Rogue Subclass Design

The rogue is perhaps my favorite character class. I played a thief, the AD&D forerunner to the rogue, in my first long-running campaign. Cunning Action and Sneak Attack are evocative, fun mechanics that do a good job of conveying the idea of a slippery, tricky character. However, the class has a few issues with its core identity.

Rogue One

The rogue, as a master of skills, can generate check results that significantly outpace other characters. However, the benefit of such high bonuses is at best nebulous. A successful check yields the same benefit whether you beat a DC by 15 or 1.

Rogues are also good at handling traps, but over the years those have become less important in play. Traps are also rarely an interesting part of play. They tend to trigger and deal a lot of damage, or the rogue finds and disables it. There have been attempts to make them more interactive, but those efforts haven’t caught on.

The rogue also has the top symptom of subclasses with a poor conceptual definition. Does the game refer to a class’s subclass as archetypes? That means the design team never had a clear idea of what the subclass meant within the class.

The upside is that when building rogue subclasses, you have a lot of room to build your own conceptual space.

Design Structure

Rogue subclasses are weirdly low impact. Looking at the thief, we have a subclass that waits until 17th level to deliver a direct damage boost. Its other benefits are either niche or low utility. Use Magic Device might be useful, depending on your campaign and if you are willing to wait 13 levels for it.

I think the rogue has a fundamental design flaw in that not enough power is reserved for its subclasses. I also think the rogue lags a bit in damage output, despite the truckload of d6s that sneak attack brings to the table. It’s literally the only damage output feature that the core class receives. Cunning Action sits on top of bonus actions, the best way to deliver boosts to weapon-using characters.

I think a good rogue subclass needs to create a core mechanic that doesn’t use bonus actions and gives the rogue an extra layer of gameplay on top of the class’s core chassis. As with the fighter, we can use the spellcasting subclass to figure out how much of a power budget we have to play with.

Building a Core Mechanic

We’ve established a few design principles for rogue subclasses:

·         Don’t use bonus actions (unless its an ability mean to expand cunning action)

·         Add some combat utility

·         Give the rogue play a core mechanic that expresses the subclass’s identity

The fighter and rogue both have the same daily output budget for their subclasses. Here’s a recap of the commentary from the fighter, after I cleverly replaced fighter with rogue in the text:

Rogue Level     Total Daily Damage Output

3             22

4 to 6    33

7 to 9    77

10 to 12               94          

13 to 15               149

16 to 18               176

19 to 20               209

You can cap the daily rogue’s damage output at the damage equal to the highest level spell a wizard of the same level as the rogue could use. That information is all in chapter 9 of the 2014 DMG.

When crafting daily rogue abilities, the total damage output at a given level should add up to the value given in the listing above. For example, a 5th rogue fighter should do a total of 33 damage on average using features that they regain after a long rest.

You might want to go with short rest cooldowns for your subclass. In that case, use the battle master fighter as your guide. Duplicate its martial dice, and you should be in the ballpark for power level.

Crafting a Mechanic

Building a core mechanic for a subclass takes a lot of work. There’s a reason most subclasses build features that look a lot like ones you’d see from any other class. A new mechanic takes more time to develop, balance, and playtest. However, I think it’s worth it in the long run. Each attempt is a chance for you to skill up. If you hit something fun and novel, you have a good bead on a subclass that will stand out to your players. There’s no secret formula, but I can share some tips based on my experiences.

Lesson 1: It Should Feel a Little Broken

“Feel” does a lot of work in this sentence. The first time looking at the mechanic, the player should be excited to play it. It should let them do things that seem a little overpowered, but not obviously so. A clever design finds ways to place non-obvious limits on a feature.

Sneak attack is a good example of this. The Internet is filled with stories of DMs toning down its damage. A 3rd level rogue does 2d6 extra damage! Outrageous! It looks great until you realize that a wizard can do more than that to a significant chunk of monsters in a fight with burning hands. By 5th level, the fighter’s second attack pushes that class ahead of the rogue in raw damage output.

However, all those dice feel powerful. You could argue that feel too powerful, as the rogue’s shallow damage progression leaves it behind other classes.

Lesson 2: It Should Be Broadly Useful

A subclass that only functions in combat or in certain situations is too limited. Since we need this mechanic to bring the character’s identity to life, it has to offer utility in every phase of the game. The most elegant approach grants features that are naturally useful across multiple situations. Teleportation is great in a fight, in a chase, or when trying to infiltrate a location.

Many mechanics consist of a resource (dice, a pool of points) spent on various abilities that are each sculpted to a specific situation. This approach is a tried and true tool for game designers, and it’s a good starting point. In some ways, you should ask yourself why you are not opting for this route.

Within the system, this approach requires you to figure out the damage value of your resource and then determine how much of that resource to give the character at each level. When you design abilities, you can use spell levels (and their typical damage) to get a sense of when a character should gain access to them and the scope of what they can offer.

My experience is that players love flexible mechanics that are open to creative uses. Don’t be afraid to build options with a layer of narrative description that encourages players to try using them creatively. Just be sure to make it clear in your writing the line between rules text and evocative flavor text.

Lesson 3: It Should Be Fair

Balance in TTRPGs is a funny thing. You can create a mathematically balanced option, but players can reject it. Options that look clearly weak to mathematically minded gamers can flourish and claim high playtest ratings. What’s going on there?

Many people play TTRPGs because they want to become someone else for a while or create an improv story within the bounds of a set of rules. For those players, I think the perception of fairness trumps balance. Sure, the wizard can incinerate a mob of zombies with fireball, but they have such pathetic hit points and AC. It’s a fair trade off.

In my experience, fairness is the perception (whether factually true or illusory) that a character has an advantage at the cost of a weakness. Alternatively, a character might have a cool ability that is narrow enough that it avoids stepping on another character’s cool ability.

I think this is why players who delve into the system side of things tend to focus on combat. It gives us clear benchmarks to compare things. It gives every class the same goal, shut down the enemy damage per round as quickly as possible.

While players love combat, they also love the rest of the game. In practical terms, it means that your core mechanic should focus on what rogues are assumed to be good at (sneaking, handling traps, excelling at skill-like actions) while avoiding niches occupied by other classes. Even if your ability is balanced, if it seems to steal strengths or specializations linked to other classes, players might reject it.