Inspiration? Assassin job from Ragnarok Online

[LairdMaon]

My buddy challenged me to build a character that D&D equivalent of RO Assassin.

Rules are:
Any book, any magazine
No homebrew
Level 3
No LA buy off
Gold: 30,000
Stats: 18,18,16,16,14,14
Gimmicks and shenanigans accepted
Finally: He wants to have his own demiplane into which he can throw opponents for arena-like funs.

And away we go!

[TrollCapAmerica]

Not a lot of folks likely play RO and don't know what your looking for in this character

It certainly doesn't help that TWF is fairly weak compared to RO where it's free extra damage

[Mr.Moron]

Not a lot of folks likely play RO and don't know what your looking for in this character

It certainly doesn't help that TWF is fairly weak compared to RO where it's free extra damage

It's been years and years since I've played so it's likely changed but back in the day they were generally defined by:

-Attacking very quickly (high number of attacks per minute)
-High Critical Hit Rate
-High damage avoidance via dodging.
-Poison buffs that worked as direct damage multipiers (not Debuffs or Dots).
-Multi-hit attacks that caused multiple cumulative damage instances with 1 action.

[Zaq]

I've thought about this before, and I've never come up with anything that really makes me happy, but let's get started.

Okay, well, there's two primary kinds of RO Assassins: katar and dagger. As I'm sure you know, katar users focus on crits, and dagger users focus on having extra card slots as well as being able to stack cards and elemental modifiers, as appropriate. (The Ice Pick is another matter altogether.) Both kinds of Assassin have cool poison tricks, and they both have access to some flavor of invisibility. They have high Flee, so they tend to be hard to hit.

Cards obviously don't really exist in D&D. The mechanic just isn't there. The closest thing is probably something like a Bane weapon, or maybe Favored Enemy. However, that's not really something you want to really rely on, since having a separate Bane weapon for everything you fight isn't exactly economically feasible, and you can't change Favored Enemy once you pick it. (Having a perfectly-carded weapon for everything you fight isn't economically easy in RO either, but that means something very different in a MMO where your resources are dependent on your luck and your willingness to grind than in a tabletop game where WBL is a thing.) So while TWF very well might find its way into an Assassin build, I don't think we can really recreate the defining feature of a Daggersin. (If you had an Artificer in your party, or if you had Artificer levels yourself, and you therefore had easy access to the Weapon Augmentation infusion for an on-the-fly Bane ability, that might be another matter, but that's still just going to be a +2 to hit and an additional 2d6 + 2 to damage, which is a far cry from the massive percentage multipliers that Daggersins can rack up with the perfect weapon for the job.) Daggersins don't have any defining attack skills, either, so there's nothing for us to model on that front. Double Attack isn't something that translates well to D&D, and I think the best thing to do to model it is just to get as many swings as possible, probably from TWF. There are some ToB maneuvers that apply (Dancing/Raging Mongoose from Tiger Claw, primarily, and Avalanche of Blades/Time Stands Still from Diamond Mind), but they tend to be high level. I suppose the Manyfang Dagger from Serpent Kingdoms exists, but let's not mess with that.

The actual katar weapon (which D&D calls a "punching dagger") doesn't get any love in D&D. It's got a ×3 crit modifier, but it doesn't have a broad crit range, so you're better off looking at something that does, like a kukri, and just calling it a katar. Outside of silliness with Disciple of Dispater and similar 3.0 stuff, you're not going to get much better than a 15-20 crit range, but that's still about as good as anyone can get. The Blood in the Water stance is useful if you make lots of crits, though it doesn't do a lot on its own. Of course, getting crits only really matters if those crits turn into a lot of extra damage, so you need nice big flat numbers to multiply. The easiest way to get lots of flat bonus damage on an attack with a light weapon is to get Sneak Attack and the Craven feat, which isn't a bad idea anyway. You could use Aptitude shenanigans to get Lightning Maces involved, but that's pretty sketchy overall. There isn't a great way of mimicking Sonic Blow or Soul Destroyer—I guess just picking your favorite high-damage ToB maneuver is going to be the order of the day, if you specifically want to represent an attack skill.

Poison is hella expensive in D&D, and it's not especially reliable. The best thing to do is to max out your ranks in Craft (Poisonmaking) and get your hands on the Psionic Minor Creation power, which either requires a feat (Hidden Talent) or a dip in Shaper. That will give you a reliable source of free poison, so you're not going to be spending all your money on a consumable resource that isn't actually that effective. You're going to want a way to apply it without poisoning yourself in the process, which is likely going to take a three-level dip in Ninja (CAdv) or the feat Master of Poisons (DotU). If you're open to homebrew, the link in my signature to my Poison skill is a lot closer to how the RO Assassin uses poison, but it's obviously homebrew, and I've never had a chance to playtest it in an actual game.

Flee is pretty much a direct analogue to AC, so getting good AC and/or good miss chance is simple enough. This kind of character naturally lends themselves to being DEX-heavy, so that's a good start. Shadow Hand offers several sources of concealment and miss chance, or you can get those from other forms of magic (or even magic items). Most of the tricks that increase AC work just as well on this kind of character as on anyone else. If you can spare the feats, Elusive Target (Complete Warrior) has the very handy ability to negate Power Attack bonuses, which might be appropriate.

Invisibility can come in any of a number of ways. If you have actual spells (perhaps from the actual Assassin class in the DMG), you might get it that way. A two-level dip in Monk for Invisible Fist (Exemplars of Evil) gets you the ability to turn invisible as an immediate action once every three rounds, so that might help. Swordsages (or anyone burning feats on Martial Study) can get Cloak of Deception, which kind of works, even if it's not going to keep you hidden for the entire encounter. The Ninja class from Complete Adventurer has the ability to turn invisible as a swift action for several rounds per day, but in my opinion, they don't get enough uses of it per day to really rely on it. You might also look into getting Hide in Plain Sight from somewhere, rather than true invisibility. Depending on exactly which version of HiPS you end up with, it might be more reliable than actually trying to use true invisibility, and it's likely harder to counter.

Overall, I think Swordsage is going to be a good choice for you, since they get Shadow Hand and Tiger Claw, and Diamond Mind might also be useful at the higher end. You're going to be kind of feat-starved, since you'll want TWF (and maybe its cousins), Master of Poisons, Hidden Talent (Psionic Minor Creation), Improved Critical, and Craven, just to start. Any TWF user is going to want some manner of Pounce or free movement (Tiger Claw offers a couple stopgap solutions), so you'll probably have to dip into Barbarian or Cleric for that. Craven requires Sneak Attack, so you'll need to dip into something that offers that (Assassin's Stance might do it, but it's dicey).

In the end, the game mechanics an Assassin uses in RO just plain don't translate well to D&D. D&D just flat out doesn't have anything like RO's card mechanic, D&D poison is utterly unlike RO poison, and the basic assumptions of how much effort a single attack takes (and how much of a battle it should represent) are wildly divergent. You can make a sneaky backstabby character with a plain old Rogue or anyone who uses Sneak Attack (even though RO's Backstab skill is a Rogue power and not an Assassin power), and a basic TWF/Sneak Attack blender is a decent way of representing an Assassin's high attack speed and powerful attacks, if you're willing to abstract it to that degree. Sneak Attacks and crit-fishing don't really mix that well, so if you specifically want crits (rather than just abstracting it to mean "high-damage attacks"), that kind of character is going to be trying to do two different things at once, which may or may not work depending on the power of your game.

I guess it boils down to exactly what you want the character to be capable of doing. Do you just want high attack speed and high-damage attacks on a sneaky character? You can do that as a straight Rogue, with some dips here and there to get some magic if that's important to you. Do you want flashy attack powers like Sonic Blow and Soul Destroyer? Something ToB is going to be your best bet for discrete attack powers that deal a lot of damage, or you could try to use the DMG Assassin's Death Attack power (not that it's very reliable overall, since the DC kinda sucks and the setup time is no fun at all). Do you want something the system calls poison? You need a cheap form of poison, mostly in the form of Psionic Minor Creation, even though RO poison just means "more damage" and D&D poison means "separate ability damage." Do you want something the system calls crits? You can crit-fish on nearly any martial character just by getting Improved Critical on an 18-20 weapon like a kukri, though how valuable those crits are really depends on what else the character has to offer. Do you want to be sneaky and hard to pin down? There's ways of getting invisibility on tap, and there's ways of being very stealth-focused, and you can pick what works best for you.

It's not going to be very efficient to get ALL of those things on one character, so the question is what exactly you do want the character to do. So what matters to you? What makes a character like an RO Assassin, in your mind? The class can't be translated directly, but if we know what aspects of it you want to carry over, we can focus on those and come up with something that works.

[TrollCapAmerica]

Funny thing is I used to play RO a lot in the late 2Ks . It's incredibly fun early on and the world is beautiful and interesting It becomes an endless unrewarding grindfest and the storyline almost impossible to find but I've still had a fondness for the game

I kinda wanna take the RO setting and backstory to use as a campaign setting. With Prontera as a starting point and slowly expanding into the virtually unknown world around you. This could range from "An alliance with Al De Baran would give us access to the unknown lands of the north" to "We need heroes to investigate this Abbey of the coast" or "Valkeyries? I don't believe in they exist the island probably has a few harpies"