D&D 5E Should martial characters be mundane or supernatural?

[Staffan]

I mean, it's a weird line to draw from "% chance to succeed at climbing, moving silently, hiding in shadows, hearing stuff, detecting secret doors, etc." to "the best at leveraging the generic competency system." If anything, this should be conceived as the rogue having a significant bonus to a quite specific set of skills, or some unique mechanics to reroll or auto-succeed such checks. I'm not sure "master of a unique domain of mundane expertise" actually fits comfortably on the rogue chassis; that feels like it should be some kind of Sage or Adventurer or something else class that doesn't have the Thief baggage and/or sneaky Dexterity combatant focus.

Agreed. "Skills" was always a really weird hat to hang the Rogue concept on. This is another place where 4e had a good idea: make the Rogue the skirmisher warrior, and let the fighter be the heavily armored warrior. Arcana Unearthed/Evolved had a similar idea, with the Unfettered being the agile warrior and the Warmain being the tank (and the main skill monkey being the Akashic which was a way more cerebral class).

 

[Maxperson]

But why would you pick skills that do not make sense for your character concept?

It shouldn't be possible for the best rogue to be better at wizard knowledge than the best wizard.

Rogue expertise should have been limited to the traditional rogue skills. You want to be the very rare rogue who is better than a wizard, invest in the feat.

 

[Maxperson]

You and I have very different ideas about what proficiency and expertise represent. To me, they represent training and education.

We know it doesn't. Expertise comes from leveling up and how many PCs go to school or even have time to go to school in order for expertise in arcana to make sense? No, the player just chooses arcana expertise with nothing in fiction to back it up.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Expertise comes from leveling up

The Rogue gets Expertise at 1st.
Maybe you're used to playing Bards, who get it at 3rd?

So you could play a 1st level Rogue with a background like Scholar and Expertise in some snooty college-boy skill, who ultimately turned out to be too much of a rule-breaking bad boy and ended up with no degree and the Rogue class. (Which any actuary will tell you, is going to make his life insurance a lot more expensive.)

Rogue expertise should have been limited to the traditional rogue skills. You want to be the very rare rogue who is better than a wizard, invest in the feat.

By that logic, every class should just get expertise in it's traditional skills - and fighters in weapons & saving throws - and just toss BA....

 

[Campbell]

By that logic, every class should just get expertise in it's traditional skills - and fighters in weapons & saving throws - and just toss BA....

Actually, yes.

 

[Remathilis]

It shouldn't be possible for the best rogue to be better at wizard knowledge than the best wizard.

Rogue expertise should have been limited to the traditional rogue skills. You want to be the very rare rogue who is better than a wizard, invest in the feat.

At best, you're removing arcana, religion, nature, medicine and maybe survival or performance (the jury is out on the latter IMHO). Every other skill is either part of the original thief kit or adjacent to it.

 

[Campbell]

Yup. And he can know more about religion than clerics so let's give them expertise in that. Or they know more than a druid in survival, nature and animal handling, so let's give expertise to druid as well. And it's not fair fighter and barbarian aren't masters of athletics, better give expertise to them too. What about monks and acrobatics? Expertise! Paladins and diplomacy? Expertise. Warlocks and deception and intimidation? Better give them expertise.

Huh, I guess everyone is getting expertise. What makes a rogue so good at skills now? I guess they have reliable talent...

Now wait, wizards are the literal masters of the arcane, why would a street rat have more reliable access to arcane knowledge than the one thing they are best at?

And the song goes on ...

I think Rogues can be better at skills by being better at more things rather than outdoing other classes in what they should be good at from a conceptual level.

 

[Irlo]

We know it doesn't. Expertise comes from leveling up and how many PCs go to school or even have time to go to school in order for expertise in arcana to make sense? No, the player just chooses arcana expertise with nothing in fiction to back it up.

It’s that’s the way you play the game and it works for you, I support you.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

1) Wizards learn that theory in part to be able to understand the spells that they learn. That's how they create 2 new spells a level by themselves. If all they did was memorize something they don't understand, they would gain no new spells on their own. 2) unlike rogues, wizards had years of formal education on the subject. 3) neither of those monsters was the little homeless street thief. They both literally went to wizard(scare) school to learn.

Absolutely no one I know plays rogues as homeless street thieves. It isn’t implied by the class writeup, and in fact the Expertise feature contradicts it as a reading of the class.

Further, the This Is Your Life chapter from XGtE goes out of its way to indicate backgrounds with no formal training whatsoever for wizards, like a sailor finding a spellbook and studying it entirely autodidactically. Hedge wizards have long been a thing with no formal education.

Like I’m all for each class having a skill they are master of, but these aren’t good arguments for it.

 

[Staffan]

It shouldn't be possible for the best rogue to be better at wizard knowledge than the best wizard.

I could totally justify it though. Arcana is more about the stuff around magic rather than magic itself (I mean, there's some of that, but that's not the main focus). Arcana would let you know who the Blackstaff is, and who has held that title in the past. You'd be able to recognize magical runes from various traditions. You'd be familiar with various magical institutions, like Eberron's dragonmarked houses, the Arcanix, and things like that.

In computer terms, you can be an amazing coder who has never heard of Alan Turing.