Rogue's Advanced Talent: Dispelling Attack

[Shaalis]

This has caused some amount of discussion amongst my players. We've all found this skill a bit..well, silly. Its too much a stretch in believability even with the Minor & Major Magic skills, the both of which give 0 and 1st level skill abilities. The reasoning not only being that Dispel Magic is an even higher level spell but just the thought of a Rogue dispelling a magic effect by for instance stabbing someone is incredulous. Could something else be substituted for this? Or doesn't anyone else have a problem with this?

[Sebastian]

You might want to conceptualize it as an extension of the rogue's ability to disable magical traps. Basically, the rogue is able to identify some physical manifestation of a spell effect and interefere with that spell effect to destroy/disable it.

[alleynbard]

Sebastian wrote:

You might want to conceptualize it as an extension of the rogue's ability to disable magical traps. Basically, the rogue is able to identify some physical manifestation of a spell effect and interefere with that spell effect to destroy/disable it.

That sounds good to me.

I always had a hard time with the rogue's ability to disable purely magical traps. I finally just decided a rogue can sense an vibrating aura of magic without seeing it and is thus innately aware of how to disrupt the flows of magic to disable the trap.

At some point after that I ran into a problem with the concept of magic items. If a rogue can sense auras then why can't they recognize magic items as well? So I allow rogues the ability to sense that an item is magical if they study it long enough, often as the result of a Search check. They can't tell anything about the item (activation, power, etc.) but they can sense the aura through sensation. Pathfinder makes this house rule easier with the new Perception skill.

So, while it does take some justification, I think the ability can work as written. Even without my additional houserule. If a rogue can disable magical traps they should be able to sense and disrupt magical effects.

[Sebastian]

Yeah, my flavor text for magical traps was that they noticed the sigils used to make them and then changed/destroyed them enough to disable the trap. Giving rogue's a quasi-detect magic ability at-will isn't broken, but it is probably an odd flavor.

Maybe the solution is to give them a quasi-detect magic ability along with the disruption ability or to add in that class ability using Perception as part of their disable device ability.