Is the role of Stealthy Dude a viable role in a party of non-stealthers?

[Dictum Mortuum]

This is how people pass time on the internet.

If only people could be content with watching porn...

How many times can you watch that DP video with the Pamela Anderson/Britney Spears/Lindsay Lohan lookalike without getting bored, anyways?

Less than one.

WAY less than one.

Yeah right.  $10 says you have 2girls/1cup on your harddrive.

$1000 bucks says I'm gay and you're dead wrong.

ahhahahahahahahahahahahhahha
OWNED HAAHHHA BEST POST EVER

[Agita]

This is how people pass time on the internet.

If only people could be content with watching porn...

How many times can you watch that DP video with the Pamela Anderson/Britney Spears/Lindsay Lohan lookalike without getting bored, anyways?

Less than one.

WAY less than one.

Yeah right.  $10 says you have 2girls/1cup on your harddrive.

$1000 bucks says I'm gay and you're dead wrong.

Sorry, I'm afraid my money is with Lycan here.

[Sunic_Flames]

Should I assume that you mean that any melee type character less than a Feral Mineral Warrior Dragonborn Incarnate Warforged Warblade to be a gimp? I'm just asking.

But I'm talking about the lower tier casters. Tier 3 is precisely what I'm talking about. What can a Dread Necromancer and a Beguiler do to reliably bust through SR 25 AND maintain save DCs of 25+?

We've established what Tier 1 and Tier 2 characters do that makes scouting both irrelevant and undesirable. They have powerful divinations they use to better effect and with less party danger. So, if we're talking about scouting then we're talking about a Tier 3 game at best. I essentially don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to optimizing, but Sunic, you do, or at least you claim to. So, arriving at what exactly an optimized Tier 3 character is capable of, even should be capable of in your opinion, can only help us further a legitimate discussion.

Watch that Paizil Fallacy. And you're missing the point. The point is +20 to hit is low, and something you should have had at 7 or 8, and that's if you attack via touch attack. Similarly, 12 Con is low. For anyone. 14+ just to show up.

I'm reposting this one just for fairness.

Monks have a bunch of features too. Interestingly enough, none of them are useful. So yes, it's just like the Monks are good crowd. Both them and the scouts are good crowd regularly assume heavily nerfed and stupid opposition, both assume you accomplish something useful other than death (which IS useful, to the party you are holding back but not what I meant)... the parallels go on.

Also, @Amadi: Yes, if you fail 30% of tasks, some of which involve life-threatening situations, you are some day going to get killed. The game assumes that this is going to happen and thus includes Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection, among many other ways to return the dead to life. You appear to be coming dangerous close to saying something along the lines of, "any character not IP proofed enough to have 99.999% success in his chosen roles is a gimp and his player doesn't know how to play the game." Am I mistaken or is that what you are indeed saying?

Uh huh. And a 30% fail rate means you literally drop dead every other fight. Maybe every third fight. Wonder how long it will take to run out of levels and loot, or just make the Cleric say screw this, we keep the rest of his stuff and get a not gimp.

Don't be an idiot.

Quick question: Has Sunic's game been linked in this thread?

It's been referenced in enough detail to have a full grasp on the situation without a link.

I have the weirdest desire right now. Sunic, if there's a spot in any by post games you DM, consider me interested.

Lol. Not right now. And I rarely start games. You can join the waiting list though. Yes, there is a waiting list. Despite the whining and flailing.

Oh and if you want to get mad at someone about "You must be this tall to play", take that up with the game designers. They make the rules, I just quote them. D&D is absolutely full of gear checks, and ability checks, and competence checks. Fuck, the whole WBL system is the means of organizing gear checks. Not to mention how the higher you go, the more stuff is big, and flying, and can wtfpwn you. Often all at once.

[Dictum Mortuum]

I have the weirdest desire right now. Sunic, if there's a spot in any by post games you DM, consider me interested.

Lol. Not right now. And I rarely start games. You can join the waiting list though. Yes, there is a waiting list. Despite the whining and flailing.

Oh and if you want to get mad at someone about "You must be this tall to play", take that up with the game designers. They make the rules, I just quote them. D&D is absolutely full of gear checks, and ability checks, and competence checks. Fuck, the whole WBL system is the means of organizing gear checks. Not to mention how the higher you go, the more stuff is big, and flying, and can wtfpwn you. Often all at once.

Just pm me when/if it happens.

Also I don't know if the other comment is directed at me, because of the quoting thingy. If yes then 'wtf' .

[JaronK]

I'll just put this simply: I've played scouts before.  I've never had problems.  In fact, I've never had a character die while scouting, not once, but I have made a lot of encounters far easier with decent scouting.  I've seen one scout character die to a trap, but that was level 2 in World's Largest Dungeon and that trap would have killed anyone else in the party except the Crusader had she not taken that hit, so that's hardly an argument against scouting.  So, maybe others can't do it, but I can, and have, and this whole argument has boiled down to a bunch of people saying "I can't do it, therefor it's impossible."  So instead of going back and forth on specific scenarios from a DM who clearly has no experience with this, I'll just post how to scout, because that's actually useful.  Here's the main things you need to keep in mind, and I'll phrase them for all kinds of games (high optimization and low).

1)  Be invisible to as many things as possible.  

A)  The most basic part of this is Hide and Move Silently, because everything has Spot and Listen, even if they have no ranks.  As a rule, you're only truly safe if your Hide and Move Silently, after modifiers, are 11 higher than the enemy's Spot and Listen.  That way, if you take 10 while sneaking around the enemy cannot possibly find you.  This is trivially easy... a Halfling straight out of the box gets +5 Hide, and +3 Move Silently, while a Whispergnome gets +9 Hide and +5 Move Silently.  Through in max ranks in both skills and a 14 base thrown into dex and you're looking at +11/+9 or +15/+11 even at level 1, when the vast majority of enemies don't even have spot ranks.  Note also that distracted people have a -5 to their spot and listen, and there's an additional -1 to spot and listen for every 10 feet between the observer and what they're spotting.  With these kinds of penalties, you don't even need items to avoid any chance of detection.  As you go up in levels you'll want to invest a bit of money into keeping Hide and Move Silently up, an amount determined by how much it comes up.  The Collar of Umbral Metamorphosis (22k continuous, 10k for 10 minutes per day) is great for this, providing the Dark template cheap (which gives +8 hide, +6 move silently, Darkvision and Superior Low Light Vision, and (Ex) hide in plain sight along with a few other nice abilities).  Shadowsilk Leather Armor is just 1,750gp and provides +2 to hide and move silently while also being extremely light weight (an issue for low strength stealth types), and it's not even magical so crafting it for 1/3 price is a possibility in games where that works.  There's also basic mundane gear like Silent Shoes and Darkweave Clothing that can increase both skills.  And if you're a Factotum, you even get to add your Int to it.  In the end, you should have little to no trouble keeping your Hide and Move Silently up so high that nothing can possibly detect you via Spot or Listen.

B)  Scent, Tremorsense, Blindsense, and Blindsight are all relatively common abilities that autodetect you, and you just can't have that.  Luckily, these are easily countered by taking the Darkstalker feat, which requires them to follow the Spot-Hide/Listen-Move Silently mechanic.  Since you needed those to be up anyway, this handles the problem nicely, but the feat is basically required if you want to be a stealthy character.  Without it, you're hosed... which is part of why Wizards and such actually aren't very good at this sort of thing.  No spell protects you from these things (at least not in a useful way).

C)  Lifesense.  This feat from Libris Mortis is only available to undead and causes all living creatures to glow brightly in your vision (a medium or smaller creature gives off 60 feet of light, while larger creatures double the light given off for every size category they are above medium).  Note that even invisible light sources give off light, so this sense completely trumps invisibility and no amount of hiding will save you (the enemy won't see you, but they'll know exactly where you are anyway.  They'll even see you coming from around corners).  On the bright side (heh) Necropolitans are found in this same book.  Basically, if Libris Mortis is in play, you absolutely want to be a Necropolitan (which is very useful for stealthers anyway for a variety of reasons).  If it's not in play, Lifesense isn't an issue anyway so there's nothing to worry about.  And if you do become a Necropolitan, take this feat!

D)  Touchsight.

[SeekingKnight]

Thank you Jaron and Sunic.  Again I am sorry for my eariler blow up.  I have seen a game where the halfling with maxed hide is a pain in the butt and the DM had to use things with tremorsense to fight him.  I see it from both sides of the debate.  Sunic is correct as magic in D&D can trump a lot of mundane things and if you are the best (read Tier 1) then by golly you will shine.  I also see Jaron's point on the player who knows what they are doing can make a fine scout type character.  So while yes the system as a whole has issues everyone plays the game their own way.  As an internet personality said "If the person playing the game differently from you is not effecting the way you play then why worry about it."

Ciao

[BeholderSlayer]

Also I don't know if the other comment is directed at me, because of the quoting thingy. If yes then 'wtf' .

It wasn't. It took a while for me to get used to Sunic's random topic changes when writing, too.

[Talore]

JaronK, you should either develop that post into a handbook, or at the least make it its own thread and submit it to the Handy Links. 

[bkdubs123]

Should I assume that you mean that any melee type character less than a Feral Mineral Warrior Dragonborn Incarnate Warforged Warblade to be a gimp? I'm just asking.

But I'm talking about the lower tier casters. Tier 3 is precisely what I'm talking about. What can a Dread Necromancer and a Beguiler do to reliably bust through SR 25 AND maintain save DCs of 25+?

We've established what Tier 1 and Tier 2 characters do that makes scouting both irrelevant and undesirable. They have powerful divinations they use to better effect and with less party danger. So, if we're talking about scouting then we're talking about a Tier 3 game at best. I essentially don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to optimizing, but Sunic, you do, or at least you claim to. So, arriving at what exactly an optimized Tier 3 character is capable of, even should be capable of in your opinion, can only help us further a legitimate discussion.

Watch that Paizil Fallacy.

I don't know what that means.

And you're missing the point. The point is +20 to hit is low, and something you should have had at 7 or 8, and that's if you attack via touch attack. Similarly, 12 Con is low. For anyone. 14+ just to show up.

And yet you still refuse to actually illustrate how the Warblade is supposed to get a +20 to hit touch attack at 7th level. If it's possible I want to know how.

Monks have a bunch of features too. Interestingly enough, none of them are useful. So yes, it's just like the Monks are good crowd. Both them and the scouts are good crowd regularly assume heavily nerfed and stupid opposition, both assume you accomplish something useful other than death (which IS useful, to the party you are holding back but not what I meant)... the parallels go on.

I'm trying to bring us back to more of a baseline conversation without those kinds of preconceptions, like heavily nerfed and stupid opposition and seeing where we go from there. So, while I agree that Monks have no useful class features, I want to know why you seem to think stuff like Sneak Attack, Evasion, Cunning Insight, Arcane Dilettante, or Invocations aren't useful to anyone. Also UMD which all of them have and the Factotum and Warlock can take greater than average advantage of.

Also, @Amadi: Yes, if you fail 30% of tasks, some of which involve life-threatening situations, you are some day going to get killed. The game assumes that this is going to happen and thus includes Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection, among many other ways to return the dead to life. You appear to be coming dangerous close to saying something along the lines of, "any character not IP proofed enough to have 99.999% success in his chosen roles is a gimp and his player doesn't know how to play the game." Am I mistaken or is that what you are indeed saying?

Uh huh. And a 30% fail rate means you literally drop dead every other fight. Maybe every third fight. Wonder how long it will take to run out of levels and loot, or just make the Cleric say screw this, we keep the rest of his stuff and get a not gimp.

Don't be an idiot.

See, this is why you're having a problem convincing anyone of anything, Sunic. People don't play that way. It's either incredibly boring because the players spend more time calculating and eliminating the risks of things they do rather than actually doing them. OR it's an arms race between the players and team monster as they attempt to build more and more impenetrable defenses and more and more unstoppable offenses.

Instead, people would rather play Tier 3 games, with much less IP proofing, with some gentleman's agreements in place that however highly the players optimize, the DM will not go any higher. I know, I know, this is houseruling, I'm just saying that when you say things like, "scouts fail because they can't achieve a 99.9% success rate" most people aren't going to listen because most people don't want ANY character, even a Tier 1 character, to have that kind of a success rate.

Also, to avoid those kinds of discussions, and to put this argument into a format where more of us are on the same page is why I've been bringing up Tier 3. If you can drive the point home that scouts fail in a Tier 3 game, and without as much reliance on IP proofing to prove your point, then you're going to convince many more people. And you need to bring up actual stats, use actual game resources, and talk about actual game situations rather than handwave things. I'm trying to get you to treat this like a legitimate debate, because I think you've got something real to contribute to this discussion, and I think you might be able to convince me, but you've got to take it seriously.

[Ras F]

And yet you still refuse to actually illustrate how the Warblade is supposed to get a +20 to hit touch attack at 7th level. If it's possible I want to know how.

I believe this discussion is beyond the intentions of this particular thread. However, I am curious as to see a few different ways to accomplish this myself. May I recommend you begin another thread?

[bkdubs123]

And yet you still refuse to actually illustrate how the Warblade is supposed to get a +20 to hit touch attack at 7th level. If it's possible I want to know how.

I believe this discussion is beyond the intentions of this particular thread. However, I am curious as to see a few different ways to accomplish this myself. May I recommend you begin another thread?

Well, it's relevant to me to establish what Sunic believes is an acceptable Tier 3 contribution. It will help to put the Tier 3 scouting discussion into perspective.

[Sunic_Flames]

I have the weirdest desire right now. Sunic, if there's a spot in any by post games you DM, consider me interested.

Lol. Not right now. And I rarely start games. You can join the waiting list though. Yes, there is a waiting list. Despite the whining and flailing.

Oh and if you want to get mad at someone about "You must be this tall to play", take that up with the game designers. They make the rules, I just quote them. D&D is absolutely full of gear checks, and ability checks, and competence checks. Fuck, the whole WBL system is the means of organizing gear checks. Not to mention how the higher you go, the more stuff is big, and flying, and can wtfpwn you. Often all at once.

Just pm me when/if it happens.

Also I don't know if the other comment is directed at me, because of the quoting thingy. If yes then 'wtf' .

I can't always be fucked to quote people, especially if the thing I am responding to is in the post immediately preceding my own.

As for Jaron, and his massive wall of text, his words might have some merit had he not honestly claimed, on many occasions that playing enemies remotely intelligently or competently is worth large CR boosts. Since he has, all he's proven is that he can beat other mouth breathing fuckwits.

And as for all this babbling about Tier 3, it is an irrelevant and invalid argument. If you are IP proofed, you don't die very often. If you are not, you die all the fucking time. It doesn't matter what sort of "gentleman's agreements" you think you have. If the DM nicely nerfs all the enemies by not having them use save or loses, they can still rape you just fine with their auto attacks, for example. The main difference as it pertains to that subject is Tier 3s can't IP proof very well, and flat out cannot use many IP proofing measures at all. Which in turn means a very high rate of character death. I will continue to regard you as not serious, and irrelevant and therefore disregard you as long as you continue to bring up the Tier 3 strawman, and other strawmen arguments such as throwing the 99.9% success rate at me, when I responded only to the bit about 30% fail rate.

This topic doesn't need any more fail smokescreens, least of all from other people.

And as long as you continue to throw out terrible numbers, like +20 to hit at level 10 I will continue to mock you for making fail builds, as even Tier 3s can, very easily obtain to hits in the 30s.

[snakeman830]

Translation: Sunic has been proved to be ignorant in this area and is too proud to admit it.

[Kajhera]

Could someone show the guy a build that gets over +20 at level 10? For some reason I can't think of feats aside from Stormguard Warrior, I know they're out there though.

[Ras F]

20+ at level 7, resolved as touch attacks, I believe is the proposed 'bar' in question. I'm having trouble doing this 'easily' with standard WBL without requiring outside assistance from party members.

[Kajhera]

... Can we dip a level in Cleric if we have 9 or less Wisdom, or is that cheating?

[Lycanthromancer]

Metamorphosis can give some pretty big numbers, and Unavoidable Strike can grant you touch attacks.

[X-Codes]

Metamorphosis can give some pretty big numbers, and Psionic Fist can grant you touch attacks.

Isn't the latter a touch attack, singular?

[bkdubs123]

Also, @Amadi: Yes, if you fail 30% of tasks, some of which involve life-threatening situations, you are some day going to get killed. The game assumes that this is going to happen and thus includes Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection, among many other ways to return the dead to life. You appear to be coming dangerous close to saying something along the lines of, "any character not IP proofed enough to have 99.999% success in his chosen roles is a gimp and his player doesn't know how to play the game." Am I mistaken or is that what you are indeed saying?

Uh huh. And a 30% fail rate means you literally drop dead every other fight. Maybe every third fight. Wonder how long it will take to run out of levels and loot, or just make the Cleric say screw this, we keep the rest of his stuff and get a not gimp.

Don't be an idiot.

So, when you said "uh huh" you weren't agreeing with the bit about IP proofing for 99% success rates and anything else being incompetent and gimp? You weren't?

You also consistently refuse to debate the merits of scouting in the only environment where non-divination scouting is at all likely to be played? And you continuously claim that any Tier 3 can easily achieve +30 to hit at 10th level, but you adamantly refuse to produce any evidence to support your claim? Have I summed this up properly?

Finally, I did call you an asshole, but I didn't think it would offend you. Sorry if it did. But I've been trying to keep the discussion in perspective and relevant, but in the last several pages all you've bothered to do is ignore or dismiss me.

You see, we've discussed at length the uses of a Stealthy dude in an optimized environment where heavy IP proofing and powerful divinations are commonplace. You've successfully proven that in that environment the Stealthy dude in fact has no uses, or if he does, they are so minimal and risky as to be inadvisable to say the least.

Was I wrong about you having anything real to contribute to the discussion of a Stealthy dude in any environment other than the one just mentioned?

EDIT: Oh, shit, I'm at 2000 posts. Gotta celebrate by designing something!

[Lycanthromancer]

Metamorphosis can give some pretty big numbers, and Unavoidable Strike can grant you touch attacks.

Isn't the latter a touch attack, singular?

Sorry, it was Unavoidable Strike I meant.

And yes, it's one per psionic focus.

However, using hammer and a form with a ton of natural attacks can give you a lot of touch attacks if you want it.