Quote Originally Posted by sithlordnergal View Post
But its still something to consider when you have an ability that is very much a lone wolf kind of deal in a party oriented game. You're almost never going to be alone, and the rest of the party's antics are out of your hands. And those antics can very easily cause all that hard work and that ability to swiftly become useless.
This kind of thinking leads to just straight button combat features that don't expand too far into the narrative. Much has been made about the Soulknife's level 9 feature vs the Assassin's. But the soulknife gets to boost his attack roll, and do a mini teleport. So to your point, no ally in your party can fubar these features. When you use them, they just work. That's nice.

I find the Assassin's feature MUCH more interesting and fun. People are talking about "getting by" without assassin. I have played the game for years without a feature that lets me add a die roll to my attack roll, or teleport as a bonus action. I can get by just fine without either.

If all we want are neat little feature packages like that, the game is going to get stale and boring real quick. I mean... in some sense it already has. This edition has become extremely cooky cutter in it's late stage.
Now, I do admit I used extreme examples there...though maybe not extreme as you might think since I was the Wild Magic Sorcerer in that particular example. And I'd happily roll those odds again as that class again, no matter how important infiltration, stealth, and subtly is since I enjoy the class and will gladly take the risks that come with the potential rewards.
Both things can be true.

What I would agree with is that sometimes a player in the group may prioritize something other than Stealth and cause the stealth attempt to fail. I can agree with this. I did this once myself because I wanted to frighten the people at the bottom of the stairs. So I rolled a decapitated giant's head down the stairs as a vanguard to our arrival. That meant we couldn't sneak down and ambush them, and up until then we had been sneaky (we ambushed the giant whose head was chopped off). However, apart from that one example in almost two years of playing this particular campaign, I honor the group's desire to use Pass Without Trace and stealth.

But what you seem to be saying is that it will almost always be the case that someone will interfere with the infiltration, to the point that it makes the feature not good. And I don't agree with that at all, and I think if one player is dominating the playstyle of the group completely like that, that's probably a problem. Doesn't have to be, some table dynamics are like that. But I certainly wouldn't want to be playing to the same player's tune over and over and over again, to the point that other people don't get to shine and use their features as well.
Its kind of like the "If you are traveling alone, you can move stealthily at a normal pace." portion of Natural Explorer. Absolutely useless because when are you, a player, ever going to realistically be traveling alone for an hour or more in your favored terrain.
Well, maybe the whole day if your group is playing a hexcrawl or something.
When are, the Assassin Rogue, realistically, going to be able to make sure one of your party members doesn't screw everything up, either by accident or on purpose?
This seems to me more like a player/table issue than a class issue. Like there is certainly an assumption in this thread that the assassin will be totally at odds with the table playstyle, which is not necessarily true, as evidenced by some of the comments in this thread.
And guess what, by level 9 the party probably is a goofy parade of rare classes with features and abilities that make them stand out of a crowd. Spell casters with 5th level spells generally aren't considered to be very common. Most Fighters don't know a bunch of special combat maneuvers, or have the ability to summon a copy of themselves as an echo, or grow to the size of an ogre and use giant rune magic to protect their allies. Even if you were to remain perfectly stealthy and perfectly unknown, you'd still have a reputation that would be passed around. And that reputation alone is enough to use a Legend Lore and Scrying spell.
If these spellcasters aren't very common, then how many people are actually casting Legend Lore and Scrying?