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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6185040" data-attributes="member: 58197">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.)</blockquote>

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