D&D 5th Editon Discussion: 6th thread and counting

[AgentPaper]

In order for you to have a character with Thieves' Cant which makes sense, these things need to be true;

- You've grown up in a literate, relatively civilized society.

Who ever said you had to grow up in this society? It does necessitate that one had to exist, but nothing about you growing up there.

- Within this society, there is a significantly large criminal underworld, which all criminals are intimately familiar with.

You don't need a large criminal underworld to have Thieves' Cant. What you need, is a large number of criminals, who have reason to want to talk to each other without anyone else noticing. I find it had to believe that there are that many settings that wouldn't fit this requirement.

- Your character has to have been intimately familiar with the slang of this criminal underworld.

Yes, which could happen in any number of ways. A gentlemanly thief doesn't just jump out of bed one day and steal the crown jewels. He needs to spend a long time learning how to open locks, sneak around, disarm traps, bluff guards, and fight dirty. Where do you think he learned all of this, a book?

- It is impossible for any other class to reach your level of familiarity with the slang of this criminal underworld.

This I don't think should be true. It should be possible for other characters to learn Thieves' Cant just like any other language, but we don't have all of the rules for that. It would also make sense to spread out the Thieves' Cant a bit more.

I don't have any problem with giving the thieves' cant to a background, I simply don't see why it can't be on the rogue, as well.

Now here are the restrictions that the mechanics of a Fighter puts on me;

- You are skilled with weapons.

These are not comparable restrictions. A Fighter puts almost no restrictions on my character; a Rogue puts many, many restrictions on my character.

This is actually another problem that I hadn't brought up yet. The fighter has even worse issues with this than the rogue. I'd actually far prefer to see the fighter be narrowed in scope a lot, because currently, the fighter seems to make just about every other martial character obsolete. If it were up to me, a fighter would be required to have learned a "school" of combat. Where and how he learned that school would still be up for debate, but it would make the fighter more of the wizard of martial classes. They learn by study and rigorous practice.

This would make other classes, like the Barbarian and the Monk much more able to grab a part of the martial pie, as it were, instead of forcing them to become another kind of spellcaster, as they were in 4E.