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Oct 29, 2012 -- 6:04PM, xtianstone wrote:

I actually like this. It says that a rogue can sneak attack and deal out damage like a fighter but in limited circumstances.  Instead of giving the rogue a super lethal attack that they can do most rounds, bring that back into balance.

I would suggest adding something extra to this though...

Sneak Attack:  If the attack is a critical, double the total additional damage from these dice.  That means that when a rogue does get a critical hit, which is less common, his attack does march up into the lethal range.  This way, a rogue does less damage than a fighter normally.  Within certain circumstances, the rogue can choose to do more damage and be equivalent to a fighter.  In the occasion of a critical, the rogue can effectively assassinate their target.

Meanwhile, the rogue can choose when to use these dice for damage, and when they can repurpose them for other tricks and effects.  I do like the change!  Rogue does not equal to abusive combat damage machine to me. 

Have you seen criticals yet? They are totally broken...

Oct 29, 2012 -- 5:38PM, mrpopstar wrote:

I think there's been a clear desire to broaden narrow the scope of the rogue so as not to pigeon-hole him as the 'high damage-dealing skills guy'. Putting heavier lighter restrictions on his ability to get lethal makes no sense, if the inferences I've understood from the designer's varied misguided statements are reliable.

There, I fixed it.  Allowing rogues to outdo the fighter for damage in certain circumstances does not pigeon hole them into being the "damage dealer," especially if those spikes average out against a typically lower DPR thanks to  smaller damage dice.  And even if they did get higher DPR when played smart enough to get SA often, the fighter is still king of combat for being substantially more durable.  And that's assuming fighters should be king of combat, a can of worms I don't feel like opening right now so I won't argue with it.  

The truth is, making rogues strictly worse in all ways to fighters within combat is actually pigeon-holing them far more than giving them one thing that they can do - at least if they want to - to shine.   That forces him to be the skills guy, who can be better at knowing things than the wizard for some inexplicable reason, and who gets twice as many skills chances to push somebody else out of the spotlight out of combat.  He literally has no other niche to exploit, and that is far, far more pigeon holing than being better at DPR (when everyone else has some other thing they're better at in combat, like durability, AoE/control, heal/buff).  At the moment, the only reason to play a rogue instead of a dex based fighter is to get more skills.  Or you just really love controlled fall and defensive roll, seeing as how the only other maneuvres you get that the fighter doesn't are iron will (not all that different from great fortitude) and sneak attack (strictly worse than deadly strike).  There is not one single thing that the rogue can do better in combat than the fighter, and that's plain wrong IMNSHO.  Worse, because rogues don't just get a +3 from training but a +3 + expertise dice, there's a temptation to focus even harder on skills because you get more benefit out of extra training than the next guy.  So you can't even hope that the fighter will take "skills specialist" while the rogue takes some kind of combat-improving specialty, evening things out.  

My preference?  As a quick fix, SA should be double the amount rolled, a bunch more in combat but not DPR maneuvres should be added to the list, and skill master should be replace with a mechanic not tied to expertise dice.  The current methodology makes rogues better at their trained skills than people with higher attributes and training, and progressively more better as they level (highest of 3d10 is about +8.5, enough to swamp even a 20 stat and a few extra points).  That both steps on everybody else's toes and encourages rogues to specialize even further into skills.  Take 10 had the right idea, cutting away the lower bound without adding to the upper bound, making rogues reliably good but not capable of greater heights of awesome than anybody else in a given trained skill.  It failed as a mechanic because it made failure impossible on all but the hardest checks, but it had the right idea.  I would replace it with the following mechanic: roll 2d6 in addition to the d20 and take the highest.  It doesn't add much to the average roll (11 and change), so it doesn't make trained rogues better at knowing stuff than wizards, and it's still quite possible to fail.  But you'll roll a lot less 1-4s and a lot more 5-12s, making a skilled character pretty reliable for moderate checks but not so reliable that you shouldn't bother rolling.  Sadly, this mechanic does not lend itself well to expertise dice, as it would be completely useless up to level 3, and 2d6 would be useless if you only use the highest roll but 2d8 and 3d10 are too awesome if you use the sum.