As the Unearthed Arcana development of 5e.24 continues, the design team’s apparent campaign against the Short Rest has pivoted hard toward everyone getting back something but almost no one getting back everything on a Short Rest. Long-time readers may recall that I called for this exact thing more than a year and a half ago. Now there’s just one problem: Rogues.
The Problem
Just as much as it’s been noted that Bards, Fighters, Monks, and especially Warlocks thrive on a lot of Short Rests, Rogues get particularly little out of them. (Barbarians too, but… they’re likely pretty excited about Hit Die healing, because they burn through so many hit points. That’s outside the scope of this post, anyway.) At the same time, it’s not easy to figure out what you’d add to the very tightly tuned Rogue gameplay that wouldn’t become a greater problem.
I started thinking about the supporting fiction – that is, Rogue characters (uh, not Anna Marie LeBeau) in books, TV shows, movies, and so on. I’m thinking about characters like Vlad Taltos (I think about Vlad Taltos as often as a lot of guys apparently think about the Roman Empire – if I’m honest, my brain spends some days just oscillating back and forth between Dragaera and Rome), the whole Leverage team, and Plunkett & Macleane.
As a matter of narrative structure, in all of these stories we see roguish characters make particularly good use of time during longer and shorter resting periods. The story’s writers are using this time to establish things that are going to pay off in an upcoming scene; this is part of showing the roguish characters are cunning and well-prepared for dangerous situations. Maybe that’s carefully hiding knives and other hardware all over their body, or mixing up some weird concoction, or showing their companions how a card trick or confidence trick works. (The last two are also usually very fun for the audience to watch, because “how does the trick work” is always gonna hook us.)
The first time I played with this idea was my version of the Mastermind rogue. There’s a lot going on there and I’d like to both keep this generally lighter, and also give the Rogue a way to benefit themselves.
Proposal
The suggestion then is a single feature with multiple options. I feel like 2nd level isn’t a bad time to bring it in – even as ”big” as Cunning Action is – but 6th level could also work.
Preparation
Level 2 Rogue feature
Where others have powerful magic or incredible fortitude, you have cunning and preparation. When you finish a Short or Long Rest, pick one of the following.
- You hide daggers in secret compartments stitched into your clothing and armor. You hide up to three daggers or dagger-sized objects, and the DC for another character to spot them is 30. This feature lasts until you finish a Long Rest.
- You hide a spring-loaded dagger up your sleeve. When you are Grappled, you can use your action to pop the dagger into your hand and attack with it. If you hit with this attack, you deal your Sneak Attack damage even if you otherwise don’t meet the requirements to deal Sneak Attack damage. This feature is expended when used or when you finish a Long Rest.
- You experiment with a weird alchemical concoction, which smokes, sizzles, or sparkles satisfyingly. At the time you use it, you can decide that it is a vial of acid, alchemist’s fire, antitoxin, basic poison, oil, a potion of healing, or incredibly concentrated peppermint soap (Dilute! Dilute! Ok). Creating a weird concoction requires you to have alchemist’s supplies on your person, and any concoction you create with this feature lasts until it is used or you finish another short or long rest.
- You demonstrate a new card trick or confidence trick to your companions. Choose up to five creatures present during the rest. When they fail a Deception, Insight, or Perception ability check, you can expend this feature to allow them to reroll the ability check and add your Charisma modifier (minimum +1) to the result. You don’t have to be present to allow this reroll. If not used, this feature lasts until you finish a Long Rest.
Design Notes
There are definitely some rough spots left in this that I’m not satisfied with, but this is a first draft. For one thing, it’s a lot of text for a single feature, and some bullet points get pretty fiddly. (It’d be great to fit in even more rogue tricks, frankly.)
I’m exploring the same problem, for the same reason, over in boffer LARP design. In working on early design for the upcoming Citadel LARP – which you’ll be hearing more about on this blog as the game approaches launch in 2025 – we’re very focused on short rests as things warriors and one of our caster types need, so it might be interesting to get scouts (rogues, whatever) in on the act too. ‘Scuse me while I pound my head against the implementation for another couple of days.
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A few thoughts:
-For the first option, I might both narrow and broaden the scope. Narrow by removing the “dagger sized objects” provision as it is potentially difficult to adjudicate and can be handled by DM fiat without the inclusionary language anyway. Broaden by specifically calling out the ability to hide a lockpick set in place of some amount of daggers (is there anything more iconic rogue than being in manacles and pulling out a well-hidden lockpick, especially after several others were already removed by the captors?).
-The second seems highly situational. I wonder if it wouldn’t be overly powerful to let it instead be a once-per-rest bonus action attack instead?
-Third option would be great to have a smoke bomb option but the rules for it annoyingly aren’t in the PHB (although the DMG does have a smoke grenade).
-Fourth option, is the intent that the reroll ability expended once for all the affected creatures or do they get to use it individually?
Love your idea, has a lot of potential. I agree with Kevin+Waterman- hiding a lockpick, a vial of acid, a dagger, a dose of ingestion poison, or even an arcane focus (smuggling a wand to an imprisoned wizard so they can cast themselves out of jail) all seem like very in-theme things to do. As a DM I would allow all these as “dagger-sized”, but the text could be tweaked perhaps to explicitly call out what a “dagger-sized object” could be, and/or prompt a less creative player to consider how else this could be used.
As for the second option, it seems like requiring the rogue to be grappled is too much- why not just a 1/Long rest (or heck, 1/short rest) spring-loaded dagger attack that grants sneak attack (maybe only usable in melee? Although the spring-loaded derringer sneak attack is certainly supported in fiction). Something to give non-swashbucklers a bit more variety in ways to get Sneak Attack (though Steady Aim does a lot of work there, too).
* I’m fine with opening that up to Tiny objects generally, I guess? Some are a lot more thematically on-point than others, but I don’t know your roguish needs.
* Highly situational is kind of the intent, in my mind – you’re loading up a trick for a difficult situation that can cause rogues to be near-helpless. 1/rest bonus action Sneak Attack quickly gets reduced to just “use this as early as possible to maximize your burst damage,” and that’s missing the mark for what I like about the idea.
* I do love a good Ninja Vanish moment.
* As written, it’s expended once, but changing that to work on each target individually is probably preferable.
With the introduction of Steady Aim is being grappled as bad for rogues now though? They don’t want to be stuck somewhere if they can help it, but being grappled by itself doesn’t do anything to take away sneak attack that I can think of and with Steady Aim they can go ahead and use a bonus action to attack with advantage and presumably sneak attack dice too.
Given that, I would imagine the only time the spring loaded dagger is preferable would be if the player suspects the creature grappling them is close enough to death that they should expect the dagger to kill them and let them move away from the spot afterwards.
I’m trying to think of what else it could do, because I love the image.
There is some interesting design going on here. In general, I agree that all classes should have a reason to take both long and short rests, so anything to pull Rogues into that economy is going to be welcome. You mention wanting to add more potential tricks, is this maybe a chance to put in another feature at a higher level with a different set of tricks? Maybe the rogue can choose one trick from each feature?
I personally have never played a 5e rogue, but I have 3 players that are currently playing them or multiclassed into them. I think I would be fine with allowing these features in those characters.
I don’t object to building on this with another feature somewhere in… probably Tier 3? and letting rogues pick one from each list.
A quick review of the full character list of my long-running Aurikesh campaign shows that 6 of the 75 PCs have been rogues, which is about right for proportional distribution of the game’s 14 available classes. If I’d had to guess I would have said there were fewer than that, so I’m a little surprised.
This gives me some inspiration for how I’ve been trying to houserule rogues (and bards) for my table. As BG3 is demonstrating to a whole new generation of 5e players: Expertise can easily become busted for campaigns that don’t revolve around combat. I’ve tried spreading expertise around more, but that screws up skill check DCs across the board and just makes rogues feel less special. So I finally settled on limiting expertise by turning it into a pool of advantage that can apply to selected skills PB/long rest. This works, but I think having an even smaller pool that is regained on a short rest would discourage hoarding and encourage more short rests.
You know, I really like that idea.