Sudden Strike balance?

[Fredgerd]

Sudden Strike has always irked me. It strikes me as sneak attack but just strictly worse and is generally found on classes that didn't need to be nerfed in any way as far as I can tell. I have two questions for you all.

1. Is there any even small usable advantage sudden strike has over sneak attack that I'm missing or is it strictly worse?

2. If I used a table rule that all instances of sudden strike = sneak attack, are there any potential negative consequences of this change that anyone can think of? Does this push any class or combination of classes into BS tier?

thx in advance for your input.

[Garryl]

The only difference between the two is that Sudden Strike doesn't get triggered by flanking, but Sneak Attack does. SS is strictly inferior. Changing it to Sneak Attack would just make it more usable.

[Fredgerd]

Cool, thats kinda what I was thinking.

[wotmaniac]

I wonder .... if I had to make a guess, I'd say that SS was intentionally nerfed to make sure that Rogue stayed a valid class.
Not sure if it was needed, because of other differences in the class abilities.

[Fredgerd]

Probably. The other thing that always weirded me out was that the name flavor would imply its the other way around. That is, sudden strike sounds like something that could be pulled off by feinting while sneak attack sounds like would require flatfootedness.

[Unbeliever]

I've adopted the proposed house rule and not noticed any substantial differences.

[StreamOfTheSky]

I made Sudden Strike not negated by non-total concealment to give it at least some edge.  I think in retrospect that's not nearly enough; being in the condition to Sudden Strike should probably let you just plain ignore non-total concealment.

Then again...I kinda hate how easily concealment screws rogues and also thought of letting them SA in it.  But then I'd have to buff Sudden Strike again to make up for that.   

Making it identical to SA is definitely simpler, I did like the idea of keeping it separate and with its own benefits, though, based solely on being stealthy instead of also flanking.  It's much easier to get flanking than flat-footed / lost Dex to AC, of course...