Carl to the rescue! My good friend Carl has proposed an extremely elegant solution to this problem to me via email, and I want to simply reproduce his idea here:
Here is a quick suggestion to mull over regarding "assassinations". How would you feel about replacing the percent chance to kill mechanic with an attack that does normal weapon damage +1d6 per level of the assassin? All the normal restrictions would apply as specified (the assassin would have to completely sneak up on and surprise the victim, and then actually hit with an attack). The "sneak attack" style of assassination that you dislike is pretty much the whole reason Vivuli's player selected that class, based (I am pretty sure) on a lot of experience playing sneak attack thiefs in the Final Fantasy video game series :) This removes the "magic" element of killing a creature outright and makes it explicitly about just being really skilled at doing damage to an unsuspecting target.
Replacing the chance to just kill outright with a modest damage increase would insure that powerful creatures like the demon/dragon/elemental/lava bird/thing* couldn't be killed in a single shot. As an example, Vivuli's dagger attack does 1d4 damage, +5d6 for a successful assassination at 5th level would do a max of 34 damage.
This does also keep the ability useful when used against less powerful creatures, guards and the like that would be easily dispatched by someone skilled in the art of stealth who snuck up on them and slit their throat. Against creatures of same HD, it is close to the same percentage chance of killing the creature, but at least your roll as DM when generating the creature's HP gets to go against the damage roll of an attack, instead of an instant death scenario.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Assassin class as converted for Labyrinth Lord is really weak. It is really weak in the original 1e as well. It has the same HD as a wizard, but a wizard has so many more cool powers. The assassin does thief skills like a thief two levels lower. And has worse HD. Really, the whole schtick of the assassin class is the ability to jump out and do a lot of damage in a single surprise attack. It is a limited ability - if it fails, the assassin is standing there with all the d4 HPs dangling in the breeze in front of your big bad monster. My feeling was that converting the ability to a damage increase and abandoning the percentile chance of death might make the entire class easier to stomach for you. It is a sort of specialized combat class that excels in sneaking around and being ninja-y and jumping out and surprising shit with a big attack. I don't think it has to stretch any kind of understanding of what is a magic ability and what isn't.
It doesn't change the relative power that much of the class one way or the other, but it does avoid the percent chance of instant death. It also gives you a very easy way to make sure that a creature does not get instantly killed - just give it a few extra HP!
One other nice thing is it eliminates the d30 wonkiness when interacting with a percentile chart.
Agreed, and so thanks Carl for coming up with this lovely solution.
Any thoughts anybody?
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* The "thing" Carl refers to here is a being the Arandish Campaign group encountered in a recent session (#51).
