Quote Originally Posted by Dr.Samurai View Post
I appreciate you Strangebloke but, respectfully, people have been saying that the assassin's features are just things you can normally do with skill/tool checks, and do them better. So maybe the word "useless" wasn't used, but certainly that's what is being said, that you basically don't have subclass features at those levels.

My hackles go up when I feel like the criticism is too strong or unwarranted, and trite. Because this stuff spreads all across the D&D community and makes people think that 80% of the player options are garbage and they don't give it a second thought because this is what everyone else is saying.
I appreciate you Samurai but I believe that you often get your hackles up in optimization discussions because you on some level feel like your enjoyment of the hobby or how you like to play is being threatened.

Certainly, I think you agree that Infiltration Expertise is weaker than normal skill checks in at least two respects:
  1. you can't impersonate someone
  2. you need a week of prep.

Both of these shortcomings are worth considering. Of course as I said earlier it has advantages as well. The biggest by far is if you're in a deep cover context and we assume that infiltration expertise covers bluff checks. Having an unfailing bluff/disguise/forgery against anyone you meet is pretty useful in such a context!

Personally though I find that kind of deep cover scenario where you have a week to prep ahead of time to be something that would simply never happen at any table I've played at, so the upside is barely relevant. It's always hard to establish what the heck most people are doing in their DND games, but I feel pretty confident that this is rare overall, and the biggest issue is that this creates a dilemna for the table since you're basically doing solo play.

Quote Originally Posted by Schwann145 View Post
Arguments in the vein of, "it's worse than X feat," or, "this background does the same thing," or, "it's no better than basic Skill rolls," are all arguments that work to seriously undervalue the ability and paint it as pretty useless.

No one has said the actual words, "it's a useless ability," but the dog-whistling about its uselessness has been pretty loud.

In truth, it's a very strong ability that just happens to be ill-suited to typical "adventure/combat heavy" D&D play. This makes it unpopular, but not weak or useless.
Why can't you just take people at their word? People don't call it useless, and there's no 'dog-whistles' here. We're just stating opinions on DND lol. If we truly thought this was worthless we could just say so. For example: the grappler feat is worthless. No need to mask my opinion there.

But by your own admission its not good in a typical D&D game, a game where people are adventuring and doing combat (DND is an adventure/combat system) which kind of just means its not.... that good. We can posit about some hypothetical game where this ability is useful, but its all going to be hypothetical. I really have no idea what an 'infiltration heavy' campaign looks like. DND doesn't really support that, and most of the stuff in DND that's relevant to this is, well. Divination Magic, which is allowed to be hugely overpowered for anti-iniltration purposes because the game doesn't really care about infiltration.

It's like trying to run a classic Poirot mystery in DND. Paladin casts Zone of Truth and the whole thing is over in 10 minutes. The game isn't set up to mechanically resolve a complex series of clues and hints. Mechanically, the game is about exploring and fighting and hanging out with your friends. Those are the things that the game tries to balance.