Salthorae said:
It really depends on what you're allowing in your game. If you allow every single thing from every book put out, yeah you can probably do away with rogues, but I've had characters toasted by so many traps in my gaming life that I wouldn't recommend getting rid of them entirely...
Sure your Cleric (if you have one) may be able to detect that mechanical trap ahead with Find Traps, but can he disarm it? Dang, too bad... and that's the only way out of the dungeon with a raging Terrasque behind you too...
So, either kill the monster or suck up the damage from the trap or just shrug and hand the DM your character sheet. Classes should be in the party because somebody wants to play one, not because somebody has to.
I think the most constructive way to look at this question is to break it down into what roles the rogue covers. Then we have to ask two questions: A) how valuable is this role, and B) does the rogue have a monopoly on the role?
The latter question can be answered handily with "only at very low levels when the party is short on magical resources". The vast majority of a rogue's functions are easily rendered obsolete by items and spells.
The former question requires a little more elaboration:
SCOUTING
The value of sneaking around is often brought into question. To sneak up on enemies, you have to separate yourself from all the party members who aren't good at sneaking. I'm sure we've seen enough horror movies to know how bad an idea splitting up can be. Often this means the rogue is all by himself.
In addition, only a minority of PHB races have darkvision (dwarf, half-orc), while virtually all monsters have it and just walk around in the dark all the time. This means that without some magic item or spell to provide darkvision artificially, the human, elven, half-elven, gnomish, or halfling rogue has to carry a light and that is pretty antithetical to stealth.
On top of all that, scouting slows things down, often unnecessarily. If a rogue doesn't come across a threat, then he's wasted time. Even more frustrating is scouting ahead and successfully locating a threat, only to consistently find that the threat could be handled with brute force kick-in-the-door tactics anyway. Remember, the concept of subtlety is antithetical to the nature of many gamers, who want the game to offer non-stop combat. They find iit more fun to sell their characters' lives cheaply in battle than sit around idly.
TRAP MITIGATION
Man, you don't have to read many of the web articles by WotC design staff to know that they regard traps as a legacy of a playstyle that they want kicked to the curb. To them, a dungeon is not best approached as some lethal enigma, a puzzle to be cautiously approached with a mixture or dread and wonder. Rather, characters should frolic in them like a cobweb-filled Chucky Cheese. Threats should be straightforward, non-combat obstacles should be circumvented by expending a modicum of resources and moving on. D&D is not Myst, it's Halo.
And this is not their sentiment alone. Again, many players come to the dungeon to kick butt, not to climb out of pits. The way many folks see it, traps are not fun. A weak trap is going to burn some insignificant resources and be pointless, while a nasty trap is going to burn a lot of resources and force the party to rest prematurely. Very rarely is a trap actually deadly. Many just do damage like a weapon attack, and 3e characters are tough enough to either get away from the source of the damage or just tough it out. Posion just does ability damage, which is lame because it's so rarely lethal but is always enough to make players want to curl up into a ball.
One thing I see a lot in WotC adventures these days is to present a trap as a mere stat blocked, basically boiling trap mitigation down to a Search/Disable Device check. How dull is that? Traps used to have a little personality to them. They had that puzzle-solving element that made them memorable. It's a real shame that's been "streamlined" away from so many adventures.
With both scouting and trap mitigation, it's pretty obvious that the DM is the key to the equation. Is he bothering to give the rogue a role in the party that's both useful and interesting?
So, there's two roles right there. What others are we looking at here?
