I would like an official FAQ ruling on this.


Rules Questions

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Paizo Employee Organized Play Developer

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Piccolo wrote:
I dunno about that. See, I have seen this build in action, and it outpaced by far the other PC's, even before it got multiple attacks to work with. [...]

What you appear to have in your example build is a highly optimized rogue; you've got a non-core race that's super favorable for the rogue class, you're using Unchained Rogue which is more pre-optimized than Core Rogue, a damage-focused archetype, and options pulled from across at least 5 books to build towards a specific function (sneak attacking as much as possible.) Even accounting for all that, it's probably not going to get full attack sneak attacks every round but should mostly be getting them about once every other round or potentially 2 out of 3 rounds as enemies die and the rogue is forced to reposition to keep up its sneak attack damage.

It seems to me that the problem isn't really with sneak attack specifically, sneak attack is just the easiest manifestation of the issue to grab onto. What you most likely have is a disparity in party optimization. In the current edition of Pathfinder the difference between a character optimized towards a task and a character who isn't optimized towards that task is enormous, so much so that the spread between skills can be upwards of 40 or more points and the spread between low-end damage and high-end damage once you hit the later levels can be hundreds of points. If you look at optimal tactics you'll see that there's some really high-powered stuff out there. Cavaliers double-charging each round for 8x attack damage (including 8x challenge bonus damage) plus attacks from their mount (while adding the mount's Strength bonus to their own), litany of righteousness paladins getting double smite on all of their attacks (which is both higher than the average roll of normal sneak attack dice and comes with an accuracy bonus), instant enemy TWF rangers who can pull +10 to attack and damage on all of their attacks and all of their animal companion's attacks (which also means they can take the penalties from Power Attack and TWF without the penalties even eating all of ther FE bonus, let alone touching their BAB and other bonuses), etc.

The ceiling and the floor of the game are really far apart and you've found a build that's closer to the ceiling than the floor. If the issue is that it's too strong and unbalancing your group, I'd suggest implementing some limitations on the number of sources allowed (my home group typically has a 3 book limit for character creation and advancement, though we vary between campaigns whether that's 3 + CRB or 2 + CRB.) You can also limit access to non-core races, which would shave some of those early numbers down a few points. If you'd prefer not to limit your players' options, you can also look at avenues to help your other players hit similar levels of optimization. There are guides and build threads for every class in the game, so a little research can go a long ways towards evening out the table experience (though it's important to be aware that as your group's average optimization rises, you're going to have more weight to carry as a GM since CR guidelines and pre-constructed adventures aren't written for the upper levels of optimization.) You can also look at other systems that don't have the optimization disparity of Pathfinder; now is a great time to download the Pathfinder Playtest and help shape a game that may better fit you and your group.

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