What drives a poor reputation for the Rogue class?

[Just to Browse]

Yes, but as a reminder the claim was about casters vs non-casters, not specifically about rogues even. So you and Skrum, or others, or some DMs do not have any considerations when making encounters for a group of spellcasters because you're confident that their spells will see them through the day. But for non-casters, you need to make sure the encounter is toned down so it doesn't kill them or stop them dead in their tracks.

Hmm, this is the second time I've needed to remind you of the original discussion. The actual topic is that: " When I'm spending time on encounters, it's usually because [...] I want to highlight someone inflexible like the party rogue, without allowing a more flexible caster to obviate the challenge." Here's the link to that quote.

Foul! JTB is just vibing with their casters! You use the word "vibing" a lot, which seems to mean "accommodating them by targeting their strengths and not targeting their weaknesses". If that's the case, the only players I have to vibe with are the inflexible ones, because they don't get spotlight if I'm not focusing on them. This is my central thesis!

JTB's Players aren't being challenged. Unfortunately this is also not true. These encounters push characters to the limit regularly, casters end days out of slots (though usually the party rogue asks to stop before that because they're on the edge of death).

But what about a sealed anti-magic room? We do these scenarios as well. I had a monster conveniently immune to a bunch of damage types that casters usually deal with (they swapped damaging spells and focused on other enemies), the death knight in my last example threw around counterspell and could make OAs when the PCs teleported (the mage learned a hard lesson when she tried to misty step away), and I've used null-magic zones and spell reflection aplenty. So unfortunately this argument is flat out wrong. Even with counterspells, antimagic, spell reflection, invisible hunters that stalk mages, inconvenient damage immunities, rooms that explode when anyone takes fire damage in them (I ran this!), the inflexible characters are still the ones that need the least highlighting.

Picking holes in the gelatinous cube story. Quick hits.

• Why didn't the rogue see the cube? They moved down a dark hallway, their passive perception was at -5, failing to beat the necessary DC 15.
• Why does this decide the fate of all rogues everywhere? This one example doesn't. Not sure if you missed the other examples, but I wrote more than one.
• The ranger would suffer the same fate. He did not need to use a dark hallway because he had darkness!

JTB is just assuming characters must have answers all the time or else they're bad. This is incorrect. My only point, literally my only point, is that it's easy to highlight flexible classes, and harder to highlight inflexible ones. I'm not sure why I need to keep correcting the record here.

Sure a rogue suffers, but how would a flexible character handle a smoke-filled room? Why not check the example where I wrote out several options for our example cleric?

If a DM has to think about locked chests, then the rogue isn't weak it's just a tablestyle issue. I honestly don't understand this one.

Examples! I'm glad you posted examples, because I'm gonna be honest, these both sound like perfect cases to demonstrate exactly what I'm talking about.

• A fighter can use a rope to prevent allies from falling into a magical black hole with anti-teleportation effects. Straight away, a sphere of annihilation that also blocks teleports sounds a hell of a lot like targeting the weakness of flexible party members. Second, anyone can tie ropes, which means flexible characters will have both the original option (using a rope) and whatever else they have (magical webbing? walls of stone? animated ropes & vines?). This is a grade A perfect example of how flexible characters have more options, thank you for providing it.
• An outnumbered fight at low HP where you can avoid thrown boulders. More than anything this sounds like the DM vibing with the inflexible party members. 13 enemies kept at bay just by flurry attacks? Six nominally-human-intelligence enemies, none of whom decide to chase down a low-HP guy, nor command their underlings to do so? A seemingly generous interpretation of corpses as cover? This is the most vibingly vibed fight to ever vibe! This reads like a textbook example of a DM vibing with inflexible characters.

I do think this is a playstyle issue. It sounds like you're playing a game with a smart, accommodating DM who knows how to showcase the party's strengths without anybody feeling bad. I play this way too (or at least I like to think so!)--I just acknowledge that it takes extra effort to make sure the inflexible classes feel good at the table.

For experienced players playing optimized characters (that have notable access to magic items), deadly+ is kinda the only encounter worth running.

Just wanted to call this out separately, because it sounds like Dr. Samurai may not be familiar with 5e XP budgets, or DM convention around them.

5e handles XP budgets pretty poorly. If your players are playing well, "Easy" and "Medium" encounters are frequently cakewalks, while "Hard" is at the border of using a resource. Folks who actually want to challenge their players use multipliers of "Deadly", like "2x Deadly" or "Triple Deadly". If that sounds kind of dumb, well, yeah I think it is. 5e's rules for XP budgeting aren't that great.

Dr. Samurai, based on your example giant encounter, it sounds like your DM is already pretty familiar with this idea. The XP budget for that encounter is supposedly triple deadly for a level 20 party, but the fight itself isn't actually that dangerous. Ludic's experience is 6+ of those per encounter day, mine is usually less because I have a lot of players who want to play rogues and fighters and whatnot.