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Rethinking Sneak Attack in 5e
🕑 Added 2025-06-10 13:00:12 +0000 UTCThis week I spent some time diving into my approach to monster math when I was reminded that the 5e rogue is incredibly underpowered. It looks great at low levels. In fact, if you only play levels 1 to 5 the rogue seems pretty powerful! However, at high levels the fighter's extra attacks make the rogue look like a sad puddle of ineffective pancakes.
The 5.5e update tries to fix this by giving the rogue the option to swap out sneak attack damage for save-dependent status effects. I'm not crazy about that. Extra pressure on legendary resistance can be useful, but it's a meek little whisper trying to drown out the thunderous sad trombone that is rogue damage.
Here's my approach:
The rogue should do about 20% more at-will damage than a fighter. That matches up the rogue's edge out of the gate. That feels like a fair trade off for worse armor, worse weapons, and fewer hit points, versus the rogue's edge in active defenses and stealth.
The rogue now gets multiple attacks!
To balance this, sneak attack is now a per turn resource. Each turn you get a number of sneak attack dice. You can add them as bonus damage to an attack that hits. You decide to spend them after you hit and if sneak attack applies as normal.
You can also spend them to activate the conditions that 5.5e allows you to apply by reducing your sneak attack damage. Again, if sneak attack applies.
As an example, a 7th level rogue has 2 attacks and 3d6 for sneak attack. Here are some scenarios:
Attack 1 hits, the rogue dumps all three dice into the attack as bonus damage. Whether attack 1 or 2 hits, they've spent all their sneak attack dice for the turn.
Attack 1 misses, the rogue still has all three dice to add to attack 2.
Attack 1 hits and the target is in bad shape. The rogue spends 1 sneak attack die on that damage. Attack 2 hits, they still have 2 dice to add to that attack.
Here's what the progression looks like:
That still leaves rogue subclasses to provide a daily resource to give the rogue an alpha strike option, but that we can fix through subclass design. Which will come later...
Comments
Ryan Linderman
I love this. It looks like a lot of fun! It makes me want to play a pure rogue now. I love having the second attack in case the first one whiffs and to help deal with minions. I like that this doesn't change the class. You still have to fight like a rogue, setting up sneak attacks to do any real damage. It just fixes the power curve.
Eva
It might be simpler to say you can only Sneak Attack any one target once per turn. This post set the cat among the pigeons on X but its a fairly minor change. I personally prefer have a skill system mostly separate from the class system so I can hack the skill system and so the Rogue having more damage feels good.
