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It's very very doable. It really depends on what you what like to do in combat and what you mean by "hold your own". You won't be a toe to toe front liner...but there's a myriad of things you should be able to accomplish in those regards.
Another route to do this would be to use the bard with one or two specific archetypes. Going Bard with the Dawnflower Dervish archetype for example would make you a very capable fighter with powerful self buffs and still have the versatile performance of the Bard class to allow you to branch out your skills effectively for the "Face" portion of what you're looking for.
Again though, Rogue really does do the job nicely. One of the things you might see though, is that rogues are not considered a "great" class in Pathfinder as there are many other classes that can do the job as well as they do with more added benefits. I don't let that discourage me though, as unless you're with a bunch of people pushing the limits of what Pathfinder brings then you're not going to feel that you're falling behind.
I encourage you to look through all the free PRD rules archives here on the site to help you look through all available classes and archetypes to help you fully flesh out what you want to accomplish. AGain though, you are not wrong in your initial gut instinct that you can build a rogue quite easily to fulfill what you want.
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High charisma and bluff can make a rogue a good feinter. Put some feats towards feints might make you a good team player and earn yourself some decent hits. Working towards some dirty trick feats with agile maneuvers might also help make your rogue interesting and helpful in combat. I always saw Flynn Rider as a good inspiration for a charisma rogue.
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Rogue is (sadly) always gonna lag more than a bit in combat. Bard is an infinitely better choice for the concept as presented in almost every way. Heck, if you want Rogue Talents, the Archaeologist Bard Archetype gets those, too.
Ninja's also better than straight Rogue, though not as much, and several other classes can probably manage to outperform Rogue for this...but none will do it as well as a Bard does.
ShawnRF,
Personally, I think it really just comes down to how much of an emphasis your group puts on character optimization.
As long as your GM tailors his campaign so that it provides a challenge appropriate to your character(s), there's no reason why you can't achieve the things you mentioned.
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'Iconic' rogue
(rog 6 / HW 3 / rog +11)
str 10, dex 17 (7+2r), con 14 (5), int 10, wis 13 (3), cha 14 (5)
+5 dex (level), +6 all (gear), +4 dex, +1 wis (book/wish)
traits: heirloom weapon (option 2; scimitar) / militia
rogue talets:
2 - Combat Trick (Dervish Dance)
4 - Trap Spotter
6 - Minor Magic (Detect Magic)
11 - Offensive Defense
13* - Feat (Dimensional Savant)
15* - Opportunist
17* - Skill Mastery (acrobatics, disable device, [face skill], perception, sense motive, stealth)
19* - Improved Evasion
feats:
1 - Weapon Finesse, Skill Focus (stealth)
3 - Endurance
5 - Eldritch Heritage (Shadow 3)
7 - Hellcat Stealth
8 - Skill Focus (perception)
9 - Dimensional Agility
11 - Dimensional Assault
13 - Dimensional Dervish
15 - Improved Eldritch Heritage (Shadow 9)
16 - Skill Focus (UMD)
17 - Dampen Presence
19 - Arcane Strike
also, while the one below isnt a rogue by class, it is one of the diplomancy-est diplomancers to ever diplomance a diplomat (and everything runs off of the cha stat)
CATFOLK "rogue"
(oracle 1/bard 19)
str 10, dex 18 (10+2r), con 14 (5), int 10, wis 8 (-2r), cha 16 (5+2r)
dex/dex/dex/dex/wis (level), +6 all (belt/headband), +4 dex/cha, +1 wis (book/wish)
traits: fortune's favored / nimble fingers
revelations: sidestep secret, lore master
rogue talents:
5 - trap spotter
9 - fast stealth
13* - skill mastery (acrobatics, disable device, [face skill], perception, sense motive, stealth)
17* - improved evasion
feats
1 - weapon finesse
3 - lingering performance
5 - dervish dance
7 - extra revelation (lore master)
9 - arcane strike
11 - dimensional agility
13 - dimensional assault
15 - dimensional dervish
17 - dimensional savant
19 - improved critical
spells
bard
0 (infinite)- detect magic, read magic, light, ghost sound, prestidigitation, message
1 (7/day)- unseen servant, cure light wounds, expeditious retreat, feather fall, vanish, silent image
2 (7/day)- blindness/deafness, heroism, invisibility, ???, ???, ???
3 (7/day)- dispel magic, good hope, haste, ???, ???, ???
4 (7/day)- dimension door, freedom of movement, greater invisibility, shadow conjuration, hold monster
5 (6/day)- greater heroism, greater bladed dash, greater dispel magic, shadow evocation, shadowbard
6 (4/day)- eyebite, waves of extacy, ???, ???
oracle
0 (infinite)- create water, purify food/drink, detect poison, guidance
1 (5/day)- protection from evil, tap inner beauty
note that these are just for *IDEAS*, you don't have to copy them or even build close to them at all. just worth looking at.
Against their favored enemies rangers are surprisingly good with bluff and sense motive.
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If you want to go rogue I recommend going Ninja.
Since you will have a Ki pool you will have a decent CHA that the normal rogues typically dump. That said it means multiple stat dependency.
You want a Face like Martial class I really like the Swashbuckler. You can take the dangerously curious Trait and gain UMD to make yourself a real front line nightmare. As well as a high CHA for a Intimidate, Bluff, or Diplomacy user.
Lastly there is the Bard. They can be really cool and totally different depending on the feats, player and archetype. I think they are really cool and my next PFS character will be a bard. I like Pagent of the Peacock and using Bluff to crush all INT checks and Int based Skill checks. Spell craft, Appraise, All Know skills. All based off your buffed up bluff check. I plan to make wizards look like the dumb kid in class lol.
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Actually, the Rogue has no advantage, whatsoever, over other classes, in terms of social skills, or even skills in general.
They have them as Class Skills. That's a slight advantage over, say, Ranger.
That is pretty much it, though. And no advantage over, say, Bards, Investigators, Slayers, or other classes that get them as class skills.
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By far the best character in the campaign I'm running right now is the rogue charlatan, with STR 8.
At level 5, with the appropriate traits, feats and social class skills she doesn't HAVE to be good in combat... she's been pretty darned good at convincing the big NPC to do her fighting for her. :-D
The thing to do is to go back to your GM and find how they run their game. If it's bash, loot, level up, repeat then yeah, a charlatan rogue probably isn't going to have a rewarding game, but in sandbox games with lots of options to actually steer the whole narrative of the game, the charlatan rogue has few peers.
Here's the thing. A Bard can do all of that even better and more easily, and be an asset in combat as well.
Seriously, show me the Charlatan's build and I'l even prove it, if you'd like, making a Bard who does literally everything better (okay, they won't have Rumormonger until 12th...but that's hardly necessary to do what you describe).
A good player can make even very mechanically ineffective characters work well, but they'll do even better if the character's actually good mechanically.
Here's the thing. A Bard can do all of that even better and more easily, and be an asset in combat as well.Seriously, show me the Charlatan's build and I'l even prove it, if you'd like, making a Bard who does literally everything better (okay, they won't have Rumormonger until 12th...but that's hardly necessary to do what you describe).
A good player can make even very mechanically ineffective characters work well, but they'll do even better if the character's actually good mechanically.
Being liked by the GM can make even very mechanically ineffective characters work well.
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There are two ways to be reasonably effective in combat as a single class rogue: 1) use touch spells, or 2) use natural attacks.
Gnomes or Elves have ways to have many, many uses of chill touch with a CL of their class level. Each casting should last an entire fight, and targeting touch AC negates the rogue's lack of accuracy. These also have the benefit of giving you a ranged touch attack to use in the rare opportunity for a ranged sneak attack occurs.
Natural attacks give multiple attacks that are all at full BAB, giving you multiple opportunities for sneak attacks without hurting your accuracy or costing precious feats like Two Weapon fighting.
Rogues are better at precisely one thing than everyone else, becoming Horizon Walkers. You can get a bigger bonus on Favored Terrain by being a Rogue who spams all rogue talents and feats into Terrain Mastery over and over until your favored bonuses on Urban and Underground are ridiculous and once you get Terrain Dominance (Astral) you can go down the Dimensional Savant line to effectively get pounce.
If you aren't playing a Horizon Walker, I can't recommend straight Rogue in a mid to high op group.
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Rogues are better at precisely one thing than everyone else, becoming Horizon Walkers. You can get a bigger bonus on Favored Terrain by being a Rogue who spams all rogue talents and feats into Terrain Mastery over and over until your favored bonuses on Urban and Underground are ridiculous and once you get Terrain Dominance (Astral) you can go down the Dimensional Savant line to effectively get pounce.
If you aren't playing a Horizon Walker, I can't recommend straight Rogue in a mid to high op group.
Rogue Horizon Walker is a good on-paper build, but it takes a while to mature, and once it does it's too powerful for normal play. I wouldn't feel right bringing it to a game.
Rogue Horizon Walker is a good on-paper build, but it takes a while to mature, and once it does it's too powerful for normal play. I wouldn't feel right bringing it to a game.Rogues are better at precisely one thing than everyone else, becoming Horizon Walkers. You can get a bigger bonus on Favored Terrain by being a Rogue who spams all rogue talents and feats into Terrain Mastery over and over until your favored bonuses on Urban and Underground are ridiculous and once you get Terrain Dominance (Astral) you can go down the Dimensional Savant line to effectively get pounce.
If you aren't playing a Horizon Walker, I can't recommend straight Rogue in a mid to high op group.
I've suffered under some pretty awful GMs lately, I have been ending up in parties that contain optimized Clerics and unoptimized Rogues, so my perception of usefulness and appropriateness is skewed toward trying to deal with wildly OP encounters. Thanks for reminding me that other people probably have better balanced groups and don't need to optimize as much to survive. (by OP encounters I mean 6 8th level characters fighting a CR 15)
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I knew there was a Face Rogue Tank build around here. I bet there's some way we can improve on it, but it looks like a good chassis to me. Skulking Slayer, perhaps? Gotta think....
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I can improve on it by making it a Cavalier (Gendarme, Standard Bearer) 1/Alchemist (Vivisectionist, Beastmorph) 10.
That gives you Greater Invisibility, Pounce, equivalent social skills with Student of Philosophy, vastly better combat ability with Mutagen and Extracts, multiple natural attacks, and a host of other advantages. You may have slightly fewer skill ranks...but only very slightly, given the higher Int.
And that's off the top of my head.
Let's see the build, I'm curious. Not familiar enough with the Alchemist to tell.
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Rogues are better at precisely one thing than everyone else, becoming Horizon Walkers. You can get a bigger bonus on Favored Terrain by being a Rogue who spams all rogue talents and feats into Terrain Mastery over and over until your favored bonuses on Urban and Underground are ridiculous and once you get Terrain Dominance (Astral) you can go down the Dimensional Savant line to effectively get pounce.
If you aren't playing a Horizon Walker, I can't recommend straight Rogue in a mid to high op group.
Actually, not even that, as more competent classes can have access to the Terrain Mastery Rogue Talent.
Like the Slayer.
And we are back to Rogues can't have nice things. I suppose I can just get a copy of the ACG when it comes out and simply tell people not to play rogues, I wish they were the best at something, but I guess they aren't.
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And we are back to Rogues can't have nice things. I suppose I can just get a copy of the ACG when it comes out and simply tell people not to play rogues, I wish they were the best at something, but I guess they aren't.
Rogue are the game on hard mode. They can be made effective, it just requires every bit of system mastery you can muster. Even then, when you fight an ooze or elemental, you might as well just go home.
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And we are back to Rogues can't have nice things. I suppose I can just get a copy of the ACG when it comes out and simply tell people not to play rogues, I wish they were the best at something, but I guess they aren't.
You want to play in "hard mode"? You looking to play "the Load" in your next game?
The Rogue is the best at that.
Sorta Ninja'd!
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Let's see the build, I'm curious. Not familiar enough with the Alchemist to tell.
Oh, lord. I so don't have time for a full build. The basic idea is to take the build as listed, dump Charisma, boost Int to 16 or so, grab the Student of Philosophy Trait and the Mutagen based Discoveries, have about the same Feat list, and basically be the same character only with Mutagen and 4th level spells.
It's not quite ideal on the social stuff, but you can't do any build that really relies on Heavy Armor as a Bard, which would otherwise be the best choice for that, and it keeps Sneak Attack and just about everything else.
I understand that Rogues are essentially hard mode, but the people who want to play rogues where I live have the lowest system mastery in the group for some reason. And if someone with high system mastery plays one, the GM goes out of his way to make it harder for that player, which defeats the purpose. Why play one of the weakest classes when a disable device check of 35 is likely to get you killed? It shouldn't by the book, but when GMs up difficulties because you don't seem to be failing "enough"...
I think I'm threadjacking at this point so I'm gonna stop venting, sorry OP, you have stumbled onto one of the longest running issues by putting the word rogue in the thread title.
sorry for my lateness (just woke up), but just a word of warning: never, EVER take rumormonger.
it makes you WORSE at spreading rumors, not better.
mostly because if you tell a lie (bluff) in the system and an NPC falls for it, they believe it to be true. if they tell that information to someone else, they are speaking as if they believe it to be true, making even lie-detection spells fizzle.
with rumormonger, anyone who talks to that NPC gets to roll against your bluff to see if that information is a lie. if they succeed, your lie is found out.
without rumormonger, they never would have had that chance in the first place.
When it comes to bluffing absolutely nothing beats a bard with glibness. Thanks to spellsong there's a very good chance you can cast that under direct observation too.
Bards are also pretty good at diplomacy too and can do it without being gimped in combat.
Cavalier could also work if you want more of a combat focus, they get all the face skills as class skills and 4+ int skill points. It only works if you want a mount. But if rogue, bard and inquisitor don't work cavalier might. Order of the cockatrice seems a good fit for an anti-hero type.
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The rogue talent Coax Information lets you use Bluff whenever you want to use Diplomacy, so you have fewer skills to divide your points between. The Mask of the Stony Demeanor is a cheap magic item gives you a +10 on your Bluff Checks. You'll have quite the face.
If you are not actually lying, then the Mask gives no bonus.
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The rogue talent Coax Information lets you use Bluff whenever you want to use Diplomacy, so you have fewer skills to divide your points between. The Mask of the Stony Demeanor is a cheap magic item gives you a +10 on your Bluff Checks. You'll have quite the face.
Coax Information only works for, well, getting information, not winning people over (and can be grabbed by the Archaeologist anyway) and the mask is only for lying and usable by anyone.
EDIT: Actually, looking at it, Coax Information lets you use Bluff or Diplomacy for Intimidate to force people to be friendly to you for a moment (and hate you later). In other words, the worst use of Intimidate. I'd never take that over Diplomacy and doing so is an awful plan.