Playing a stealthy character is worthless. Unless the entire group is adapt at sneaking around...

Playing a fighty character is worthless. Unless the entire group is adapt at fighting, any time you try to use your fighting skill you will be forced to effectively play a solo mission. No good DM will focus on a single player alone while the rest of the group just sits around doing nothing. And even if you get a shitty DM who allows you to play a solo combat mission, if you charge their ranks then you're alone behind enemy lines. At that point either you get caught/killed and you're fucked, or the enemy has to be so weak you can singlehandedly take them on (which raises the question why you even bothered to fight when the four of you could just sneak past any resistance).

Any enchanting/crafting related skill is useless, because finding equipment is a necessity. It's not a skill, it's a DM's plot device disguised as a skill with a high opportunity cost.

Thoughts?

The thing is, 90% of dnd characters are fighty, so you'll almost never be in such a situation.

And crafting is useless.

>Unless the entire group is adapt at fighting
Every single class in D&D has some combat options though. Unless the rest of the party is full of Truenamers or NPCs, you'll never be in a situation where you're the only fighty character.

>Any enchanting/crafting related skill is useless, because finding equipment is a necessity.
This is true. If WBL is followed, you can buy anything you would otherwise craft without wasting feats on it. Only scrolls and wands are debatably worth crafting over buying. And we're assuming RAW here, not DM intervention (such as claiming magical weapons are not for sale).

maybe that just speaks to the focus of the game. Consider WoD, where every not every character was expected to have combat options. The one combat guy was often bored.

Maybe if every character had social options, or exploration options, then everyone could contribute equally to every encounter

>Consider WoD, where every not every character was expected to have combat options. The one combat guy was often bored.
I've never played WoD but that sounds like bad game design. Only one guy has combat options, and he has combat options exclusively. So regardless of the circumstances, he either is the only one who's useful or he's dead weight.

In pf at least, going by the Core rulebook and the GMG, you can't buy anything worth more than 16000gp. Anything worth more than that you have to make yourself, or find as loot. This means you cap out at the following:

+2 Weapon
+4 Armor
+4 Cloak of Resistance
+2 Ring of Deflection
+2 Amulet of Natural Armor
+4 Single Stat Booster or +2/+2/+2 Combined Stat Booster

Solo missions are easy when you use the Chris Perkins method.

The party splits, the solo guy gets to a big moment. Cut to the rest of the group when something happens on that end. This way an individual is only getting 15-20 minutes of time tops before the rest of the group moves. It also means if a side pauses to think or begins arguing you swap to the other group to push the story along.

As soon as I starting doing this in my games suddenly my party stopped going everywhere in one cluster, and I think it is because there are no long breaks in doing so. Now everyone gets some action and as shit gets worse they are all still constantly doing something.

PF also lets you commission items, those rules are for off the shelf items and not the giant fuck-off sword you requested.

Commissioning items is nowhere in the core rulebook, it is literally a houserule.

Better take those crafting feats

Unless you play a system where everyone can have Stealth. Like HERO System. I've been playing it since 1983, and Stealth has always been a full-party affair.

This is exactly how I feel stealth characters should be treated. 5e seems to be balanced around rogues doing a nominal sneak attack every round to be roughly equal to other classes in DPT, which seems like a mistake to me. If sneak attacks were more difficult to pull off, happening only once or twice per combat encounter, but did much larger amounts of damage, you'd have a lot less "I sneak attack, then hide again" every round, and playing rogue would be an exercise in patience and opportunism, rather than simply playing a slightly different fighter. Rogues should be designed around taking out high-value targets quickly, though at the expense of lower DPT than other combat-focused classes after they've blown their cover, not getting sneak attacks every turn while still being roughly equal in DPT to your berserker.

This is only true if your DM is the Casual DM that makes a series of rooms leading to the next encounter. Most good DM's are skilled enough to switch back and forth between sneaking and non-sneaking players to keep things interesting. Even if the players decide to stay behind, just having a friendly-but-potentially-hostile encounter show up and wanting to investigate where the sneaking character is can keep things very interesting.

Also, the proper use of tracking skills is as a shortcut, not the main path. If a scenario requires the players to track someone down, normally, you would have them gather information in town, solve some clues, maybe get into a fight, until they can successfully reach the intended path. However, someone with tracking skills will have the ability to circumvent that entirely by just tracking where they went from the scene of the crime.

A quick addendum: you could get lucky in those major magic item rolls in a metropolis, but Mr. Fighter is statistically never going to see anything in his maximum weapon group, let alone his weapon focus chain ever.

Settlement limits for reference:

Thorpe 50 gp -> Shithole
Hamlet 200 gp
Village 500 gp
Small town 1,000 gp
Large town 2,000 gp
Small city 4,000 gp
Large city 8,000 gp
Metropolis 16,000 gp -> City of Brass

>crafting is useless
yeah have fun with only using what you find or buy. I'll just be over here enjoying my players' crazy item ideas.

>Unless the entire group is adapt at sneaking around, any time you try to use your stealth you will be forced to effectively play a solo mission. No good DM will focus on a single player alone while the rest of the group just sits around doing nothing.

If this is what you're basing your argument on, I don't agree. A good DM will know how to merge the solo mini-mission the rogue is on and the greater-scope mission the party has. By definition, a good DM knows how to make a session work regardless of the content; while you could counter-argue that a good DM wouldn't let the situation come up in the first place, that invalidates the rogue's existence to begin with and makes your argument self-fufulling.

In short, my thoughts are that you're wrong.

Fuck you, you're retarded, and your family tree is a square.

You gonna shitpost, I'll reply on your level

Purchase limit in a Metropolis is 100,000 gold not 16,000. The 16,000 gold is the upper limit for magic items you can find off the shelf with a 75% chance to find it.

NPCs have the ability to create magic items with the cost listed in the core rules.

A +7 weapon is 98,000 gold. You just need to find an NPC that can make the item, but considering up to 8th level casting is available there is very little off limits.

The purchase limit is how much a settlement can afford to pay YOU for shit you SELL. It's effectively the price tag on the net liquid assets in the entire community.

Commissioning items is literally not in Core, the GMG, or any other rulebook. Yes, any 3rd level adept worth their salt cane make a shitload of great stuff, but asking someone to make shit for you above the magic item limit is a houserule.

From GMG:
>A settlement's purchase limit is the most money a shop in the settlement can spend to purchase any single item from the PCs. If the PCs wish to sell an item worth more than a settlement's purchase limit, they'll either need to settle for a lower price, travel to A larger city, or (with the GM's permission) search for a specific buyer in the city with deeper pockets. A settlement's type sets its purchase limit.

This is why in my system you can do group skill challenges. Basically the most skilled character (in this case: highest stealth score) rolls for the entire party then narrates helping the less stealthy characters succeed.

Winning is also a necessity, so why bother investing in combat abilities? In fact why have rules or stats at all if the DM is so bad that he makes every situation a guaranteed success? Enemies can't flee or hide, it might as well just be freeform.

It just depends on how you handle the sneak.

I tend to let the player make one roll and then they keep that roll unless the situation drastically changes. The guards then as a whole get one roll and that only changes if the situation changes ( sneaky player trips a trap that makes a loud noise or some tougher guards or watchdogs etc appear, for example ).

I see a lot of GM's make the player roll for every potential guard/ room etc and roll for each individual guard back and not only is this a tedious exercise in dice rolls but will inevitably cause failure as eventually the player will roll super low or the guards will get a random crit success.

Group stealth checks also work as long as half pass it's fine and the group can get past together.

As for the issues with tracking they are rather a non issue if you don't play on a railroad. My players fucked up tracking this bbeg henchman who had just stolen a map that would lead the players to the dungeon with the magical thing they were after and they ended up stranded in the woods and had to work out another way of finding it bexause I always run multilayered solutions to issues.

Well I misremembered purchase limits. That's what I get for not playing in years.

You're still wrong that commissioned items are a house rule. If a GM makes an NPC that crafts items based on the rules, and the cost of any crafted magic item is the rules, then buying a custom magic item is literally in the rules by RAW and RAI.

It figures WBL would be even more broken as written than ever imagined.

Crafting your own magic items is fine, that's what the feats are there for. However, the Magic item limits are exactly what they are: limits. You can planeshift to the fucking city of brass itself, where your average commoner is a CR8 efreeti and is literally the richest city in 3.x fluff (from memory), and you are still beholden to the 16000gp limit. Anything worth more than that you can't *buy*. I'm not saying it's a bad houserule, in fact RAI I agree completely. However, on the strictest reading of RAW, there is no system in place for Mr. Fighter to walk up to Ms. Adept and say here's 50315gp, make me a +5 Longsword.

Honestly, there should just be no non magical PC classes. When I gm, I ban all noncasters, all full casters, and the summoner [because it fucks with the magic item creation rules just by existing], and when players hit the 16000gp limit, they just start making their own shit via feats. I think that's the purpose of the rule, to get players interested in making their own shit, and learning how to use the custom magic item table. At the very least, I have fun with it, and I do enforce it in that manner for that reason, after telling players what's up with the magic item mart at the start.

Just to clarify: I think items above 16000gp are to be quested for, maybe as an exchange of services for an NPC crafter, but as a gib gold receive sord system, I don't think that's RAW due to the total lack of a mechanic, contrasted with the mechanic for commissioning spellcasting services.

Well, in my campaign we get solo or almost solo stuff happening fairly frequently just because of poor attendance, but yeah. In general I agree, and I have never used stealth in a situation where other players were also involved.

Although the "behind enemy lines" thing has a couple solutions, including signalling the party to bail you out, talking your ass off, or running like hell and hoping to break through the "lines", where hopefully there isn't a wall of orcs playing red rover.

>Any tracking/survival related skill is useless, because finding the enemy is a necessity. It's not a skill
It can be useful for setting up ambushes rather than being ambushed, or for hunting if you actually track food, but by default it's as you describe.

>Unless the entire group is adapt at fighting
Thing is, there are many entire game systems built around this premise, including most of the big names, which isn't the case for stealth. No point in making a post where you say "unless [something that's usually a given]" in the second sentence.

>your family tree is a square
That's a top-tier insult

This always struck me as a fault of the theatreofmindfags than anything. In a good game with tile movement, when the PCs know a fight is imminent, I ask the rogue/stealthy guy to make a check, and if he succeeds, I show him the enemy setup and tell him he can put himself whereever he wants on the battle map and give him a surprise round while the other PCs enter the area as normal. If he fails, I place him within movement range of at least 1 enemy but no more than three, and the other PCs enter the scene as normal.

If space in the battlefield is literally meaningless, as it invariably is in theatreofmindfag battles, then of course the benefit of the element of surprise isn't very meaningful.

Well, it works out fine as long as you don't min-max to be purely social/fight/skull monkey fella

Stealth characters are at their best when they flank enemies undetected or steal stuff while the other PCs distract someone, etc. Unless the character or class is fundamentally broken then there's no excuse for it: you're just bad DMing.

What, you place him? I'm not certain that makes sense, if it's his character sneaking, but I really like the concept. Maybe showing him the setup and allowing him to place him where he wants to, provided that you plot out the move and make him roll additional checks if he passes through an area he might be spotted, for example?

5e rogues literally do this though, you have to pick up the assassin archetype. It does literally exactly the thing you said.

Also rogues are lower in dpr than every other class except monk, so I am going to say you have no idea what you are talking about, since the system already does exactly what you want it to do. (Assassin) rogues get a big spike in damage at the beginning of combat once if they were being sneaky, then they do less damage than everyone else.

The other rogue archetypes do stuff like stealing spells or buckle swashes instead.

>your family tree is a square.

>I'm not certain that makes sense, if it's his character sneaking

Because he got caught out, so he's not where he wants to be. Simple as that.

This only addresses the combat approach. If all you do is dungeondelving and combat, fine, but your experience isn't typical.

It's the only context in which OP's scenario arises. If there's no chance of combat and it's an "everyone splits up and does their own thing" type scene, then it's no different from the Wizard going off to buy magical artifacts and rolling a Haggling check or whatever.

Games are also 'balanced' so the a direct approach is just as effective as a stealth approach.

Wait, shit, I thought that you were the guy placing him if he succeeded. Sorry, I misread it. I'm probably going to steal this.

Just had a rogue do two good runs with sneaking on ahead, managed to extract himself taking only a little damage and after dishing more than the fighter or any big spell thrown. Cleric patches him up after, no problemo.

Git Gud OP, stealth is fun - whole party watches and listens intently while he's doing his forward work.

>your family tree is a square
Well I guess I'll be fucking saving that. Christ.

>No good DM will focus on a single player alone while the rest of the group just sits around doing nothing. And even if you get a shitty DM who allows you to play a solo stealth mission

Can't the DM just have someone DM this bit seperately for him or do it at another time, separate from the game.

If a player wants to do something solo just have them come over an hour earlier or something so you can do it then.

solo sneaking is fun as a gm

you can mess with the player and you have more control over what happens.

tis fun.

Chow-YunFat giving thumbs up.jpg

I remember this one time, we did a joint sneak attack on an old island fortress. There was an entrance to an underground lair hidden out there, so we were going to create a "distraction."

Went out on the water in a boat at night, and we surrounded the boat in magical darkness.

Snuck up onto the shore, handed off some chemicals to the rogue. The kind that burn and explode when you heat them. The rogue goes for the wall, while half of the party begins sneaking around the beach towards the other side of the island to get a head start on looking for the target area.

The rogue sneaks over to the walls and scales them, and just starts slathering the chemical all over it. They get back down to ground level and head off, and the party's jester just points at the spot on the wall with his hand like a gun and casts pyrotechnics.

Meanwhile, up on the ramparts
>"Sort of a boring night, isn't it."
>"Sure is... Say, do you hear laughi-"
AND THE WALL CAME TUMBLING DOWN.
Half of this old castle just starts to fold in on itself and all of the guards are running to that side of the thing. Into a Pyrotechnics-induced smokescreen.

Was it obvious that they'd been attacked? Sure. But our insane diversion was too sudden to respond to, and we managed to sneak into the dungeon

Wrong on both points. It's remarkably simple to provide the sneaky person an opportunity to sneak while the rest of the group does something related. Have the rogue or whatever be looking for incriminating documents at the corrupt baron's manor while the rest of the group need to cause a bit of a ruckus.

And let's say we grant that the group MUST find the bad (despite a multitude of scenarios existing where they could completely fail and the game could continue), if direct tracking skills are the quickest and most convenient way but they don't have them all it takes is the GM not being completely pants on head for time-related consequences to start racking up.

But the books lay out social interactions, which is what commissioning an item would be. Is any social interaction not spelled out specifically by the book "homebrew"?

The exception is a Night Caste from Exalted, where you will murder everyone when you turn your stealth on.

Seriously, PCs can do it with very little effort.