A Land Far Away

Hi there.

Not sure why, but I don't seem to be getting my 1d6 sneak attack as a level 2 Rogue / Level 1 Sorc.

I am pretty sure I was sneak attacking before I multi-classed. I checked my feats list and seem to not have it listed in there. I was using a crossbow if thats of any help and wearing medium armor.

Anyone have any advice?

Sneak attack is rather fiddly in NWN2.
First you have to be attacking something that is sneak attackable. Undead, elementals, plantcreatures etc are out immediately.
To trigger it you either need to:

a. attack from stealth (sneak mode, invisibility, opponent hasnt rolled for initative yet for some reason, attacking neutral etc)

b. attack from the flank (which requires another pc or summon to be positioned on the other side of the target you are attacking, in my expierence about 135 degrees is enough)

c. attack someone who is flatfooted (status effect, in practice thats enemies who are stunned, asleep or the feint feat).

If you use a ranged weapon, you need to be close enough aswell.

Odds are when you tried the last few times you didnt manage to fullfill one of the conditions. Armortype doesnt influence sneak attack and theres little reason to suspect the rogue/sorc combination messes SA up in ways other rogue/x combinations do not.
The sad reality is that sneak attack is highly unreliable. Buff ALFA-rogue 2016!

Ah I didn't know about the degrees condition I thought the subject being occupied with a meat shield was enough. I'll try a few more tests on easier monsters

Sneak attack not listed on the character sheet then is normal?

Sneak attack not being listed on the character sheet is abnormal; you're probably broadly unable to sneak attack right now.

Check your override folder; make sure it's empty. The server you're on should do the same.

Definitely empty I have a clean install. (and visually confirmed it just now)

I also did a quick char creation in making a new character on the main campaign. I get the sneak attack there listed as expected.

I'm definitely missing sneak attack on the alfa character's feat's list.

There's a few more ways to get sneak attack to activate in NWN2; it's actually a lot easier to get sneak attacks in NWN2 than 3.5e, especially if you're using a ranged weapon - getting ranged sneak attacks is much more tricky in pnp.

An easy way to catch someone flat footed is simply to attack while target is neutral; you don't have to be stealthed. Even if they're 'red'/hostile and/or combat has begun, the vanilla nwn engine stupidly treats the target as still napping flat footed unless they're engaged in some sort of attack (although ACR thankfully tweaked things so it's no longer as silly).

And yet; the poor Rogue is still underpowered in many situations.

Well in combat vs constructs and undead, etc, sure. In theory that should be a relatively small percentage of situations where rogues are hapless, especially if skillchecks are as important as we say they are. But ALFA DMs sure do love their undead. There's definitely been times where I was tempted to agree that penetrating/death/gravestrike weapon property (or whatever it's called that allows you to sneak attack specific types of critters normally immune) should be viable in ALFA.

And don't even get me started on the state of scouting in ALFA2... *mutter* ignore me... back on topic... *mutter*

*waxes nostalgic about ALFA 1 scouting* As I RPed a scout/trapspringer for most of my ALFA 1 experience, I do agree.

So, yes, back on topic.

If there's no overrides and the PC doesn't have sneak attack, then the problem is just that the toon is broken. The usual culprits for this sort of thing are custom-scripted critters ("Sneak attack immunity isn't enough! I need to strip the feat from attackers!!1!") and systems trying to be similarly clever; hard to know offhand, as literally any script is capable of damaging a character in such a fashion, and they sneak into mods as part of imports (even when the "import" button is avoided; Moonshaes suffered many mysterious resource additions when its HDM refused to use erfs for anything).

Arri can fix this with her mighty HDMly powers. I can teach her the command to add a feat if she doesn't already know it. Rogue sneak attack is 221.

Zelknolf wrote:So, yes, back on topic.

If there's no overrides and the PC doesn't have sneak attack, then the problem is just that the toon is broken. The usual culprits for this sort of thing are custom-scripted critters ("Sneak attack immunity isn't enough! I need to strip the feat from attackers!!1!") and systems trying to be similarly clever; hard to know offhand, as literally any script is capable of damaging a character in such a fashion, and they sneak into mods as part of imports (even when the "import" button is avoided; Moonshaes suffered many mysterious resource additions when its HDM refused to use erfs for anything).

Arri can fix this with her mighty HDMly powers. I can teach her the command to add a feat if she doesn't already know it. Rogue sneak attack is 221.

I think I know how to use the control panel to add the feat to her PC but thanks for the feat number , saves me having to go look it up.

AND THIS HDM uses erfs regularly . . .

Thanks for the assistance I hope it works!

Thanks for the assist, it was apparently due to sub dual mode needing to be toggled on and off to get it back.

While on the subject of sneak attack... Any chance of arcane tricksters getting them for range touch spells as per 3.5?

There's a design floating around (a design which would broadly fix sneak attack-- getting rid of "ranged flanking," allowing flanking to operate vs. things targeting you, and generally supporting weapon-like spells [spell sneak attacks aren't AT specific; touch spells and ranged touch spells are defined as "weapons" for many mechanical purposes, like threatened space]), but ALFA NWN2 lacks the population to justify such a large piece of development.

So "any chance"? Yes. Some non-zero chance.

"Likely?" -- not unless current patterns change dramatically.

Also

Arianna wrote:AND THIS HDM uses erfs regularly . . .

... yes I know. The problem is that usually when I mention scripts sneaking in among imports, someone points to Castano's (demonstrably-worse) strategy of extracting erfs and dropping the resources directly into the module. You take good care of MS; I didn't mean to imply otherwise.