Rogue

This article is about the player role. For the game, see Rogue (game).

The Rogue, abbreviated as Rog, is one of the roles available for a hero in NetHack. From the guidebook:

Rogues are agile and stealthy thieves, with knowledge of locks, traps, and poisons. Their advantage lies in surprise, which they employ to great advantage.

Rogues can be humans or orcs, and are always chaotic.

Starting equipment

Each Rogue starts with the following equipment:

• a +0 short sword
• 6-16 uncursed +0 daggers
• a +1 leather armor
• an uncursed potion of sickness
• an uncursed lock pick
• an uncursed sack
• an uncursed blindfold (¹⁄₅ chance of 20%)

Orcish Rogues receive an orcish short sword in place of a short sword, a set of orcish daggers in place of regular daggers, and are given two additional stacks of 1-2 random comestibles.

Rogues start with knowledge of the sack and any applicable racial equipment.

The Rogue's default starting pet is a little dog or kitten with equal probability.

Intrinsics

Rogues gain the following intrinsic properties upon reaching the given experience levels:

• XL 1: stealth
• XL 10: searching

Attributes

The Rogue's starting attributes are distributed as follows:

Attributes	Strength	Dexterity	Constitution	Intelligence	Wisdom	Charisma	Remaining
Minimum attributes	7	10	7	7	7	6	31
Distribution percentages	20%	30%	20%	10%	10%	10%
Mean w/ standard deviation (human)	14.10±2.29	17.52±1.00	13.72±2.18	10.41±1.77	10.41±1.77	9.07±1.70

Skills

Rogues have the following skills available to them:

Rogue skills
Max	Skills
Basic	Weapons: two-handed sword, morning star, flail, hammer, polearms, spear Combat: riding
Skilled	Weapons: broadsword, long sword, scimitar, saber, club, mace, shuriken Spells: divination, escape, matter
Expert	Weapons: dagger, knife, short sword, crossbow, dart Combat: bare hands, two weapon combat

Rogues start with Basic skill in short swords and daggers.

Special rules

Rogues get a +1 bonus to multishot when throwing daggers.

Rogues can perform backstabs, granting +1d(XL) damage when they attack a fleeing monster in melee while they are not twoweaponing.

Rogues have an ^XL⁄₆₀ chance of gaining a bonus to untrap floor traps, and gain a separate bonus if carrying their quest artifact. They also have double the normal chance of disarming container traps, and gain 3 times the level multiplier when calculating their chance of disarming door traps.

Rogues have a higher chance of unlocking doors and containers with lock picks and credit cards.

Rogues are the only role that do not take an alignment penalty for stealing from a shop or gain an alignment bonus for pacifying an angry shopkeeper.

Rank titles

The status line displays one of the following ranks for the corresponding experience levels:

• XL 1-2: Footpad
• XL 3-5: Cutpurse
• XL 6-9: Rogue
• XL 10-13: Pilferer
• XL 14-17: Robber
• XL 18-21: Burglar
• XL 22-25: Filcher
• XL 26-29: Magsman/Magswoman
• XL 30: Thief

Gods

The Rogue pantheon is based on the Newhon pantheon of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

• Lawful: Issek
• Neutral: Mog
• Chaotic: Kos

Quest

The Rogue's quest sees them fighting the Master Assassin for The Master Key of Thievery, an artifact skeleton key. The quest is notorious for a high amount of shapeshifter monsters, item-stealing monsters, and traps, as well as the quest nemesis being quite difficult to reach.

While carried, The Master Key of Thievery grants warning, teleport control and half physical damage, and applying the Master Key of Thievery to unlock doors will always succeed. Rogues carrying The Master Key of Thievery also gain a bonus to disarming traps on the floor, and gain the following effects if the artifact is non-cursed: success is guaranteed when untrapping doors and chests; locking or unlocking a door or container with the Master Key always detects traps, and will always successfully remove them if the hero chooses to; and wielding the artifact while not wearing gloves will print messages that hint at the presence of unseen traps nearby. Invoking The Master Key of Thievery and selecting an adjacent door or container removes all traps from that object.

Strategy

The Rogue is a moderately difficult role, and can be more or less so depending on the player's ability to utilize their daggers and other ranged capabilities properly: they also have the potential to become powerful melee fighters, particularly if they make use of Elbereth, scrolls of scare monster, and other scaring tools. This potential carries well into the later stages of the game, where a Rogue will most likely have their desired artifact weapon and/or projectiles of choice highly enchanted, giving them high damage potential with backstabs and "storms" of projectiles as well as standard two-weaponing. Rogues are also notably faster with lock picks and credit cards than they are skeleton keys.

Note that Rogues do not have any inherent ability to steal gold or items from monsters or shops.

Character creation

The primary factors in the choice between playable races for the chaotic Rogue are weapon quality, starting food, attribute growth, and the ability to navigate (and fire projectiles) in the dark.

Orcs have an easier early game because of their starting food, poison resistance, infravision, and lack of penalties for cannibalism: they have more time to find weapons and train skills, and can also reliably perform same-race sacrifice much sooner than humans, even with the odds of other orcs generating as peaceful. As a tradeoff, orcish daggers have the weakest damage of the dagger weapons, and orcish Rogues looking to upgrade to normal daggers from their starting stack will have to gather them from scratch—this is not particularly difficult in practice, since gnomes and other monsters frequently generate with stacks of daggers. Orcish Rogues will also have to contend with hostile elves that ignore Elbereth and can generate in groups capable of overwhelming them.

Human Rogues have better quality in weapons, and possess superior growth for HP and energy to go along with their higher attribute caps for mental stats: intelligence in particular is important for spellcasting, and both intelligence and charisma determine the outcomes of foocubus encounters. In return, they are more reliant on amassing a cache of permafood and have a harder time obtaining corpses for same-race sacrifice—human hostiles are generally stronger and appear later on, unless a hero is willing to try their luck with the watch or even shopkeepers, and their corpses will be much heavier to lift. Additionally, while elves are more likely to be peaceful for human Rogues, orcs will always be hostile, and encountering a horde of Uruk-hai early without a source of poison resistance can have fatal results. Humans are also held back by their lack of infravision, though they can compensate with light sources or properties such as warning.

Early game

Rogues should seek out food and develop their primary offensive skills as soon as possible. Sokoban is a good early target to reach, especially for Rogues that start with low strength: pushing boulders will exercise strength, and strength increases improve carrying capacity along with the range and damage of thrown projectiles. Sokoban also has a lot of permafood among its useful loot, and both of the possible prizes are highly desirable: a bag of holding helps shore up carrying capacity and maintain mobility, while an amulet of reflection is great for any hero to protect themselves and their inventory from many wands and other deadly rays.

A Rogue's starting sack and smart use of a pet can be used to perform credit cloning in any early shops, and can also be used for stealing desirable and otherwise-pricey items to either use them as equipment or sell them back for gold. Despite this, Rogues are at a disadvantage when it comes to attempting the protection racket, because while their starting sack is handy for shoplifting and credit cloning, the Mines will inevitably be dangerous because dwarves and gnomes alike are hostile to chaotics. Since spellcasting is generally less of a priority for Rogues than some other roles, racking up early protection points is also much less urgent compared to simply making use of viable armor.

The Rogue's starting stack of daggers is often a primary form of ranged offense early on: their multishot lets them throw 2 at once, and Expert skill both increases the maximum to 4 dagger per throw and grants each one that hits a +2 damage bonus. The starting short sword is a serviceable early weapon, but few Rogues will make use of it, especially if they plan to obtain an artifact weapon: the skill can be useful for twoweaponing purposes, since an elven short sword is a solid off-hand candidate. Rogues should collect any daggers and elven daggers they find and curse-test them prior to either wielding or throwing them: the latter type deal the most damage of dagger-type weapons, and are good to use against rust monsters and acidic monsters that can damage or destroy iron weapons.

Rogues looking to train daggers as quickly and often as possible can use a single dagger in melee, by wielding the stack of daggers and using the quiver command via shift + Q to ready all but one. This assigns the readied daggers to a separate letter automatically, which can also be done manually with the adjust command; the separate dagger sets can then be given different names to prevent the stack from re-merging. Dagger volleys can deal impressive damage, but be careful with peaceful monsters behind your target—if a thrown dagger kills a target during the multishot, any remaining daggers are likely to fly past them, hit the peaceful monsters and anger them. Numeric prefixes should be used where necessary to fire fewer daggers at once (usually only one), particularly when in areas that have a significant peaceful population such as most Minetown maps.

The starting +1 leather armor is easily superseded by most metallic armor, and armor selection is fairly straightforward in theory: most Rogues will not attempt spellcasting early on, and do not reliably start with the required intelligence and maximum energy. In practice, a lack of carrying capacity from low starting strength can complicate matters, and a Rogue's armor must both provide reasonable AC without being too heavy. As with many heroes, a dwarvish or elven mithril-coat is an ideal goal for Rogues, since both suits provide much better AC and MC2 for the same weight as leather armor - Rogues confident in their abilities can seek out dwarves and hobbits to relieve of their armor.

For Rogues that start with enough intelligence and plan to branch into spellcasting down the line, it is best to wait until they have a reliable cache of permafood and sufficiently trained their combat skills—they can then find a safe place to read spellbooks, remove any metallic armor and train their spells, with the most ideal books to find being ones for low-level divination spells, escape spells and matter spells; any spells that a Rogue cannot or does not plan to use can be used as a source of confusion later in the game. The spells of detect monsters and jumping are among the better options for a Rogue to train with, since they can be used to spot targets at a distance and either close in or maintain space accordingly.

Backstabbing versus two weapon combat

Another consideration for Rogues that applies outside of character creation is their primary source of melee damage: While backstab damage is a decently strong asset for a Rogue in the early game, it is significantly limited by only working against fleeing monsters - Rogues can also reach Expert skill in twoweapon combat, which outputs much more consistent damage at higher skill levels. Even so, the intermittent boosts to damage from backstabs can be enough to turn difficult encounters around and shore up the Rogue's early offensive power: all of their best melee weapons are one-handed, and judicious use of Elbereth can scare off monsters frequently; finding an early instrument can also be useful to this end. Remember that when twoweaponing, if a monster begins to flee you can switch to your primary weapon as a free action by pressing shift + X.

Twoweaponing can be used to output damage that reach or surpass the level of single-handed artifact weapons: with a double damage artifact weapon, backstabs deal (XL + 1) damage on average, which can out-perform many off-hand weapon options; one of the exceptions is a crysknife paired with a silver dagger. Before strength, enchantment and skill bonuses, Grayswandir (which deals double damage against all monsters) will average 9 damage against most monsters and 19.5 damage against silver-haters, while a two-weaponed crysknife and silver dagger yield averages of approximately 7.75 and 18.25 damage. With full strength, skill and enchantment available to a rogue, a single-handed Grayswandir will average 30 and 40.5 while the the crysknife/silver dagger twoweapon averages 35.75 and 46.25; the artifact Grimtooth averages the same damage as a single crysknife for a Rogue without requiring any additional skill training.

Projectiles

By the mid-game, a Rogue should at least have an idea of which projectile weapons they want to commit to using going forward, as well as access to holy water and scrolls of enchant weapon in order to prevent erosion, raise their accuracy and (if applicable) minimize their odds of mulching. Daggers, darts, and crossbows bolts can be trained to Expert, and Rogues can also reach Skilled in clubs, enabling the use of the aklys - each of these weapons have the listed advantages and disadvantages below to consider:

• Daggers have multishot and to-hit bonuses, and Rogues are likely to be at least Skilled if not Expert at this point of the game, though the to-hit bonus may not make as much difference if the Rogue has found a luckstone. They cannot be poisoned, and are fairly heavy at 10 aum per dagger: the weight from a sizeable stack can add up, and many characters can struggle to carry more than 16-20 daggers without help from a bag of holding. The multishot also means that they may exhaust quicker when thrown, and retrieval may become somewhat tricky in certain cases. That said, daggers do not require a launcher like crossbow bolts, and also do not "mulch" like darts or bolts can; this makes them a stellar low-maintenance option for any Rogue, especially melee-focused ones.

• Knives have lower base damage than daggers and lack their multishot and to-hit bonuses, and require six skill slots to train to Expert; like daggers, they also cannot be poisoned, though they have half the weight at 5 aum. Knives are also somewhat less common than daggers, including fewer monsters generating with them - they can be obtained from Mordor orcs and soldiers. Somewhat fortunately, knives also do not mulch like crossbow bolts or darts and do not require a launcher.

• Darts deal slightly lower base damage than daggers (at most dealing one less point on average compared to elven daggers against a small target), and also lack a multishot bonus; switching to darts from daggers requires six skill slots to train to Expert. Darts also weigh only 1 aum each and do not require a launcher, making them less of an encumbrance issue. They can easily be obtained in bulk from dart traps and poisoned with a potion of sickness for extra damage and the chance of an instakill, although many late-game enemies are poison-resistant. Darts are often the most ideal choice for a ranged-focused game plan - you can often carry more than enough to freely engage certain monsters such as disenchanters or monsters that are in or over a moat, and can maintain damage potential while fleeing from potentially-lethal threats more easily, and do not lose as much capability from eroded, mulched or otherwise-lost darts.

• Crossbow bolts deal slightly more base damage than daggers against small targets, and substantially more against large ones. However, bolts also require a crossbow, which take six skill slots to train to Expert and takes in-game time to switch to—this can prove unwieldy if one of your weapons is cursed, and makes two-weaponing more cumbersome. Additionally, bolts have a multishot penalty unless you have at least 18 strength, but do not gain bonuses from strength as darts and daggers do. These caveats, the carrying capacity required due to the launcher, and the relative rarity of bolts generally make them the hardest of the projectiles to utilize. With this in mind, bolts weigh 1 aum themselves and can be poisoned like darts, and can still be obtained from gnomes and centaurs; as with darts, losing individual bolts is not as pressing as leaving daggers behind. Rogues willing to take this route only need to worry about enchanting the bolts, since the crossbow's enchantment only affects to-hit bonuses.

• The aklys is the lowest-maintenance weapon, since it can double as a melee and ranged weapon, weighs 15 aum, and will almost always return to the hero when thrown while wielded. An aklys cannot be multishot like other projectiles, so there is little benefit to advancing the club skill beyond Basic, which saves five skill slots relative to darts and crossbows. Its damage potential is also far lower than any of the above options, but a well-enchanted aklys is still sufficient to safely deal with the occasional cockatrice, mimic, or sea monster.

The bonus damage from enchantment for projectiles somewhat flattens out the differences between their base damage: A ring of increase damage with a positive enchantment is also a very useful supplement when throwing or firing weapons, with the damage bonus applied to each hit - a scroll of charging or two should raise the ring's enchantment to a suitable level, though beware of exploding the ring! For Rogues poisoning their projectiles, they can maintain a stock of sickness potions by holding on to any fruit juice they find and dipping them into a potion of sickness, cancelling potions of see invisible and booze if they wish. Orcish Rogues can poison their darts or bolts as soon as they amass them and have a potion to spare, while human Rogues should wait until they obtain poison resistance (which they will often have by this point) to avoid a potential YASD from a monster lobbing their poisoned projectiles back.

Mid-game

In the mid-game, on top of deciding on projectile options as above, Rogues should also have their primary melee weapon established and enchanted. Sacrificing for an artifact weapon can take longer for Rogues compared to other roles: they lack a guaranteed sacrifice gift, and the chaotic artifacts that are first gift candidates are either very weak or of very narrow utility with the exception of Stormbringer - unless they elect for crowning, Rogues will also generate at least one sacrifice gift before they can obtain Stormbringer or a good unaligned artifact such as Fire Brand or Frost Brand. Orcish Rogues have a ¹⁄₂ chance of receiving Stormbringer as a first gift, since they cannot be given Sting or Orcrist; human Rogues will need to name both artifacts to have the same chance.

Rogues willing to spare a wish or fortunate enough to find them in bones can potentially utilize cross-aligned artifacts such as Magicbane and Grayswandir, provided they can handle the blasting damage: Magicbane's scare effect and reliable engraving of Elbereth provides openings for backstabs, and its damage benefits from the ability to train daggers to Expert; Grayswandir's double damage also applies to backstab damage, and Rogues can reach Skilled in sabers.

Rogues that use a shield instead of twoweaponing will benefit most from a shield of reflection if they want to keep their body armor and amulet slots open for other choices, or an elven shield if they have a reflection source if one of those slots. A spellcasting Rogue will prefer the small shield, which has lower potential AC but incurs the smallest spellcasting penalty. Shields of reflection are very rare, but one can potentially be found in the statue of Perseus on Medusa's Island.

The Rogue quest is infamous as one of the trickiest in NetHack, and advance preparation is generally required to complete it: a source of magic resistance and/or reflection can help deal with chameleons that take powerful forms, while a ring of protection from shape changers prevents them from shapeshifting to begin with; a ring of free action can prevent guardian nagas from paralyzing the hero and leaving them at the mercy of other hostiles; and the Master Assassin is hard to reach without polymorph or a means of attracting his attention at a long distance, but is easy enough to dispatch in comparison. For more details, see the article's strategy.

The Master Key of Thievery is a very nice quest artifact, with one of its most useful qualities being the rare half physical damage, and warning and teleport control are also valuable extrinsics to have slotlessly—while non-cursed, it can also automatically untrap doors and containers that it is used on, and can be invoked to remove a door or container's traps as well. A Rogue that manages to complete their quest without magic resistance should seek out the property as their next immediate goal.

Spellcasting Rogues should seek to reach Skilled in at least one of their spell schools with whatever skill points they have available - performing alchemy to brew potions of gain ability may be worthwhile. Divination spells should be raised to Skilled first if possible for the skill level benefits from spells such as detect treasure, identify, magic mapping, or detect monsters. Skill in escape spells can be useful for navigation via jumping or levitation spells; matter spells are generally the least useful to advance, since the spells of knock and wizard lock are low-level and can usually be cast reliably, though some Rogues may be willing to advance the skill and employ a robe in order to use the polymorph spell.

Late game

Weapons

Entering the late game, rogues should continue to refine their primary attacks, enchanting their melee artifact weapon to +5 or +6 and enchanting their missiles as well. Silver daggers are often desirable missile weapons, but are exceedingly rare, and not worth a wish.

If you choose to try twoweaponing despite forfeiting the backstab bonus, good secondary weapon choices for Rogues are crysknives, silver sabers, katanas, and elven broadswords. Crysknives pair well with Magicbane, since you can train both weapon classes to Expert for the lowest to-hit and damage penalty. If you have Grayswandir, Stormbringer, or one of the Brands, you may prefer using secondary weapons from the same classes so you do not have to train a second weapon skill.

Armor

Rogues can use shields of reflection comfortably if they so choose, allowing them to forego silver dragon scale mail in favor of gray dragon scale mail - this supplies the magic resistance that your quest artifact lacks, and frees the neck and cloak slots for other items. Alternately, you may choose SDSM if you have another source of magic resistance and you prefer not to wear a shield.

History

The Rogue first appears as a role in NetHack 3.0.0, where it replaces the Ninja from previous versions.

In NetHack 3.4.3 and previous versions, weapons thrown at fleeing monsters apply backstab damage on each hit. Twoweaponing is relatively unpopular in these versions, since Rogues cannot reach Expert skill in the better artifact weapons (besides Magicbane, which is cross-aligned and requires a wish) and cannot backstab while doing so; many players instead use the free hand to augment their AC with a shield, since all their best melee weapons are one-handed, and the shield of reflection frees up their amulet and body armor slots for other options if they so desire it.

In NetHack 3.6.0, backstabbing is made less powerful: it now only occurs when attacking with a single weapon and is exclusive to melee attacks.

Origin

A rogue is a person or entity that flouts accepted norms of behavior, or else strikes out on an independent and possibly destructive path. The Rogue as a role is based on the Thief of Dungeons & Dragons, which debuted in the June 1974 Game Players Newsletter #9 and is later included in the 1975 Greyhawk, the first Dungeons & Dragons supplement. The Thief is eventually renamed to the Rogue in later editions - thieves and bards are generally recognized as Rogue subtypes.

Variants

Some variants of NetHack retain the more powerful backstab mechanic from NetHack 3.4.3.

SLASH'EM

See Rogue(SLASH'EM).

SlashTHEM

In addition to SLASH'EM, they can be incantifiers, kobolds, or lycanthropes.

Encyclopedia entry

I understand the business, I hear it: to have an open ear, a
quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse; a
good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other
senses. I see this is the time that the unjust man doth
thrive. <...> The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity,
stealing away from his father with his clog at his heels: if
I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king
withal, I would not do't: I hold it the more knavery to
conceal it; and therein am I constant to my profession.

[ Autolycus the Rogue, from The Winter's Tale by
                William Shakespeare ]

See also

• Rogue (player monster)