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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 4158878" data-attributes="member: 1645">I'm not the original poster, but we can definitely give rogues a chance at a one-shot kill without having to give fighters a "new toy" to compensate.  After all, we can give rogues a chance at a one-shot kill without making them any more powerful.As I've already pointed out, a one-shot kill is inordinately difficult in D&D, because D&D uses ablative hit points.  If you want a character to survive three or four shots in a hit-point system, you look at how much damage an attack does, and you give that character three or four times as many hit-points.  That makes a one-shot kill not just improbable but impossible -- unless you add on rules to make it possible to do four times average damage, which critical hits and sneak attacks try to do.The obvious way around this is to use something other than hit points.  That's what the assassin's death attack does.  It's usable less often than a typical sneak attack -- it requires three rounds of studying the victim -- but it goes against a Fortitude save.  The rogue's sneak attack could simply work like this; in fact, it's odd that it doesn't, since it's conceptually the exact same thing: sneaking up on someone and striking them somewhere vulnerable.Of course, skipping hit points feels like a bit of a kludge, but we can work with them a bit.  For instance, what if we increased sneak-attack dice to d10 or d12 -- but they only applied that extra damage if it was enough to kill the target?  Instead of doing an extra 14 points of damage, a sneak attack might have the potential to do an extra 22 points, but if those extra points don't drop the guard below 0, it means he did manage to squirm, and he didn't take a blade to the kidney.Or we could change the whole notion of hit points, so that they're not about ability to absorb damage at all, but about ability to avoid damage -- explicitly -- and we let characters use hit points against the to-hit roll.  Then hits would be less common, but they'd hurt, which strains credibility much less.</blockquote>

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