D&D 5E Sneak Attack: optional or mandatory?

[Dausuul]

I agree with the first part of your statement here, and disagree with the second. A thief should be able to open combat from stealth and deal a metric ton of damage. After that, he should be able to hold his on in combat, but nowhere near the ability of a ranger/fighter/paladin without resorting to methods like invisibility. Stealth in combat should be almost impossible to pull off without magic. You step behind a chair and hide, why didn't I SEE you step behind the chair? And if you pulled off a distraction, well, there's only so many places you could be, I'm going to be prepared as I check behind the chair, not surprised.

This used to be my opinion, but I spent about a year tinkering with my own variant form of D&D, and after fooling around with the numbers for a while I came to the conclusion that it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. If a thief's combat contribution is mostly front-loaded into a first-round backstab, that backstab has to be unbelievably lethal to compensate for the thief's relative ineffectiveness afterward. If you're fighting a group of weak monsters instead of one or two big ones, a lot of that damage blows through to no effect. More importantly, it means that the thief's combat experience is very dull. You have one blast of excitement at the start and then you plink away with your crossbow or poke away with your shortsword, while everyone around you is laying the smack down.

However, if you give the thief some ability to pull a quick fade in combat, and put conditions on it so it a) makes sense in the fictional context and b) requires some maneuvering to make it work, the picture changes. Sneak attack can be scaled down to a sane level, and on the rounds when you aren't sneak attacking, you're not making weenie attacks. Instead you're trying to meet the conditions to hide so you can sneak attack again. I was still playing around with the exact mechanics when 5E was announced and I put the project aside, but I think it's a more promising avenue than the one-round-and-done model.

(For anyone wondering, the idea was that if you're a thief, you can lose yourself in the chaos of combat. If you don't do anything to draw attention to yourself, you can make a "skulk" roll. If it succeeds, your foes lose sight of you--they know you're there in a general sense, but as long as they're busy fighting your allies, they can't keep track of exactly where you are. The effect is broken if you attack; you can re-establish it by breaking your opponents' line of sight to you and making another roll. A foe that's determined not to lose sight of you can spend its action doing nothing but watching out for you, in which case the ability doesn't work on that foe. As soon as the fight ends, the ability stops working anyway.)

 

[TwoSix]

My default thief would play like an AD&D F/T - more fragile in both hp and AC, marginally weaker in to-hit (because 1 level lower) and damage (because of the STR/DEX trade offs), but compensating for both with abilities that mitigate damage taken (via stealth, evasion, deception etc) and allow spike damage (via ambush, surprise etc). The current packet, in my view, makes the rogue too fragile (in hp terms) and too reliant on sneak attack for damage (no multi-attack) and provides too little support for sneaky things being the underpinning of combat efficacy.

I'd also like to see the rogue closer to a F/T, but with a tendency towards lower HP and at-will offense, but higher AC (perhaps an innate version of Combat Expertise) and encounter powers to provide some extra offensive power.

Basically, I see the rogue as a guy who will jump into melee, and can survive via his wits and natural agility, but doesn't win fights by cutting monsters up. He stabs them when they're lured out of position. He lures them into falling into the fireplace or kicking them off the walls of the castle. To my mind, the quintessential Rogue fight is the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where after the display from the swordsman, Indy calmly pulls out his gun and shoots the guy. That's the Rogue style of fighting. The Fighter would be the one to face the champion and proves his superiority by strength of arms. The Rogue just does whatever it takes to win.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

This used to be my opinion, but I spent about a year tinkering with my own variant form of D&D, and after fooling around with the numbers for a while I came to the conclusion that it didn't work as well as I'd hoped. If a thief's combat contribution is mostly front-loaded into a first-round backstab, that backstab has to be unbelievably lethal to compensate for the thief's relative ineffectiveness afterward. If you're fighting a group of weak monsters instead of one or two big ones, a lot of that damage blows through to no effect. More importantly, it means that the thief's combat experience is very dull. )

Not if he's smart. Smoke bombs, invisibility, blink, there are a ton of ways to sneak in combat that make sense. Besides that, after his opening salvo, if he can't come up with a way to sneak, yes, his combat experience will be average at best. But then, other than his opening salvo, combat is not the thief/rogues expertise. His schtick is (or should be) taking out a guard before he can raise the alarm and generally subterfuge, disarming traps, picking the courier's pocket to find vital information, etc. Anyone who plays a thief for his combat expertise is playing the wrong class.

 

[Starfox]

It is very tricky to strike a balance between verisimilitude and damage output. Even with ways to sneak, if that means attacking every second round with no attacks in between, the burst damage must be very high. I played a lot with a rogue PC in my 4E campaign that managed to get a sneaky attack in maybe 95% of all rounds because of the liberal Stealth rules in 4E, and that felt perhaps too flexible - and still her damage was not all that impressive, she definitely did not outdamage the party's main damage dealer, the fighter, except possibly at epic levels.