T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
The Plot-Driven Door
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
Poor Gimli. At least he tried.
Gimli’s player feels like the only one of our characters that might fit in the roleplaying group we see in Darths & Droids.
Gimli’s player bringing up roleplaying here is rather funny considering he just metagamed his way into the Paths of the Dead in the last strip after the DM told him Gimli was paralyzed with fear: “Oh, I’ve played Call of Cthulhu, therefore I’m not scared by your description, therefore Gimli isn’t either – see you inside.”
Now there’s certainly a discussion to be had about whether a DM can tell you what your character is feeling, but Gimli’s player doesn’t even bother coming up with an RP explanation for why Gimli isn’t scared, just goes OOC to argue against it.
These players are all dummies! Even Gimli! Every seasoned tomb explorer knows that the FIRST thing you do is CHECK FOR TRAPS! ;)
That makes sense, both in the real(?) sense and in terms of metagaming (see Tomb of Horrors), but depending on which RPG rules we’re talking, there might be no point.
I believe when this comic was written while DnD 3rd or 3.5 was the current edition, both of which had a rule that only Rogues could find traps of certain difficulties (which in practice meant that in most adventures, only rogues could find traps). And they have no Rogues (I think?).
It was a rule meant to keep Rogues relevant, when Wizards could cast Knock and Unseen Servant/Summon Monster 1, I think.
I was about to say where is a halfling when you need one, but then I remembered that while Pippin found all the traps, he was terrible at disarming any of them…
There was also a cleric spell, Find Traps. No skill roll, you just know it’s there. At least it didn’t disarm them.
A lot of the published modules didn’t include any traps anyway.
The rules for backstab meant the rogue had to be positioned on the opposite side of an ally from an enemy. To do that, usually the rogue had to be in the middle of the enemy ranks. Since they had a lower AC and lower hit points than the fighter, this was a problem. Ranged backstab was also a problem.
There were a number of problems with rogues in 3/3.5. They did fix at least some of them for 5th.
Why yes, I played some rogues in 3rd. It sure wasn’t for power fantasy.
Preach it.
I think the Fighter/Barbarian was meant to go into the middle, and give flanking opportunities to the Rogue darting around the sides. But whether that actually happened is another question (Fighters preferred to stay still and full attack, and the mages wanted the meat shields between them and the threats).
And then you can throw in the issue of stealth not being very useful as a team skill if you’re the only one who has it.
And then all the monsters that were immune to Sneak Attack! First time I played a rogue, turns out that dungeon was all zombies and skellies :(
Those editions had a pretty bad divide between casters and non-casters, and rogues were low tier even for non-casters.