So in your eyes a swashbuckler is someone who wins every fight he is in. If he doesn't, he is a poor fencer?
You have a bad habit of putting words in people's mouths.
What Mistwell said.
I will requote my post:
"Using" implies a certain competence, a capacity to use that rapier to genuine effect. And in D&D this is utterly tied to how many dice you roll for damage (plus your to hit bonus, your critical range, your static damage mods etc - if you want a summary expression, you could say it is wrapped up in your DPR).
For instance, if the typical duelist my swashbuckler will be facing has (say) 40 hp and deals 1d6+8 hp on a hit, and my swashbuckler PC has (say) 30 hp and deals 1d6+1 hp on a hit, then I have basically no chance of winning a duel with a typical duelist: assuming equal to hit chances, they will take me down in 3 blows, at which point I will have eliminated around one third of their hit points.
Under these conditions, within the fiction my character will be regarded - rightly - as a poor fencer
Nothing in that implies that a swashbuckler wins every fight s/he is in. It asserts (unambiguously) that a swashbuckler has a certain competence with the rapier, and that a so-called swashbuckler who has no reaslistic prospect of winning a duel against a typical duelist is a poor fencer.
I also put forward some hypothetical numbers to illustrate the point.
Because you haven't posted your conception of a typical 3E duelist, I don't have actual numbers to work with - hence my hypotheticals. But whether the numbers are hypothetical or actual, the point remains that a character who has no realistic prospect of winning a duel against a typical duelist is a poor fencer. Hence, you cannot divorce your conception of a character as a swashbuckler from the mechanical expression of that conception via attack statistics.
It would be equally absurd to have a conception of one's character as a great orator, and then have an 8 in CHA and no skill bonus in Diplomacy; or to have a conception of one's character as a scientist on a par with Newton and then to have a 6 INT and no skill bonus in mathematics.
If you want him to be competent then why don't you build him more competent than a charismatic rogue?
Here you actually seem to take for granted what I am asserting, namely, that a character cannot exemplify a concept indpendent of the details of its mechanical build. Given that, I don't know why you are disupting my claim (which is really just a reiteration of points made by others upthread).
This seems less a problem of balance and more an idea of "competing concepts" of what a swashbuckler is.
D&D has had a problem since probably its inception about what traits define a class and whether a class adequately reflects its supposed archetype.
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For some, a fencer with his thin blade and leather jerkin is no match for a knight armed with a greatsword and wrapped in steel. For others, the two should be totally comparable numerically and the fiction explains away the perceived differences
I think this is a separate issue. In my example I simply posited hit point and damage numbers (extrapolated roughly from a 6th level fighter and a 6th level rogue). I didn't say anything about armour or other weapons.
My personal view is that, if the game is going to make fencers mechanically inferior to knights, it shouldn't beat around the bush and create an illusion to the contrary in its presentation of options.
For some, the rogue is not a combat machine and is best served avoiding combat (or striking a dirty blow when presented) while others see him as an agile combatant full of acrobatic maneuvers and stunning redirections.
And this is also a separate issue (although it can become tangled up with the knight vs swashbuckler thing). If the rogue is not meant to be played as a swashbuckler, then I agree with [MENTION=67338]GMforPowergamers[/MENTION] that the rules shouldn't create an illusion to the contrary (by presenting a class loaded up with swashbuckling options like sneak attack, evasion, uncanny dodge, etc).
If the fighter is mechanically most optimal built as a knight,
and the rogue is not meant to be played as a swashbuckler, the upshot will be something like classic D&D.
4e of coures takes the other tack: the fighter is mechanically most optimal built as a knight (at least until some of the Martial Power options), but the rogue is a viable swashbuckler.
Either is a viable path to go down (though I think the 4e path probably increases the overall appeal of the game). It is the path that creates the illusion that swashbucklers are viable when in fact they're not which I think should be avoided.
