Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6183121" data-attributes="member: 87792">And here we have the problem in a nutshell.  D&D is not intended to only be played one way - even going back to the mid 1980s, you do not play the Dragonlance Saga the way you play Tomb of Horrors, and Barrier Peaks and Isle of Dread are different yet again.  Yet they are both emphatically D&D.  Moving into the 90s, if you try playing Birthright, Dark Sun, and Planescape the same way you are going to get very very weird results.  The purpose of the plethora of settings brought out in the 90s is so that there are many different ways of playing D&D and all of them are valid.And for the record, if there is one way D&D was intended to be played we need to go back to 1974 for it.  1974 when Gygax and Arneson were playing D&D with wargamers.  Wargamers who were going flat out to win the game while treating it as only a game because that is what wargamers do.  The sort of environment where player skill matters and Tomb of Horrors was given out as a challenge - and the first ever team to go into Tomb of Horrors (Rob Kunz and Ernie Gygax) cleaned out all the treasure and didn't lose a single person.  And the sort of game where you use whatever abilities you can glean to the best effect available and don't worry about your party role in the slightest - you just worried about solving the challenges.Now your power gamer isn't much of a power gamer and you might have what you believe a thief should be able to do influenced by the ineptitude of the AD&D thief (there were official supplements in AD&D that outright said that you shouldn't bother being a thief because a wizard could do it all better - I think the necromancer's handbook was one of them) but for thirteen years now, high damage when you can get into the right position and aren't facing someone immune to sneak attack has been one of the hallmarks of the rogue, but to do this they either need to be hiding regularly, or need to be flanking.  And from flanking they fall over in a high wind; they have few more hit points than a wizard and are right up there in the thick of melee.  The barbarian gains 3 hit points/level over the rogue before they start raging - if the rogue's doing that much damage, the rogue/swashbuckler can draw the aggro.  At which point in a low magic campaign they fold like a cheap tent.</blockquote>

Verification