Playing a rogue, rp/considerate and useful gaming

[fof3]

First time poster, long time lurker.
Playing a rouge (Merisiel) in a PF campaign. I’ve played rogues in lost of systems but I generally have the same issues:
1 a big part of your job is to be a canary down a mine shaft and trigger all the traps and ambushes for the rest of the party.
2 in a combat situation you tend to spend lots of time moving about to then hit something for ... as much damage as the fighter deals out with every attack (which they have more of and a better to hit chance).
3 outside of combat you shine as the skills monkey, the guy who wanders off into town, doing side plots and “their own thing” while the rest of the players get bored.

I would like to find a party useful angle for my character without resorting to either rouge stereotypes (gambling, thieving, etc) or being a play by mail party member.

[Castilonium]

Try an investigator, vivisectionist alchemist, slayer, bard, or inquisitor instead. They're all better at being rogues than rogues are.

[Elkad]

If you don't like those 3 jobs, what ARE you looking for?

Sounds like you don't want to be a rogue at all. (And congratulations on spelling rogue correctly ½ of the time by the way).

[Psyren]

Before anything else, show your GM the Unchained Rogue (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/unchained-classes/rogue-unchained/); It is basically Paizo's attempt to boost the regular rogue's power to keep up with most of the other classes (especially the other skillmonkeys) in the game. You can definitely still make a competent regular rogue, but Unchained does it so much better and more easily.

To your specific points:

1) This is less a problem with the rogue and more a problem with D&D traps in general. There are a bunch of articles (like this one (http://theangrygm.com/traps-suck/)) explaining why and what your GM can do to make them better. The rulebooks themselves are unfortunately bad at this.

2) As noted above, if you start with Unchained Rogue your damage and utility increase dramatically, such that you should have little trouble keeping pace with a Str-based melee while also having far superior natural defenses and utility. The money you save on gear early on (i.e. heavy armor and shields) can go to rogue-y things like splash weapons and wands.

3) This depends heavily on your campaign. Some give the players plenty of "me time" to do their own thing, I would guess however that most will just handwave your time in town rather than have the GM take you on a solo caper to rob the marquis blind or something while the party is elsewhere.

[Geddy2112]

I second the above. But if you are playing the iconic rogue, that means a lot of your stats/abilities are predetermined? Did you get to build your own or play with a pregen character? If so, did the rest of the group pick pregens? If you are playing Merisiel at level 1, grab a compound longbow because you are proficient, and if you can go first in combats you can usually land a sneak attack shot against a flat footed enemy. Dump the rapier and dagger TWF thing for dual short swords and weapon focus them right away.

1.You should not be triggering traps, you should be able to avoid and spot them, and actually disarm them. Although the wizard should be having an unseen servant or summoned animal do this in a few levels, leaving you out of a job(albeit finding traps is a bad job and traps are just badly designed overall. They really only come into play in the first few levels).

2. Second using unchained rogue, as it boosts your damage power dramatically. Even before you get dex to damage, getting weapon finesse for free is big. Likewise, your attacks now debuff and they debuff hard. Eventually if you two weapon fight your sneak attacks will start really packing it on. It is important to keep in mind you can do a lot more the fighter can't, and while they can do a lot of damage, that is really all they have. Play your other abilties.

3. Being a skillmonkey and face should not be a solo activity, and comes up a lot in group things. Don't intentionally run off from the party, but join them and help them out. You can cover almost any skill the party is lacking, and several of those.