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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hafrogman" data-source="post: 5887914" data-attributes="member: 8858">I was actually thinking about this just this morning, because I found myself musing along the lines of "If lurker is a theme, and criminal is a background, what IS a rogue?"And so basically in the DDN idea of the basic choices modeling older editions with the standard choices, the "standard" rogue is your criminal, lurker rogue who ends up looking much like a Thief or a 3.X rogue.  However, to figure out what the rogue is, it needs to be distilled further in order to get something more generic.And so perhaps the rogue's niche IS the skill monkey.  What skills he has come more from his theme and background, but he's either got a broader base of skills or perhaps something like skill knacks or tricks.  The effort to flatten math seeming to be that a character in their element isn't necessarily better (a higher skill check) but can simply do more/multitask better than a character out of their element.But then in an effort to make sure the rogue isn't useless in combat, the base rogue's idea I came up with is these two points:a) A rogue focuses on skills over specific combat training or magic and b) A rogue uses skills in combat to attempt to gain an advantage over an opponent.This gives us the lurker rogue who uses stealth skills to try and sneak attack opponents, but it can also give us a swashbuckler who uses social skills (bluff, etc) to try and dazzle, distract and taunt opponents into dropping their guard, the thief-acrobat who uses movement skills (tumble, jump, climb) to dart and flip around the battle field to strike from unexpected directions, and the scholarly adventurer type who uses knowledge type skills to find and exploit weaknesses of the monsters he meets.  All are rogues.</blockquote>

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