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View Full Version : How to Make an Engaging Stealth System?



Mr. Mask
2013-06-26, 03:48 AM
Saw some people discussing a progressive rolling system for stealth in the DnD 5e thread. It lead me to wondering: Are there any good stealth mechanics or systems out there? If not, then why? And what would it take to make a good stealth system?

Stealth is relaly interesting in fiction, but dead boring in RPGs, pretty much all RPGs. Metal Gear Solid and a few other games have good stealth, but that's about it. It's really hard to get right in any form. But how do you get it right for tabletop?

Totally Guy
2013-06-26, 04:20 AM
The problem I've seen in RPGs is "Roll until you Fail".

You want to stealth your way in somewhere and the GM keeps on breaking down the journey into stealth check after stealth check until you fail and are stopped. The difficulty was basically arbitrary because the number of times you had to roll just kept on going up. That annoys me a lot.

A much better way is to have the player state where they are trying to go and the GM sets a difficulty (or rolls opposition) for the whole journey. The "caught half way" scenario works as something to put in as the failure condition.

There was one time where I had a player state they were being stealthy to get up a wizard's tower. I stated that each floor would be successively harder to infiltrate as magical alarms and guards become smarter. I stated that I'd give a warning when the current floor was at the limits of the character ability but otherwise allow them to move undetected below that point in the tower as long as the character continued to act in a stealty manner. The player was then concentrating on finding things to bring back to his buddies (who had only had stealth lower down the tower) to figure out how to get to the top.

Looking back that was quite a generous reading of the skill use and situation on my part. I'd probably run it differently if I were to do it again today but the fundamentals I'd definitely keep.

TuggyNE
2013-06-26, 05:37 AM
The problem I've seen in RPGs is "Roll until you Fail".

You want to stealth your way in somewhere and the GM keeps on breaking down the journey into stealth check after stealth check until you fail and are stopped. The difficulty was basically arbitrary because the number of times you had to roll just kept on going up. That annoys me a lot.

Zeno's Paradox, basically? :smalltongue:

Totally Guy
2013-06-26, 05:39 AM
Zeno's Paradox, basically? :smalltongue:

That's a pretty apt comparison!

The Rose Dragon
2013-06-26, 06:14 AM
You know why video games can have interesting stealth? Because you can rely on your two "acute senses" (to borrow an M&M term) to figure out what to do next. You have a detailed environment, with plenty of places to hide, plenty of clutter to suddenly render stealth invalid and stealth isn't rendering other options of interacting with the enemy invalid. These things largely don't exist in tabletop games, so we abstract to a stealth check. Just like we would abstract Shadow of the Colossus into a series of climb checks or athletics checks or what have you. It removes dozens of minute details that can make you or break you in a video game, and just sees whether your character can pull it off.

This is not inherently a bad thing. Those dozens of things exist in many fields of human endeavor, and I've yet to see anyone complain about, say, a first aid check not needing to be played out step by step. The only difference is people find physical action (such as combat, platforming or stealth) engaging and visually interesting that they can make them the core of the experience, rather than something that merely facilitates it, like the aforementioned first aid check.

I think the best stealth mechanics I can think of come from Anima Prime and Nine Worlds, where they work like any other conflict resolution mechanic, and if the conflict is meaningless (defined here as "either success or failure is not an interesting alternative to the other") or non-existent, you never get involved in the mechanics. What you're trying to do is automatically successful or automatically a failure. Incidentally, the best violence resolution mechanic I can think of is in an optional rule in Faery's Tale Deluxe, where you roll your combat stat against your opponents, and the one with the best score wins the scene. This is not the same as the best combat simulation system I've seen (which is in The Riddle of Steel), just the best resolution system, as it has no points where it can break down. If you want the victory to be a narrow comeback from a hard spot instead of a curb-stomp, well, you won the fight. Describe it how you like, as history is written by the winners.

The problem arises when the game puts too much importance and detail on one aspect of the story (say, physical violence in D&D or Remnants, or interpersonal relationships between the Master and the Maids in, well, Maid) that it has no room left to detail everything else in the same level of satisfactory detail. You have dozens of options when slugging it out, and can afford to play it out blow by blow, but you can't do the same with other systems. There are two solutions that I can see. One, write a detailed system for everything. Make them interact in the same time scale, even if they are wildly different in goal and method, so that one does not automatically render the other invalid. Give the same number of options to the stealth guy or the first aid guy as the sword guy. Generally, make things as complex as you can in the word count given to you. This is what GURPS tried to do, and to some degree, succeeded. Even though combat resolution is still more detailed than other things, you never feel like you are running out of options if you choose to focus on something else. But it also became GURPS, known for driving away players by its sheer size. The other, abstract everything to the same degree. This is usually my preferred method, but not always. It works in Anima Prime and Nine Worlds, which are conflict resolution systems for largely narrative games. It doesn't work in the kind of game I'd play with, say, Pandemonium, where grim, bloody fights for survival are the norm, and you have to make every dirty trick count.

If you want a stealth mechanic in, say, D&D, that is as interesting as the combat mechanics? Unfortunately, you are probably not going to get it without devoting the same attention and word count to stealth. If your stealth mechanics are 500 words in a game where violence takes 10000 words to detail, stealth is going to remain on the backburner.

((At some point this stopped being about stealth and started being about "combat versus non-combat", but still, the point remains.))

Madeiner
2013-06-26, 06:33 AM
I did something like this for a stealthy part of my game, even if it was against 3.5 rules i think it was actually better.
I only used it for a single infiltration scene inside a bank.

Each character has a set of distance where he can be undetected by the enemy patrols, if they are not actively looking in that direction.
This distance is set at 10 squares minus your ranks in stealth.
You have 6 ranks? (Maximum in my E6 game) Good, you can get just outside of 4 squares of an enemy that is not looking at you, provided you don't trip into anything or try to interact with him, while crouched and moving at halfspeed. Any penalty on the armor check is a penalty on the distance, but dex bonuses do not count (penalties do)
Anything else (moving while in line of sight of enemies, making intentional noise, speaking, running/walking instead of crouching) requires a normal check.

Then, i replicated the bank on maptools, complete with vision blocking layers. I filled the rooms and corridors with "things" that the PC could hide behind (no check required if you stand still and do nothing).
Then, i prepared patrol routes for each guards, round by round. The PCs had to observe enemy patrol routes, plan when to go where (not all hiding spots were enough for 4 people), when to wait, when to risk it and run.
Sometimes, guards would break patrols to do other things (go to the bathroom, investigate a noise) and so the Pcs had to react.
Also, i should have enforced complete silence between players; everyone who spoke even OOC should have had to do a stealth check (however, i forgot to enforce this)

I found this very interesting. The "rogue" could manage to get very near enemies without being discovered; the others had to stay at a distance and try to figure out what to do. It wasnt a matter of making skill checks; just a matter of knowing where to go when by observing patterns.
Of course, the rogue got it easier and in case he had to so something less subtle, he had the skill to try and roll it.


I realize this is not good in all scenarios. But it can work in some.

hewhosaysfish
2013-06-26, 06:58 AM
Saw some people discussing a progressive rolling system for stealth in the DnD 5e thread. It lead me to wondering: Are there any good stealth mechanics or systems out there? If not, then why? And what would it take to make a good stealth system?

Stealth is relaly interesting in fiction, but dead boring in RPGs, pretty much all RPGs. Metal Gear Solid and a few other games have good stealth, but that's about it. It's really hard to get right in any form. But how do you get it right for tabletop?

I've thought about how I would run a game based on MGS and my thought was that I would kinda have to run it the way a lot of GMs run Shadowrun: spend as much time on the planning the run as doing it.
I'd give the PCs maps of the facility they have to infiltrate (minus all the super-secret sections), a rough outline of how many guys they can expect to face in there, and then let them figure out a plan... which would need amended on the fly as secrets were uncovered (Metal Gear?!) and unexpected cyborg ninjas showed up.

Hopefully, have a clear plan at the start would eliminate the "roll til you fail" problem by having at most one roll per step of the plan (and PCs would have a chance to gank a guard to temporarily recover from a failed roll...)

The sneaking would be more than just Stealth rolls. It would be about planning and improvising a plan too. And ambushing guards and hacking and lockpicking and asking questions of rescued prisoners and wondering what the heck is up with that cyborg ninja.