Assassins are pretty good, they have a well rounded skill set and at upper ranks they can mitigate their relatively low HP pool with armor and trance. They can control confrontations with people who can't see them through a mix of the threat of assassinate and just flat out beating them up.


I think one way to level the playing field without really changing their essence would be to give them a choice between concealment and mobility. You could implement it in several ways, adding flat movement lag while hiding, making more commands have a chance to pull you out of hiding and possibly adding less than one round lag to coming out to stop triggers from nullifying the affect, replacing sneak with creep and having wilderness time and civilized time.

All of these things could affect thieves as well if you make it like creep then elf/drow would have a natural advantage (at the cost of their natural disadvantages) in both classes.

If hiding classes cannot keep up with moving targets it forces them into being more ambush related, it gives them a choice, and it reflects reality in the sense that if you are trying to move undetected you can't generally do it at a full out sprint.

If we're talking about reality, then we should go ahead and not let them do complex martial arts techniques when they're gripping and attacking with two weapons at the same time. I would love anyone to show me a guy able to twist and break someones wrist with the same hand he's holding a sword in.

I would love to see a guy raising dead or hurling fireballs.

In Thera all things are possible whether it great feats of arcane ability such as manifesting fireballs from your very hands or the dark arts such as raising the very dead from their cold graves to walk among us or the ability to grip a sword-hilt and a dudes wrist at the SAME time. A grip so firm that you can twist it to the point of breaking ALL the while griping your sword AND attacking with it. Yes all things fantastic to see can happen here.

There's suspension of disbelief and then there's just plain absurdity though the line it's always clear. Maybe you're right though that they are pretty much the same thing.

who just eats you and you can't run away from him no matter what

and duergar still can't see into the trees