Why does the URogue lose so many talents over the core rogue?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


It seems unnecessary and kind of weird.


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Not following your point.


Half my title vanished. Fixed that.


Now I get it. My cynical guess is that two factors are at work, word count and how much time was used for R&D to get balance right.


In the book it says that only the talents in the listed books were limited and that all the splat book support should work on the Urogue. PFS said only the explicitly listed talents work. So really only in PFS are the rogue's talents limited. In a normal game fallowing the text in Uchained the Urogue can use all talents not found in the books listed. And the talents removed in those listed books aren't as needed with the new mechanics of Urogue.


Ahh! That makes way more sense.

I'm assuming that the exclusion was intentional due to items being out-of-balance. I haven't seen anything in detail on them. For home games, you can easily review them individually and house-rule them back in.


Some splat books, like Blood of Shadows, state in the Rogue Talents section that URogues can take these new talents. It calls them out by name, as well as Slayers. (Of course they still have to qualify to take the individual Talent). Is PFS just ignoring that text?


In PFS those work. But in older books it doesn't say that. And only the Core line was reviewed and mentioned that those talents not listed aren't able to be used. But talents from other books should have been fine to use with Urogue.
So in PFS it needs to have the line "Urogue can use" but it seems like the Urogue originally should have been able to use all rogue talents not in the core books.

Shadow Lodge

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Paizo rarely gives without taking away.


For a hacky workaround in home games, take ninja talent for rogue talent, since ninjas don't get access to the new stuff.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

In some cases they took away a talent because it was incorporated into the core class features or combined with another talent. For example, the idea of offensive defense was incorporated into the debilitating attack ability.


If I had to speculate why Paizo omitted so many rogue talents from URogue, I would say its a combination of:

  • Some talents were obsoleted by the new additions to URogue, such as Debilitating Injury. This includes Befuddling Strike for example.
  • Some talents were from obscure sources, including campaign settings and player's companions. There are probably more than 40 that fall into this category and most are extremely weak.
  • Some new talents were added that combine multiple past talents into one. The new talent "Certainty" replaced the APG talents "Charmer" and "Fast Fingers" for example. The functionality was streamlined and made slightly better, so the old talents weren't needed any more.
  • The rogue talent list was just getting too bloated. At my last count, there are 139 total rogue talents (not including advanced talents) available to the core rogue. This was an opportunity to trim the chaff.

There are (by my count) 62 core rogue only talents, of which only a small number are big losses: Bomber, Bomber's Discovery, Ki Pool, and Sacrifice Self (if you have improved evasion).

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