How To Play a Swashbuckler in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the seekers guide to twisted taverns which is just coming off the back of a wildly successful kickstarter campaign and is now available for pre-order this book contains 14 brand new taverns for you to explore and join in the revelry with your party at your own game table they absolutely blew through all of their amazing stretch goals and there are tons of super fun accessories as well to augment your game taverns have been a cornerstone of dungeons and dragons campaign and i feel like we're overdue for a good pub crawl some of our amazing friends are working on this project including logan from runesmith here on youtube as well as elder mancy and ghostfire games so make sure to check out the links below to pre-order your copy of twisted taverns and get the party started and now on to this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything dungeons and dragons including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we're talking about how to play a swashbuckler rogue in dungeons and dragons 5th edition we're going to be looking at their various abilities as well as some build ideas their tactics and different feats and options that you might consider when building a swashbuckler the swashbuckler rogue is a classic fantasy archetype that really fills the fantasy of playing a character with a sharp rapier wit there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling so i've been playing a swashbuckler rogue for a long time now in our live stream campaign shadows of drakenheim and have been thoroughly enjoying it yeah now we actually had a bit of a back and forth as you were designing wilhelm over which class you would play with this character so why did you ultimately decide to go with the swashbuckler rope well originally i wasn't looking at the robes because rogues tend to advertise themselves as kind of that sort of criminal or assassin sort of vibe but the swashbuckler rogue really stood out to me as being able to build on that charisma element and bring to life that fantasy of things that we've seen in popular culture like zorro or the princess bride yeah i think the swashbuckler rogue is a really fantastic option for someone who loves all the skill and guile and cunning of the rogue but finds that the other archetypes like the arcane trickster or the assassin and the thief kind of wear their criminality on their sleeve like that is very much embedded in the flavor and feeling of the subclass whereas the swashbuckler rogue is very much a dualist that gets to feel like they are taking their enemies head on and outwitting and outmatching them at every single turn whereas the other rogues i think rely a little bit more on stealth and subtle huge the swashbuckler rogue is perfectly capable of going toe-to-toe with their enemies and does not need to hide in the shadows at all and they will do it confidently and throw at a few good one-liners while they're doing it yeah and i really find that this approach to confronting your enemies head on having that sharpened wit really comes out in all the features of the subclass because the swashbuckler rogue in many respects is quite transformative on how the subclass alters the way the basic rogue plays and you would be forgiven for playing it in a completely different fashion to any other rogue although you still get to have all those amazing goodies like sneak attack cunning action and a bevy of skill proficiencies and expertises so let's take a look at what actually is unique about the swashbuckler rogue in the subclass features that we get right away at third level when you take the swashbuckler subclass you gain fancy footwork this simple ability is pretty game changing for a rogue if you make a melee attack against a target you can now move away from that target without provoking opportunity attacks this enables a swashbuckler rogue to actually have a very hit and run style to their melee attacks normally a rogue that wants to get in stab somebody and get out is going to use their cunning action to disengage and depending on your character's movement speed this might only allow you to move 15 feet in stab somebody and then move 15 feet out but now that you don't have to disengage to prevent yourself from taking an opportunity attack from at least a single target you can now use your cunning action or your bonus action in general in so many other ways and still know that you can get yourself out to safety or at least at a striking distance of your foe you can now use your bonus action to dash further away you can use your bonus action to hide even if that's possible or to use it for dual wielding which is a very very key strategy i think for swashbucklers in particular the other great thing about fancy footwork is if you're playing in a team that has some frontliners like fighters or paladins or whoever it really opens up that option to sideline the enemies that they're already fighting get your sneak attacks in and then move away so that you are out of danger it's a really great skirmisher play style that opens up just from this one ability now the other ability that all swashbucklers gain at third level is a really transformative ability called rakish audacity the first part of this ability you can actually be forgiven for missing because this actually lets you add your charisma modifier to your initiative rules but the meat of this ability gives you a new way to activate your sneak attack normally rogues either need advantage on their attack role or they need to have a enemy of the target within five feet of their target in order to apply their sneak attack to a successful hit however a swashbuckler rogue can do something slightly different you do not need advantage on an attack roll in order to add your sneak attack damage to a successful hit provided you are within five feet of your target and no other creatures are within five feet of you what this means is that if your swashbuckler rogue is squaring off against a single foe in kind of a dual sort of situation you can apply your sneak attack damage to your successful hits even though you don't have advantage on your attack rolls or have an ally there to add that five foot direction you can still sneak attack under the regular conditions though that you can sneak attack as well two important things that this opens up for the swashbuckler rogue number one it really lets you play that fantasy of the duelist and you get to call out that enemy on the battlefield go toe to toe with them and have that epic sword duel but also this takes into account battlefield positioning is a major factor for swashbuckler rogues if you have two enemies standing side by side if you go in on the side of them so that you are five feet from your target but the other enemy is not within five feet of you you can now get sneak attack so being aware of how you position yourself on the battlefield how you interact with the enemies where your allies are and all of these pieces working together means that a swashbuckler can reliably land sneak attacks every round if they're smart now of course this doesn't mean that you shouldn't lose sight of working together with your allies or taking every advantage of every advantage you get on your attack rolls because those conditions still work for your sneak attack so essentially the only way that you can be denied sneak attack is in a situation where you are surrounded or interestingly enough if you are adjacent to an ally that ally can actually spoil your sneak attack if that ally is then also not adjacent to your enemy as well so be careful because that's the one corner case where your positioning can kind of get the better of you i guess swashbuckler rogues just have such a flair for battle that they need ample room to really deliver the point at ninth level you gain panache if you're conversing with a target you can use an action to make a persuasion check contested by their insight check if you win the check and the enemy is hostile towards you they now have disadvantage on attacking any creature other than you and they can't make opportunity attacks against creatures other than you either now this effect will end however if another target attacks them or if you are further than 60 feet away from them fortunately though you can also use this ability out of combat as well if the target is not hostile to you you actually charm them for one minute which means that if your rogue makes a single persuasion check against a target you're not going to have advantage on all your other charisma checks whether that's deception persuasion or intimidation against them for the next minute enabling your swashbuckler rogue to either taunt enemies off their allies in the midst of battle or be the face of diplomacy and guile in non-combat situations a lovely double-sided ability that applies both in combat and in role-playing situations at 13th level you're going to gain elegant maneuver now as a bonus action you can give yourself advantage on the next athletics or acrobatics check you make during the same turn finally at 17th level you become a master dualist if you miss within it with an attack rule you can choose to re-roll it again with advantage once you do so though you cannot do so again until you finish a short or long rest looking over at the complete package the swashbuckler road gave some amazing features very early on making it a very front loaded subclass because i think many of the higher level abilities are good but i could take or leave them which means we might even consider multi-classing with our swashbuckler rogues also i think that we've got a pretty clear focus on making melee weapon attacks because our um rockish audacity is giving us a way to sneak attack only with attacks made within five feet but i also think that we're going to want to have a focus on charisma because of the bonus to initiative and the panache ability which we really want to capitalize on with more than one ability in this package that focuses on charisma it really does advertise that charisma based rogue i still think that because we are a rogue dexterity is going to be your main stat but this definitely puts charisma as the second option and then constitution is maybe the third i would say so we normally use a custom array of 17 15 13 12 10 8. where would you put your ability scores with your rope i mean i put 17 into dexterity 15 into charisma and 13 and 2 constitution now i will say that one of the lessons i have learned is yes i'm very charismatic and i'm good with a rapier but i go down pretty quick with my squishy squishy rogue who has less hit points in our campaign than the fighter or the warlock yeah no i think with your other ability scores this really comes down to how you want to role play your character i think a lot of people quite naturally are probably going to want to put a decent score into either intelligence or wisdom and then you might even just abandon your strength altogether as a swashbuckler although i do think that the advantage on athletics checks that you can gain with elegant maneuver does mean that you might want to have the ability to bound around a little bit what i'd like to point out here is that when we think of a lot of the classic swashbucklers that we see in fiction like inigo montoya from the princess bride or even captain jack sparrow from the pirates of the caribbean series a lot of swashbucklers are really charming but some of them are kind of airheads yeah i think that there is a cunning to the way that these rogues operate but cunning doesn't necessarily mean intelligence a lot of these famous rogues are pretty foolhardy they will make smart decisions in the moment on the spot when they are using their cunning and ingenuity to outwit their opponents but in the long run the reason why they end up in those situations in the first place is probably due to a pretty low intelligence or wisdom score i think many swashbucklers are notorious for making poor life choices they rely on their audacity their skill and their ability to wriggle their way out of the awful situations that they so often get themselves into and that's not really a hallmark of a character necessarily with a high intelligence or wisdom score a lot of them are not really long-term thinkers or planners and it's i don't even think it's necessarily uh that they have good instincts either many of them have really bad instincts and it's it's actually one of those things where um i think that d doesn't necessarily quantify this this unquantifiable cunning that reflects someone that just has kind of the skill and the luck to wriggle their way out of the awful situations that they get into because oftentimes when you watch those movies you're like why why would you do that and that's the fun the fun of seeing them get out of it the joy of all of those movies is watching them get into those situations i mean the reason why pirates of the caribbean works is simply because we watched jack sparrow get in over his head in a terrible situation and then get away by the skin of his teeth and that's what's exciting about those movies uh the ability to do that with the rogue may not rely on your intelligence or wisdom but it might rely on some good feat choices yeah i and i think so often when you see the swashbuckler outwit a more intelligent foe it's usually because they've done something to cheat or something really unexpected or something that you're like no reasonable person would ever believe for a second that that would work but this person is just so foolhardy to try it right it's kind of like again in the guardians of the galaxy who's just gonna break out into song and dance and expect that to work but a swashbuckler swashbuckler rogue might [Laughter] so so i think that that really shows uh where um even though you might be dumping these stats there's still an opportunity for some cool role play and some justified role play as well if you're leaning into the classic archetype following through with that though what would we choose for eraser lineage for our swashbuckler robe well tasha's has really opened up the options here which means that we're going to be looking more at the additional features of the lineages and races if we weren't including tasha's new rule set i would say that half elves are a great choice i agree i think any elf half elf or tabaxi in particular would make an excellent and really iconic swashbuckler really you want to nail that that bonus to dexterity and that bonus to charisma if you can get it and then have a few other complementary abilities but with patches cauldron of everything allowing us to move our stats around or letting us select the custom lineage and of course the old standby of the variant human i think there's a lot of really good feats that we're going to want to take with our swashbuckler rogues and so the variant human and the custom lineage really do stand out because they're going to allow us to do some of these cool build options we'll get into what those feats are in just a moment but i do think if i was building this a swashbuckler i'd be tempted by either the variant human or the custom lineage yeah i i went with a variant human and that was so that i could take a feet right out of the gate which we're going to see there's a lot of good feed choices that present different build options i also do want to bring in here that if we are looking at the additional features that some of the lineages offer when we look at tieflings or dark elves these actually present a really interesting option because both of them have the option of laying down darkness and now with new feats that allow you to take invocations a swashbuckler rogue who can lay down their own darkness and then have devil sight in it might be a game changer and that's from a cool lineage choice and a good feat i think with the ability to mix and match your ability score boosts there's a really cool opportunity to look at the various lineages that offer minor magical powers because these can be a really big augmentation for a subclass that has no magical abilities to speak of even if we take the classic high elf who gains one cantrip well that kantrip could be booming blade which is really effective with the dart in dart out ability that you get from fancy footwork we could even look to something like the fear bog who has a lot of magical abilities including the only ability to turn invisible we could look at gnomes if we wanted to as well or even an arachoka if your dm's going to let you play a flying character from character creation yeah either way there's there's a lot of great lineage choices and a lot of ways that you can complement the already great foundation of the swashbuckler rogue with just adding a little bit of magic or extra abilities through your lineage choice now if we build up to our character's background this is where we're going to want to choose our skills and other features for the character and as we already discussed playing a swatch buckler is a great opportunity to consider backgrounds that are not associated with the criminality often thought of as the core of the rogue we could be a noble we could be an outlander or even of course the classic the sailor or the pirate if you want to be jack sparrow yeah i i do think that this is a brilliant thing about the swashbuckler is i almost am just drawn to the criminal or charlatan background with most rogues but with the swashbuckler i actually felt like they wouldn't be a criminal or a charlatan although they still could be there's a really good option there for that as well but yeah the sailor swashbuckler which is basically just code for pirate yeah is is so iconic or the noble who's the duelist and challenges everybody they come across to a one-on-one sword fight there's there's a really cool option there for that as well yeah and i think that this pairs really nicely with the main rogue feature of expertise which is going to double your proficiency modifier for uh two skills right away when you first get to be able to get this at level one but then as you gain levels you get to pick two more and i think that a lot of rogues their go to is stealth deception and probably their thieves tools with their expertises but i don't know if that's what we want to do with the swashbuckler there's a lot of open-endedness here i still took stealth because i'm the rogue and i like being stealthy beyond stealth i also did persuasion acrobatics and thieves tools so i still have a bit of my stealthy rogue package there ready for me if i need to sneak but then also the persuasion and acrobatics presents this much more flamboyant in your face sort of rogue play which i love yes and i think it's essential because having expertise in persuasion is going to help you make better use of panache and having expertise in acrobatics or athletics is going to really double down on the benefit of elegant maneuver once that comes online as well you're going to really be able to nail those high skill checks in both those areas that you're going to want to be making a lot so as we're building our swashbuckler rogue we have the whole package here but one of the things that's going to complement this the most is the choice of feets and so what feats are we going to choose yeah it's really really tempting i think with the swashbuckler to just boost up your dexterity and your charisma as high as you can get them and not take any feats but i do think looking at the matrix of all the different feats that are now available with xanathar's and tasha's all factored into this that we got a lot of really great options and you might never need to take a straight up ability score increase on your swashbuckler and instead favor the feats that give you a plus one bonus to one of your key ability scores and then also give you an extra perk i'm thinking things like elven accuracy or piercer or even actor or even resilient for constitution to just round up some of those audibility scores and give you a really good baseline now those are ones that you might want to consider but i think that when we look at the swashbuckler rogue at its core there's kind of three or four directions that we could take with the swashbuckler because now we're thinking about fighting styles of classic swashbucklers that we see in fiction i think that you see a lot of swashbucklers that are either wielding a brace of rapiers so two rapiers is it if you look at any fencing manual you'll see these but you also often see the rapier and buckler style but of course then there is the classic fantasy archetype of the rapier and the crossbow or simply the simple duelist who has an open hand so i think that depending on what your fantasy is you could choose feats to support one of these better than others for my variant human swashbuckler i took crossbow expert as my feet right out of the gate now technically speaking what i'm doing with crossbow expert doesn't exactly work in the rules as written which you can check out in our video up over there but we house ruled it so that we can have the rapier and the hand crossbow and use crossbow expert to fire it as a bonus action which really helps out the rogue in the situation of landing your sneak attack because now if i miss my first attack i can pull out my hand crossbow and try again it also gives me that extra added benefit of not having to rely on melee combat all the time and it just looks really cool to think of that character with the melee weapon in one hand and the ranged in the other going in and stabbing twirling and shooting yeah now crossbow expert if you're if you've got a generous dungeon master like me that lets it work for your character is a really great way for a rogue to weaponize their bonus action and being able to make an attack with your bonus action as a rogue is critical because rogues don't get extra attack now the reason why this is critical is not because you want to double your sneak attacks in your turn because you can't get sneak attack damage more than once per turn even if you can make multiple attacks the reason why you do want to make multiple attacks is that if the first shot don't get them the second one will missing with your one and only attack as a rogue is so disappointing because not only do you miss out on the weapon damage you miss out on the fistful of dice that you get to roll with sneak attack and straight up being able to attack twice in one round is better than being able to attack once with advantage because you have the chance of both of those attacks hitting and you get more opportunities potentially and your odds of landing a crit can be just as good as well now a rules permitting version of this is to simply use a short sword and a dagger now if your short sword attack misses you can just stab with your offhand dagger and even though it's only dealing on one measly 1d4 damage well that 1d4 looks a lot better when you pick up 5d6 absolutely it really doesn't matter what your base weapon is if you're landing sneak attack it's a good use of a bonus action or an action now this dual wielding rogue is pretty awesome but we can make it even more awesome if you want to live out that fantasy of dual wielding two rapiers there's a couple feats that you can look at getting first of all there is fighting initiate and of course dual wielder now when you choose finding initiates this is a new feat that was introduced in tasha's cauldron of everything that allows you to choose a fighting style and of course there is the dual wielder fighting style which now allows you to add your dexterity modifier to your offhand attacks on top of that if you combine dual wielder which not only adds one to your ac but it also allows you to wield a weapon that is not light in your off hand so now you can have your double rapier swashbuckler rogue now there is a really cool three musketeers build as well which is the rapier and the buckler we're gonna have to look at a few different feats in order to create this fantasy as well yeah now with this first of all we're gonna need to get proficiency in shields because rogues don't get this by default we could take the moderately armored feet for this which is still going to give us plus 1 to our dexterity and get us shield proficiency on top of that so we're almost there we might also want to take fighting initiate and take either the um defense to get another plus one ac or even potentially the dueler to get plus two damage on our main attacks but i think this is where where we can really cook with gas is by taking sentinel the major thing about sentinels not only do you help block enemies from getting to the rest of your party but you can make opportunity attacks more often and the thing about opportunity attacks is you can make one sneak attack per turn but you can make another sneak attack during your reaction because it's not part of your turn if you want to land two sneak attacks per round sentinel might be the way to do it now we can also boost up the rogue's defenses a little bit more there is a feat called defensive duelist that allows the rogue to use their reaction to increase their ac by an amount equal to their proficiency modifier so you can kind of create this no-win situation where if your enemy does attack one of your allies you are going to brutally stab them with sneak attack but if they attack you you can boost your own ac up with defensive duelist if defensive duelist is not going to be enough to save your hide you still have the rogues uncanny dodge to fall back on this actually makes a pretty beefy rogue that can stand up within the front lines with the fighters and paladins you still might want to be a little bit of a skirmisher but there's a lot that you can do here and you can boost up your ac and have pretty decent ac to start now we could really go a little bit further with this as well by adding the shield master feet on top of this which now lets us bash somebody with our shield as a bonus action after we attack it doesn't do any damage but we can use it to shove them or knock them prone and if you are now going up to them taunting them with panache attacking them knocking them prone moving away you've got a pretty disabled enemy there like they have to now spend half their movement to get up they might not be able to get to you they're gonna have so many problems if they do attack any of your allies it can really be a no-win situation here and the rogue really gets to feel like they are outplaying their enemies like this now an alternative build to the ones that we've mentioned if you wanted to go a little bit more magicky would be to take something like magic initiate which could give you something like booming blade and find familiar find familiar will help you reliably have advantage on your attacks making sure you can land those sneak attacks and booming blade again with that moving and moving out can be really really helpful booming blade on its own as you advance levels just adds extra d8s to your core damage so it can be really good for this purpose so now the thing is is that i would either go ahead with booming blade or the dual wielder approach because booming blade is casting a spell not taking the attack action so it doesn't let you attack again as your bonus action if you're dual wielding i'll also mention while we're discussing the magic swashbuckler that some of the new feats and tashas like shadow touched which gives you invisibility and another spell or fey touched which gives you misty step and another spell both have great options for the spells that you can take and both at their core already complement what you want your rogue to be doing misty step and invisibility are both pretty awesome on a rogue swashbucklers are known for their luck so this is i think one of the clear cases where you would be forgiven for taking the lucky feat just don't forget to use your luck points kelly i will try uh yeah as long as you remember to use the luck points this goes back to the to our earlier conversation where even if you have a low intelligence and wisdom but you want to play up that cunning of your rogue lucky doesn't need to be luck it could be just your character's cunning coming into action i do think that the swashbuckler rogue is the closest you can actually get to the vibe that a bard gives off but the difference is that a lot of people don't necessarily want to play into the magical nature of a bard so being able to bring that charisma wet and cunning into a melee focused character is really interesting and i think overall the swashbuckler presents a new way to play a rogue that is really really fun and fills out a large gap that we had in the fantasy of what a rogue can be yeah i think this is one of the strongest rogue archetypes out there barring perhaps the arcane trickster the ability to land your sneak attacks more reliably and have all this battlefield mobility but then such a diversity of actual different build options of how you can choose your weapons and your strategies and your different feats and then all the role-playing opportunities that you have with the subclass all the inspiration that you can draw on really makes the subglass thing so this has been a look at the swashbuckler rogue in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about your favorite way to play a swashbuckler in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters we thank them deeply from the bottoms of our heart if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider joining our community by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6pm eastern at twitch.tv dungeon underscore dudes you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more build guides for the various classes and archetypes and dungeons and dragons fifth edition right up over here please subscribe to the channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 227,701

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: 0Q7pz-TuCZI

Length: 29min 57sec (1797 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021