D&D 5E The Rogue: Are skills enough?

[Stalker0]

The debate currently rages between the rogue and the fighter.

The key surrounds the rogue's sneak attack. It is now a more specific damage bonus compared to the fighter's deadly strike. But its equal in damage, meaning that the rogue on his best day can only match the fighter in strength, but cannot surpass him.

This is big change compared to 3e and 4e rogues, where a well run rogue was a damage king on the battlefield. And as all big changes do, it has caused a lot of controversy.

But this controversy actually speaks to another debate that has occurred for several editions now.....what is the role of the skills system?


In 4e, skills were present, but were generally put on the backburner compared to powers and class abilities.

5e (so far) in its attempt to reduce complexity and provide flexibility, has pushed a lot of the weight back on the skills system. The idea being that I don't need special abilities to perform actions, I have a suite of skills that can handle all of those actions and more. This requires more DM interpretation, but this too was a stated goal of 5e.


Many who look at the rogue right now site its lack of combat damage and combat abilities and declare it a "fighter lite" (I myself am guilty of this declaration as well).

But the rogue does have a unique ability all of its own, its skill bonus maneuver. Presentation wise, its a little hidden, its not put on the class sheet in bold letters like sneak attack once was....but yet it is an ability unique to rogue, at least this far.

This ability is actually quite strong, a rogue can net a +10 bonus to a skill at 10th level...a bonus no one else seems close to getting. Rogue's appear right now to be the king of skills by a solid margin.

So getting back to combat, if combat is intended to be about attack rolls and class abilities, than the rogue does fall short. But if combat is intended to be a hallmark of skill use for dodging, climbing, tumbling, disabling etc....then the rogue seems to have a unique advantage all his own.


So what do we want as a community? Do we want skill use to be considered important enough to be a factor in combat power....or should we return to combat specific abilities as the primary drive for such?

 

[Zimith]

I have, in part, the same reservations. The sneak skill is just a Deadly strike with conditions. Now a sneak attack/backstab should have conditions, but the reward should also be on par with it.

As for the rogue's role, it makes for a tricky class because it's meant to be diverse. It should encompass both assassin/sneaky combatants, thieves, explorers, charlatans, spies and more.

Let's boil it down to two things - sneaky combat and checks [skills]. At the moment, the only thing that's exclusively rogue is the rogue Expertise. The maneuvre list leans heavily in the favour of combat. The rogue has access to one maneuvre that affect skills - Skill Mastery. It sure is powerful, but if I want a rogue that's about something else than sneaky combat I have but that single maneuver to invest in. Then what?

That said I like how the expertice dice mechanics look. Overall the system seem simple, interactive and interesting and I get roughly the same positive feeling as with the advantage/disadvantage rules. I also like how sneak attack is not a default class ability. For me, sneak attack only ever fitted a certain type of rogue concept therefore it's best optional!

 

[MoonSong]

Well.

Optional Smeak attack - Good
Not having anything roguey to replace it with - Bad

 

[I'm A Banana]

With regards to using skills in combat...I feel like it's the same basic problem of the fighter pre-Expertise Dice. "Skill check, skill check, skill check" is only marginally more interesting than "attack, attack, attack." Interesting and engaging options are generally good things.


As for skills outside of combat...
[sblock]
Skills are the melee basic attacks of the non-combat world. A +10 bonus on a skill ensures success, but it doesn't make it interesting.

Remember the first 5e fighter? It was a machine -- damage and accuracy scads above any other character on the field.

But people didn't like it. Not because it wasn't powerful, but because there wasn't enough variety. It wasn't interesting enough. It didn't have enough "options." It was all "attack, attack, attack." Unless, of course, the DM paved the way for remarkable experimentation.

Skills are the same kind of thing. A +10 bonus on a skill makes you a monster at that skill, but it's still just "skill check, skill check, skill check" to handle any challenge that isn't part of combat. Unless, of course, the DM paves the way for more experimentation.

So that part of the game needs to be more interesting, needs to have more variety, needs to be a place where the rogue can choose options.

Y'know how a fighter chooses to parry or cleave or whatever? A rogue should be choosing to stealth or bluff or climb or whatever.

That requires more codified exploration and interaction rules.
[/sblock]

 

[Blackbrrd]

The Fighters maneuvers primarly makes him able to do things he wouldn't be able to do without them. I think the Rogue's schtick should do the same thing. As you said, just adding a bonus to skill checks doesn't really make you envision how it's used. Maneuvers like Whirlwind attack or Cleave does.

4e added skill powers in PHB3 and I think that maybe that's a way they could take the Rogue. If they decide to stick with expertise dice, they should add more unique Rogue manuevers.

I would like the Rogues schtick in combat to be slightly less reliable, but more damaging than the Fighter's. In addition, I don't want the Rogue to be as hard to hit as the Fighter - not as a default atleast. In other words don't let light armor give as good AC as light armor.

 

[Mengu]

IMO, skills don't make up for combat. One character may gave a wide variety of skills applicable to specific situations, while another may have fewer skills applicable to a wider variety of situations. This is a fine out of combat balance. But I want everyone to have a niche in combat too.

I think the rogue is the perfect class to have an encounter power, a trick that will surprise the enemy, that he would not be able to repeat over and over. For round to round damage, maybe the rogue can't match the fighter, that's fine, but he takes advantage of opportune moments. Once per encounter, he could use that cunning to deal something like double or triple damage to an enemy (or maybe turn a regular hit into a crit). This could front load the rogue's damage, allowing him to make encounters easier by taking a target out early, or waiting for an opportune moment to take out a specific key target such as an enemy leader. This might also make up for his glass jaw, if he is ever caught by himself (which on scouting missions and the like, can easily happen). Add in some sort of silent kill feature, and you're capturing more and more of the flavor.

 

[Shieldhaven]

In my blog, I spent a bunch of time breaking down the Four Tenets of Rogue Design that Mearls posted, and how the current lack of a full-fledged skill challenge system means that rogues aren't great. (Also, some thoughts on the problems of the old skill challenge system, not that we don't all have our own opinions there.)

The short version: Just succeeding consistently isn't enough; that doesn't comprise a game. There needs to be a sense of opposition and a (probably more variable) sense of progress. I'm proposing the inclusion of a "Fate" character in skill challenges who stands in for bad luck and complications that arise in non-combat encounters (and gives the DM a clear place in the turn order).

Haven

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think the biggest issue with the whole thing is just to make sure that *if* Rogues continue to use Expertise Dice going forward... their list of maneuvers should be 75% completely different than the fighters.

Clerics and Wizards have massively different spell lists. Their spells do all kinds of different things. Fighter and Rogue maneuvers should also do massively different things. Most Fighter maneuvers are directly related to combat, the weapon attack versus defense paradigm. Perhaps most of the Rogue's maneuvers are directly related to doing ability checks... ability checks that can be used during combat to accomplish widely different things than just hitting with a weapon to cause damage like the fighter (in addition to being used outside of combat during the interaction and exploration pillars.)

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Really the current rogue is strictly inferior to the fighter in everything but skills. I don't think this is an effective or interesting way to go, no matter how effectively those skills are meshed into combat. I hope t that the next playtest will re-jigger the entire rogue expertise mechanic, but at the very least I expect they'll alter Sneak Attack some more and add in some other rogue-specific maneuvers to make the class more unique in combat.

 

[Stalker0]

Perhaps most of the Rogue's maneuvers are directly related to doing ability checks... ability checks that can be used during combat to accomplish widely different things than just hitting with a weapon to cause damage like the fighter (in addition to being used outside of combat during the interaction and exploration pillars.)

I think this is good summary of the 4e style camp. Basically this camp says: "I want the rogue to have maneuvers and power directly related to combat.

The other camp says "The rogue already gets a lot of skills that the players can use to do things in combat. They just have to use them".