Forum > Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion
Whaaa! My Rogue Sucks! Whaaaaa!
Maddman:
Overall, I'd say the problem is that the group is rolling ability scores in 3e. So yes, some characters are going to be much better overall at low levels. It would be less disruptive IMO to roll 1d4 for starting levels. At least eventually you'd catch up that way.
Things Unattempted:
--- Quote from: CleanCutRogue ---Rogues have always been my favorite class. So when I converted to D&D 3rd edition (now 3.5) so long ago - I feel my favorite class got the short end of the stick.
--- End quote ---
I grew up with 1st edition, and a while before 3rd edition was released, I was thinking about ways to improve rogues (we called them thieves back then) after flipping through The Throne of Bloodstone. It's a high level adventure for characters from level 18 to 100.
It gives pregenerated 100th level characters, on the off chance that the players don't have any of their own. Hermes is a 100th level thief with a 25 dexterity. Here are his thief skills: Pick Pockets:170%, Open Locks 154%, Find/Remove Traps: 145%, Move Silently 134%, Hide in Shadow 134%, Hear Noise 65%, Climb Walls 84.7%, Read Languages 80%, Use scrolls at 25% and 5x backstab multiplier.
Two things: Once I made a campaign with really high level characters and one of them had thief skills. His sheet was written up so that he was automatically successful unless there were extenuating circumstances. The other thing is Hear Noise at 65%?! What?! Climb Walls fails 3 times out of twenty?! My first level Spiderclimbing mage has a better success rate than that.
I was pretty happy with rogues in 3rd edition. As a couple other people before me have said, I don't think they're the best stand alone class, but nor are the totally worthless, and with evasion, oodles of skills and improved sneak attack damage, they are orders of magnitude better than what they were.
Sigmund:
--- Quote from: Cyclotron ---No, he doesn't. The wizard rolled better...
Let's assume that the Wizard rolled an 18 Dexterity, which would qualify as "amazing", I think, to a Rogue with a 15 Dexterity. For now, Intelligence is irrelevent, since we'll only be looking at one skill, Move Silently, which we'll try to maximaize as a standard Wizard.
First, we make our Wizard a Halfling. This gives us an additional +2 bonus to Dexterity for a total Dexterity ability score of 20, and also a +2 racial bonus to Move Silently checks. Already, we have an untrained bonus of +7 to Move Silently.
Next, we drop 4 skill points into the cross-class skill, bringing us up to +9.
We choose a cat familiar for another +3 bonus, for a total bonus of +12.
Finally, we can pick Skill Focus (Move Silently) as our first level feat for an additional +3... +15 altogether.
And that's not counting Spells or MAgic Items that could come into play later.
A best, a first level Rogue with a 15 Dexterity will likely have a Move Silently of +9 (+2 Dex, +4 ranks, +3 Skill Focus)... +11 if he's a Halfling or a Human. It'll probably take that Rogue 3 to 5 levels to catch up with the Wizard.
Granted, it a pretty ludicrous example, but it is possible, if the Wizard's player is bent on making the Rogue's player look like a fool.
:p
--- End quote ---
And of course the Wiz is gimping himself in other areas....giving up having another metamagic or caster-related feat to get the skill focus, sacrificing Knowledge, Spellcraft, and/or Concentration skill ranks to get his stealth.
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