D&D 5E The Illrigger: Why I hate this class and love what it could have been.

[Steampunkette]

I don't think that this assertion really flies. In film and literature, thieves - including the likes of Robin Hood - were already being called "rogues" before Gygax's balls dropped.

While, yes, Robin Hood and other thieves were called "Rogues" they were also called Knaves and Varlets and Vagabonds and worse. Outside of RPGs and stuff the definition of rogue -still- doesn't include "Thief". It's about dishonesty and aberrant or unpredictable actions.

They weren't called Rogue because it meant burglar or brigand or highwayman. They were called rogue because it was an insult.

In 2e D&D, the thief was part of the "rogue" group, which also included bards. It wasn't until 3e that the thief was renamed the "rogue." But between 2e and 3e were a wide host of video games that were already calling otherwise thieves "rogues," including the influential Diablo 1 game.

The Rogue in Diablo 1 wasn't a thief. She was an archer and a warrior. Here she is with a sword and shield, after all.

She -could- disarm traps, which 2e would've classified as a "Thief", but in 5e a Fighter can disarm traps sooooo...

Also the fact that a Bard, who is categorically not a "Thief", was placed under the Rogue group kinda shoots the argument in the foot.

A "knave" referred to a boy servant, a cognate with the High German word "Knabe," which is still used to refer to a "boy" or "lad." A "blackguard" was the servant responsible for taking care of kitchen utensils, which is how you know that your ex-paladins have fallen on truly hard times.

Both of these terms later acquired a sense of dishonest people, likely as a result of classism that looked down on working class servants.

No, no, I get it. The words had specific definitions and were created for a specific purpose. But they were also broadly used as insults and have been in the hundreds of years since they were coined. Varlet and Villain both meant "Servant", at one point, after all.

I'm just saying the modern interpretation of "Rogue = Thief" is a lot more recent and a lot more narrow than most people seem to think. There have been dictionaries written since D&D 3e came out with the Rogue class in place of Thief, and it's still not put there because that's not how it is widely used.

Mostly "Rogue" is still used in the wider lexicon to describe things or people breaking protocol/expectation/etc. "Going Rogue" as it were. It hasn't penetrated as far as Villain's definitional shift, yet. Or Varlet. Or Knave. Or Blackguard.

Hell, the only way I'd heard Blackguard used in my life was as a general insult between pirates to the point I sincerely thought it was spelled "Blaggard" and when 3e came out with Blackguard as a prestige class I thought it was pronounced "Black Guard" for almost a decade before someone said it the right way and I went "Ohhhhhhh...."

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The reason the class name was changed from thief to rogue is that thief implies criminality (they were barred from being lawful good at one time), whereas rogue does not. And it was used in the 2.2 sense: "a person who behaves in a way that is outside societal norms".

 

[Aldarc]

View attachment 390996

A dictionary is not an argument, but it is a red flag that the conversation is doomed to devolve into a petty pedantic argument, and lo and behold! That is indeed what follows in your post, so I will see myself out in search of conversations that I hope will be more productive than this one.

 

[Senior_WotC_Janitor]

I'm not a fan of the Illrigger. But it's mostly because I can see what it -could- have, and maybe should have, been.

1) The Name
Illrigger. What an absolutely terrible name. It has no cultural connection, no linguistic derivation, it's a whole cloth creation to define the class... Which I kinda get. Sometimes words don't exist and you have to punch them into reality with all the violence your fingers can muster against a keyboard. But -this- one is just awful. Not only do you -have- to know that there's going to be racists that change out one of the Rs because it's a double G and hard R, the first 3 require a capitalization that makes them look like a roman numeral of 3.

Free play (Derrida) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Senior_WotC_Janitor]

A dictionary is not an argument, but it is a red flag that the conversation is doomed to devolve into a petty pedantic argument, and lo and behold! That is indeed what follows in your post, so I will see myself out in search of conversations that I hope will be more productive than this one.

These arguments generally come from people that seem to think that dictionaries are a key to reality as it exists and that any ideas or arguments that don't agree with the dictionary disagree with reality itself.

 

[Steampunkette]

These arguments generally come from people that seem to think that dictionaries are a key to reality as it exists and that any ideas or arguments that don't agree with the dictionary disagree with reality itself.

I love how you're just telling people how I think rather than, y'know, -reading- what I'm saying. LOVE THAT. There's certainly nothing bothersome about having people define your internal universe from their external perspective.

The point of naming a character class in a TTRPG is largely to be evocative of the archetypes and tropes that you're tapping into to provide the concept a structure for players to interact with. Because language has cultural weight and expectations based on, yeah, the broad definitional understanding of the name. (Which is why I say "Rogue" doesn't mean "Thief" to most people outside of the gaming population)

Doesn't need to be the dictionary definition, though. For example the Blackguard's dictionary definition has nothing to do with paladin oaths or falling from grace for obvious historical reasons...

But the term itself contains contempt and disparagement which was broadly the goal of naming the prestige class for 3e. Something historically evocative of various tropes and identities applied to the class being presented.

Coining the phrase "Illrigger" is a perfectly cromulent thing to do. In the context of naming a character class, though, there's a different goal than just inventing the elbow.