlier. Although we can all rather quickly come up with a list of famous rogues or quasi-rogues to debate over, I can't ever come up with a comparable list of heavily armored, warlike but sword-free, priestly healers from myth or classic fantasy. Furthermore, the Cleric has historically suffered from an identity crisis of going from Christian priest (in OD&D) to pagan pantheistic agent, etc., demonstrating its difficult fit in the medieval fantasy setting. Rogues haven't had a problem like that.

So, for mechanics: Rogues are sacred-cowish outliers. For archetypes: Rogues are pretty essential, moreso than Clerics.

Like many threads, this seems like a good candidate for a poll. Perhaps "Which of the 4 kernel classes is least archetypal?" Or "Which of the 4 kernel classes functions least well mechanically?"