My hot take, rogues, and their predecessors thieves, shouldn’t exist. Their monopoly on stealth, traps, locks, etc shouldn’t all be in one class, and instead should be stuff that other classes are expected to handle individually.

“You rogues are a pretty contentious people.”

stabbing noises

whistles quietly in Armorer Artificer, stealth build

… yes… not fair at all…

Are you suggesting that adventurers should know how to adventure? Blasphemy!

Don’t even get me started about modern artificers, but this isn’t about specific editions or current meta. Whatever that means in a roleplaying game. I’m talking about the underlying assumption built into the game loop vs the stories we’re trying to bring to life.

I’m definitely saying the most famous thieves from fantasy and legend are never rogues.

Before the Artificers it was the rangers who were “stealing the stealth thunder from the rogue.” Heck, I remember in 3rd ed when people said the Bard was “stealing the Rogue’s lunch” because their skill mastery made them decent with traps.

Rogues have always fiercely guarded their tricks because being able to do everything does feel nice.

They feel far more to be a relic of a bygone era in which the idea of a skill monkey carrying their weight to the game felt reasonable.

I do think that there are many opportunities to create a good rogue class. But rogue encompasses too many ideas, while simultaneously being far more of a backstory than an actual class.

The meat of the class that I think is valuable is a martial that’s survivability is in dodging and whose offensive loop is to set up and exploit vulnerability each turn, whether it’s by buffing themselves or debuffing their enemy. The problem is games like 5e take this and the math they give rogues just doesn’t work out to leave them feeling equal to any other martial getting two attacks with 1d12/2d6 or even 1d8

My favorite game I ever ran was a party of halflings who all multi classed rogue/something else. This was 3rd edition and the party among other things showed how broken the combination of tumbling and flanking was.

Literally bilbo baggins you goddamn casual

Bilbo is proof that anyone can fill a rogue’s role (provided an obscenely powerful artifact falls into their lap).

Every time I talk about this someone brings up Bilbo. He was a thief by employment, but he’s not a rogue or a thief by D&D standards, which is exactly my point. His entire story was about not being a thief but figuring it out as he was going. Conan was called a thief, but he’s not a rogue either. All the best thiefs aren’t rogues.

Don’t forget Sneak Attack/flanking. Waiting for the perfect moment and striking at an enemy’s weak point? That’s obviously not something a fighter, trained for battle, would know to do. Better give it to the thief, most of whom aren’t trained killers outside of the rare assassin. Yeah, that makes sense.

No True Roguesman type slander

The only rogue-esque quality Bilbo has is a species ability.

The meat of the class that I think is valuable is a martial that’s survivability is in dodging and whose offensive loop is to set up and exploit vulnerability each turn, whether it’s by buffing themselves or debuffing their enemy.

sad monk class sounds

But seriously, I always felt archetype of light armor being the ‘stealth’ armor class was silly. Sure, less penalty than chains and plates, but still.

Ah, you just brought up the class that I think actually doesn’t belong in most games. Tonally a whole class devoted to wuxia is fucking nuts in something like 5e and has no place in the basic 10 in pf2.

The rogue I described having a fast pugilist subclass who buffs itself with speed every turn giving it added ac and lightning strike is good enough to fit the monk. A fighter pugilist is a different monk. As is a paladin. Why do I care? Because the monk slot should have gone to psions, especially in 5e where that’s clearly what it was designed to be.

Racism now smh

The DM gave him an OP magic item to compensate for his crappy build