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First off - we get threads about the Rogue Problem roughly once per day. Over the years some people have come up with pretty interesting solutions. To the point that it's getting hard to see the forest for the trees; my eyes start to glaze over when I see yet another variation on making the rogue better.
I don't mean to tell you off; the rogue really does need help, you're right about that. And beyond CRB it only gets worse, because many other classes infringe on rogues' territory.
Specifically about traps. While clerics and druids have Wisdom as a major stat, paladins no longer do. (!) But they don't have Perception as a class skill. Also, the bonus granted by Trapfinding to Perception/Disable Device is actually relevant, if you look at the trap DCs in the core book. Those are pretty steep DCs!
Now, given how important Perception is, basically everyone will end up with a shot at detecting traps. However, there are some limits at work here;
1) You search for traps one 5ft square at a time, and this takes FOREVER. Rogues can take a talent to get a Perception check even when not actually looking.
2) Once you've found a trap, you need to deal with it somehow. Now we get to see the GM for who he really is. Is he a cautious guy, placing nice CR-appropriate (WUSS!) traps that inflict a bit of damage that doesn't really scare anyone? Just send in the barbarian, he can cope with the damage. Or the monk's obscene saving throws and reflex save; he'll probably dance past it. Doesn't matter that he triggers the trap, he can take it. It's only the wizard that needs to be protected really, but that's why someone else takes one for the team.
OR... traps could be more old-school Gygaxian. Properly deadly. You really don't want to get hit, the damage could knock you flat. Not always instant-death for a barbarian, but enough to make the cleric look sad at the amount of healing lost to one single trap.
OR... traps actually have other effects that are even worse than damage. The ceiling falls. The exit is blocked. A general alarm sounds and the entire dungeon population converges, rather than being spaced out in manageable separate encounters. The treasure is destroyed by the trap.
It's not a solution, mainly because beyond the CRB there are many classes/archetypes that can get Trapfinding or at least good enough at Disable Device that it doesn't matter. But it should at least convince people that traps are serious bussiness. Knowing about the trap is half the battle; ONLY half.
Miles, your rogue solution is different from the others I've seen proposed here as it focuses on trapfinding, something most rogue upgrades seem to gloss over, so giving it its own thread is not a waste of space.
First, I agree Disable Device should be able to spot traps, but I'd not remove the capability from perception. Just giving rogues a new way to do it is a boon, especially considering Trapfinding.
Second, the rules you quote for finding traps are not from Pathfinder, they are from 3.5. In Pathfinder, it seems looking for traps is just a regular use of the Perception skill. "Intentionally searching for stimulus is a move action." So this is a regular Perception skill check, with the regular penalty of -1 per 10 ft. distance. In my group, the default assumption is that during exploration, characters spend one move action moving and the other doing Perception checks. As soon as the trap comes into line of sight, Perception checks can spot it.
Generally I find trapfinding comes into play extremely rarely, it's very much a YMMV skill which seems like a poor niche for any class.
Ways to help the rogue:
Combine with Fighter. Full BAB 8+int skills, choose between rogue or fighter abilities.
Fix Rogue Talents.
Empower skills to be more powerful. There's another thread on this forum focusing on that. Let's be able to Disable Device on constructs to stagger them or something.
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@Miles: I couldn't name one single thread that has The Answer in it. Many different approaches have been proposed depending on what the author thought was the angle that really needed improvement. I have a "graveyard" of bookmarked threads about rogue and fighter improvement (but mixed in with threads about lots of other things; finding stuff is hard). With the hope that one day I'll write the perfect house rule to fix things.
There's one 3PP supplement I can recommend for consideration, Rogue Glory.
It's well-written. The game mechanics are sharply written. It gives the rogue considerably more oomph. It makes rogues a lot nicer, although lately I'm thinking that it might not be going far enough. Inspired by this influential article, I want nonmagical skills to do MUCH MORE at levels 10+. There are some threads going about introducing new uses for higher-ranked skills; I'm following them closely.
In my opinion, the key to fixing the rogue is skills. Rogues should have class abilities that really make them a lot better at skills - far better than they are right now. Rogues should get new skill-related abilities that aren't already being copied by a dozen other classes through archetypes.
And skills need to do much more. At every level, skills need to do awesome stuff. At level 1 sneaking past a monster is awesome, or having a bluff check that commoners can't beat. After level 5, skills should be waging war on "realism", and after level 10, skills should be winning that war. The kind of moves you see in movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are a good example of what skills should be able to do at level 10. (The nice thing about CT,HD is that it builds up the level of bizarre action, increasing it gradually. If they used the action scenes from the end more in the beginning, you'd go "that's ridiculous". But due to buildup, you gradually get used to it, and accept that what they did just then is also possible for the protagonists. It's the same with RPGs; you need to expand beyond "realism" step by step.)
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Another main issue with rogues is an honest assessment of how you play the game. The essence of playing a rogue, is playing a rogue. It's supposed to be a character that's very independent, self-reliant. When facing with a powerful enemy or obstacle, the rogue's instinct isn't to come back to the party to find strength in unity, but to find a way around the problem. Not overcoming it with brute force, but with being more clever and stealthy.
So much for the dream. In practice this doesn't work for several reasons. But aside from (existing, real) mechanical reasons, the most important (IMO) reason is actually not mechanical, but metagame.
For a rogue to be truly effective, he's operating on his own a lot. He's setting up intrigue in town. He's scouting. Maybe he's even "removing" guards on his own to create a no-alarm entry route for the party. But this splits playing time between the rogue and the rest of the party. This can quickly become boring for the rest of the players. It's not quite as bad as a hacker in shadowrun, but it's still a problem. (Personally I think that if a player has a side sub-quest, the other players should be polite and be quiet. But their reward should be that whatever happens is actually entertaining for them to observe. This will be true for the first couple of scout missions, but it may become dull after a while to watch - ANOTHER scout mission. But for the rogue's player, he's risking life and death every time.)
Next to that, there's the issue of how fast a PC is supposed to "win". Some PCs are built to slaughter enemies in 1-3 rounds of combat. Barbarians have a limited number of Rage rounds; if combat just drags on, they lose a big advantage. But there are also characters that are good at the "long game" - cause damage to the enemy, fall back, wait, attack again. This includes some mounted builds that are good at kiting or even ranged attacks. It can also include rogues, that try to make a sneak attack and then disappear again.
The long game can be an interesting and powerful strategy. Against an enemy that relies on buffs that last for only a few rounds, it can be devastating. Consider that Orcs have few HP but also Diehard. If you damage them beyond 0HP, they continue fighting but also lose HP every round. If you play the long game, you can just try to wait them out. Since orcs are very deadly in melee, such a strategy may be useful.
The long game has major problems attached to it though. For one, it takes a long time. Such encounters can consume a large part of a gaming session. The most important problem though, is if other players built their characters for the short conflict. Like the barbarian, or the nova-magus. Either they decide the combat in a few rounds - making your long-strategy (rogue) look bad - or it drags on longer than they can deal with, and they feel bad.
I think rogues are a class that could be much stronger if the long game gets played, but in practice, that doesn't happen a lot. I'm not even sure if I really WANT to play the long game.
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Why are we even talking about rogues in combat? Because we must. More adventures are "decided" between success or failure with a combat, than in any other way. And if a class isn't fun to play in combat, then it's often not fun to play during the climax of an adventure. That's bad. So yeah, every class, including the rogue, should be fun in combat.
Note: fun. Doesn't even have to be powerful, if it's a lot of fun to play. But part of fun usually comes from contributing something important. That could be damage, but it could also be the continued survival and functioning of the other PCs despite the horrible things the enemy does to them. The trick is finding something for the rogue.
Besides the "practical, but boring" option of making rogues just another class that does a lot of damage, what else could be possible? You could play with the environment. Use skills and abilities to manipulate the terrain the combat is being fought in, to gain advantage for your side or hinder the enemy. With the amount of skills rogues have, it can work. But you tend to need something from the GM: enough "raw material" in the combat environment to work with. If combats take place in bare rooms this is hard.
So maybe the Homebrew solution for rogues should actually be a somewhat "meta" thing: giving them some leeway in "adding" to the GM's description. Not contradicting, mind. If the GM says the fight is in a temple and there's an altar, those are facts already established. But maybe the rogue can say "well, then I'll just grab some of the votive gifts from one of the side chapels and throw them at the monster to enrage it with this sacrilege". Was there a side chapel? The GM didn't say there wasn't, so you can introduce them without causing a contradiction. Voting gifts? Plausible, so introduce. Will it enrage the monster? Skill check!
Note: I have no idea right now how to capture that kind of meta-power in game mechanics. But there's quite a few indie games around that do stuff like that. Maybe one of them has a good idea.
@Miles: I couldn't name one single thread that has The Answer in it. Many different approaches have been proposed depending on what the author thought was the angle that really needed improvement. I have a "graveyard" of bookmarked threads about rogue and fighter improvement (but mixed in with threads about lots of other things; finding stuff is hard). With the hope that one day I'll write the perfect house rule to fix things.
There's one 3PP supplement I can recommend for consideration, Rogue Glory.
It's well-written. The game mechanics are sharply written. It gives the rogue considerably more oomph. It makes rogues a lot nicer, although lately I'm thinking that it might not be going far enough. Inspired by this influential article, I want nonmagical skills to do MUCH MORE at levels 10+. There are some threads going about introducing new uses for higher-ranked skills; I'm following them closely.
In my opinion, the key to fixing the rogue is skills. Rogues should have class abilities that really make them a lot better at skills - far better than they are right now. Rogues should get new skill-related abilities that aren't already being copied by a dozen other classes through archetypes.
And skills need to do much more. At every level, skills need to do awesome stuff. At level 1 sneaking past a monster is awesome, or having a bluff check that commoners can't beat. After level 5, skills should be waging war on "realism", and after level 10, skills should be winning that war. The kind of moves you see in movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon are a good example of what skills should be able to do at level 10. (The nice thing about CT,HD is that it builds up the level of bizarre action, increasing it gradually. If they used the action scenes from the end more in the beginning, you'd go "that's ridiculous". But due to buildup, you...
The end part of what you said reminded me of Fantasy Flight's newest roleplaying system. The Star Wars roleplaying system. It uses it's own unique story-telling dice that have either positive or negative results and the players decide what happens as a result. I've only played it 2 times so far, going to play a 3rd time tomorrow night, but it's a blast.
+1 for the "meta-gaming" idea of helping the GM decide the environment as long as it's not ridiculous.
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Yeah, one nice thing about tabletop RPGs is this flexibility. In a computer game you're limited to the things the programmer put into the room. You can't improvize a tactic with stuff that isn't available.
In a tabletop game you can propose other things that are in the room, that just hadn't been mentioned before. Of course they can't directly contradict everything that was said before, and they can't be so outrageous that nobody understands why they weren't mentioned before. You can't sneakily add a great wyrm to the scene. However, a precious ming vase you can smash on someone's head is both fun and fair.
As a GM, if a player proposes something like this, I think you should ask these questions:
1) Did I specifically NOT include that for some reason?
2) Is it really unlikely/impossible that the thing the player wants is there, but wasn't mentioned before (because it's "just background")?
If there's no reason to say No, you should say Yes, because the player probably has an exciting idea with it. And an exciting idea is better than a routine idea.
Thing is, this isn't something I'd necessarily want to restrict to rogues. There's no real reason for that. But rogues need this sort of thing more than other classes, I think.