“You rogues are a pretty contentious people.”
stabbing noises
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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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.
Are you suggesting that adventurers should know how to adventure? Blasphemy!
I'm definitely saying the most famous thieves from fantasy and legend are never rogues.
Literally bilbo baggins you goddamn casual
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.
No True Roguesman type slander
The only rogue-esque quality Bilbo has is a species ability.
The DM gave him an OP magic item to compensate for his crappy build
Racism now smh
Bilbo is proof that anyone can fill a rogue's role (provided an obscenely powerful artifact falls into their lap).
And anyone can fill a cleric's role with enough potions and necromancy but that doesn't make wizards clerics
Y'all just classists tbh
This is why I held off on playing Skyrim until I actually took an arrow to the knee.
whistles quietly in Armorer Artificer, stealth build
... yes... not fair at all..
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I don't really know 5e very well, nor PF, but monks were always kind of an awkward fit in 3.5 too. From what I understand the redesign put then closer to an old 3.5 prestige class with the ki strikes and such.
Yeah 5e has them as using ki in ways that feels very much like they started building a psion and were told to change it to a monk. Pf2 has them also using qi magic (there it's just the monk flavoring of focus spells, something most classes have), and doing a lot of classic monk stuff. There I'm far less unhappy with it being it's own class, I just don't think wuxia classes are generally fitting enough to belong in core 2 rather than a splatbook.
Reminds me of the Palladium monk occupation. Strictly about dodging and the point was monks did NOT attack or fight. Striking an opponent meant being defrocked and losing monk status. I thought it was a neat take (and a direct response to the DnD monk trope.)
Pure dialogue and skill class. Never got a Palladium campaign really going though. Just a sea of worldbuilding.
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.