An All-Rogue Party

[DeathByDM]

One of my buddies is planning to run a game where we are all "encouraged" to play semi-evil rogues. I.E. we will all need to be have the stealth and thievery skill if we are going to survive. It's a city-based game and we'll start at level 16.

I was hoping to get a discussion going here as to ways to give us a well-rounded party that is still able to do this.

Here's some ideas I had:

Defender/Controller:
Githyanki Swordmage/Ranger with skill training: Thievery

Face:
Doppleganger Rogue/Cleric Daggermaster

Strikers:
Bugbear Ranger/Fighter Stormwarden with skill training: Thievery
Kobold Rogue/Ranger Daggermaster
Gnoll Rogue/Warlock Daggermaster
Halfling Rogue/Warlord Daggermaster

[Kalanth]

Don't forget that a Warlock gets Thievery as a Class skill outright so you could get a Warlock in there who multiclasses into Paladin or Cleric to add some healing to the party.

Definetly going to need a few heavy multiclass characters to better cover the other roles in a party like that.

[Valdar]

Anyone can take Skill Training twice to get those skills- all you'd need is a passable DEX and you're set. Play a Goblin (+2 stealth, +2 thievery) and you're even more set.

Also beware if your DM is going to say "Everyone roll stealth"- show him or her the math beforehand. If every single one of you can succeed by beating a 5 on a D20 (75 percent chance), your party will be noticed 82 percent of the time (.75 ^ 6 chance of succeeding, or 18 percent.) The mechanic I use for this is the best listener against the worst stealther, and roll once- if everyone has to roll, someone will inevitably fail, even if it's extremely likely that any one character will succeed.

[emblasochist]

Yeah. Valdar's got a great point. Making EVERYONE being sneaky, or any skill for that matter for a success, spells disaster if you have more than say 3 players. The fact of the matter is that with every player that must be successful with the skill over 1 player makes it more difficult in general because each player has a decimal chance of success between 0 and 1, and each player's chances gets multiplied to each others' to get the party's overall chance of success in any single instance.

D&D doesn't work well when everyone MUST take any particular set of skills; the game is designed so that a vanilla party of 6 might have one or two overlaps in skills aside from Heal, and that the person that has the highest level in that skill uses it. If the DM wants to play a balanced D&D game where everyone must be sneaky, the better way to do it is give everyone a boost to sneak or hide or whatever the skill is (I forgot the name) and for stuff that uses the skill over and above the normal use in the campaign's setting has their DC raised an appropriate level.

Case in point: If everyone succeeds on a roll of a 3 or better (a 90% success rate on average), the party of 5 will have a success rate of a 59%. Even if you increase it to a success of a 2 or better, you only get a 77% success rate for the party.