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AnBe
2017-05-18, 09:28 PM
I have played a lot of tabletop RPGs and a couple things I sometimes have issue with are the Perception and Stealth systems. I'm fine with it, I just think their could be a better way of doing it than, "I roll Perception vs. Stealth" and vice versa.
There could be some way of doing it that is more interesting, right?

Like, unless you have some sort of "special" Perception ability like Blindsight or something, you just have a normal everyday person's Perception.
Your Passive Perception could vary depending on the situation. For example, if you're using a d20 system, your Passive Perception might be 10 if you're distracted or not expecting any trouble. This is called Low Alert. Medium Alert would be 15, if you're like a guard on duty protecting a place or something. High Alert is 20, when you're anxious, paranoid, and expecting all kinds of trouble, like in a dungeon or something.

Perception and Stealth as skills make no sense, in my opinion, since they're like innate natural things that almost anyone can do without training for.
As far as Stealth goes, why not just say your character is sneaking around, like roleplaying it out. "I take cover behind those pots and this counter, so they can't see me." Or, "I hide in the closet" You might have players make a Luck roll to see if the enemies happen to turn around at just the right time and spot you, and so on.

I sometimes get frustrated as a GM because the players can sometimes be super Ninja and never have much of a chance to be caught, or the characters are like Sherlock Holmes, noticing and spotting everything around them. Why not just say, "You search the house long enough and eventually find the evidence." Instead of leaving it up to a die roll?

And in other instances, Perception can feel like a wasted skill/stat because in some games if you neglect Perception you're screwed. That's points I could be spending in more interesting stuff, like Cooking lol.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-05-18, 10:35 PM
Spotting hidden things and sneaking around are absolutely skills that you can get better at with practise/training.

If they're producing nonsense results then consider that maybe the game you're playing is bad at dealing with untrained skills in a reasonable way.

Vitruviansquid
2017-05-18, 10:45 PM
I don't think the system you propose is a good idea because typical players would probably always try to make the case that they are being 20-perception-paranoid to the GM, especially if the GM tries to tell them that something they didn't notice harms them.

Pex
2017-05-18, 11:24 PM
They're overrated. Important, but overrated. Particular classes tend to be very good at them. Hooray for them. Not everything in the gameworld is them. Not every bad guy will have stealth up the whazoo you need to keep up with perception and vice versa. It's the same reason not everything you face will have resistance or immunity to fire regardless of level despite how many such creatures exist in the Monster Manual. No opponent exists without the DM's permission. You only need to be good at stealth and perception as your DM makes you due to the encounters you face. It's fine for sometimes you fail to perceive something or are noticed despite your attempt to keep quiet and hide. That's the game, but if it becomes an arms race the problem is not the skills but the DM not getting it your character is supposed to be that good and the Player not getting it you don't always have to try so hard.

Martin Greywolf
2017-05-19, 02:23 AM
I have played a lot of tabletop RPGs and a couple things I sometimes have issue with are the Perception and Stealth systems. I'm fine with it, I just think their could be a better way of doing it than, "I roll Perception vs. Stealth" and vice versa.
There could be some way of doing it that is more interesting, right?

Well, yes. FATE, for example, has systems in place where you use more involved methods to resolve this, up to and including using combat mechanics, if the stealthing in question is important enough part of your scene/adventure.



Like, unless you have some sort of "special" Perception ability like Blindsight or something, you just have a normal everyday person's Perception.
Your Passive Perception could vary depending on the situation. For example, if you're using a d20 system, your Passive Perception might be 10 if you're distracted or not expecting any trouble. This is called Low Alert. Medium Alert would be 15, if you're like a guard on duty protecting a place or something. High Alert is 20, when you're anxious, paranoid, and expecting all kinds of trouble, like in a dungeon or something.

How is this any better than perception as skill? You basically still have it as a skill mechanically, only now there's a special rule tacked on to it, a rule that makes it impossible to change the skill in question.



Perception and Stealth as skills make no sense, in my opinion, since they're like innate natural things that almost anyone can do without training for.


So is fighting with a sword. I faced some 10-year-olds who were completely untrained and pretty enthusiastic about smacking people with a sword, to a point where I don't let parents and kids doing mock sword fights with steel swords - because parents are likely to get their fingers thwacked or broken. An average, reasonably athletic adult is dangerous with a sword, no matter the training.

Same goes for perception and stealth - watch any documentary on selection/training for modern military forces that do it a lot (scouts and snipers, mostly). Hell, basic self defense with a pistol involves something called scanning.

And there are definite tricks of the trade - looking for silhouettes, keeping one eye closed when dealing with different light levels, knowing where to step on wooden stairs or floor to minimize creaking etc etc.



As far as Stealth goes, why not just say your character is sneaking around, like roleplaying it out. "I take cover behind those pots and this counter, so they can't see me." Or, "I hide in the closet"


You need to do this to be able to use stealth in the first place. Seriously, why do people thing that all role play goes out when they use skills? "I use diplomacy" or "I use stealth" should never, ever be allowed. Tell me how you use them, give me an idea of what you're using, otherwise tough luck, you can't do it, much like you can't swing a sword at someone 1 km away.



You might have players make a Luck roll to see if the enemies happen to turn around at just the right time and spot you, and so on.


This is an extremely bad idea. All skill checks have an element of luck in them, that's what the dice represent. Use luck to get bonuses or re-rolls, if you have to, but don't use it to substitute full time for another skill.



I sometimes get frustrated as a GM because the players can sometimes be super Ninja and never have much of a chance to be caught, or the characters are like Sherlock Holmes, noticing and spotting everything around them.


Yes. That is a good thing. I don't want to to role play an average schmuck (most of the time, anyway), I want to be a ninja, or Sherlock Holmes. Sure, DM needs to learn to deal with this, but that goes for ANY area where the party is strong. It may be combat, it may be teleport magic, it may be stealth. This basically says that you can't deal with stealth characters as a DM - well, that's what this board is for.

The best advice I can give you is to make sure that your PCs describe how they stealth properly. You can't hide in shadows on a flat, featureless plain in broad daylight, and you can't just stay hidden in a closet when your opponents are doing a proper full sweep. You need to get creative in both scenarios - digging a hole and covering it with grass, or distracting guards to make a run for it.

Honestly, if a player invests heavily in stealth, he's basically telling you "I want to play a game where I sneak around a lot" - so do that. An adventure built around stealth can be exciting and nailbiting without the PC ever being discovered. i should know, I had one or two adventures like that.




Why not just say, "You search the house long enough and eventually find the evidence." Instead of leaving it up to a die roll?


This is a wider problem of DMs demanding rolls when they shouldn't. Basically, only time you should roll is when both outcomes are interesting. So, "you find no evidence" is not interesting, but "your looking for evidence attracts the attention of the grandma next door and she goes to investigate with a shotgun/calls the police" is. Failed roll can mean that you do get what you want, but at a significant price (e.g. police attention), not just that you don't find a thing.



And in other instances, Perception can feel like a wasted skill/stat because in some games if you neglect Perception you're screwed. That's points I could be spending in more interesting stuff, like Cooking lol.

Yup, and this is one those things that needs to be addressed during session 0. "I want to run a ninja heavy game, as in ninja who do NOT wear orange, so you should all invest decently in perception" is a perfectly valid thing to say. If you feel like you're getting screwed, talk to your DM about allocating skill points, most DMs will not be anally retentive enough to ban you from doing it completely.

And let's not forget that perception can be more than just a passive skill - several DMs and even several systems encourage players to come up with story details of their own if they roll well, like "I notice that the guard has a wine stain on his uniform and is therefore likely to drink later this night".

Aotrs Commander
2017-05-19, 06:16 AM
Considering that, for example, real-world modern warfare relies a lot on spotting, obviating Stealth and Perception is emphatically not the answer.

First, remember to enforce the fact that you CANNOT HIDE without appropriate conditions (and if the game's rules don't explicitly say this like D&D, then you as DM usually have the room to enforce this yourself). If there is a 50' gap with no cover between you are the guard at the tower, you just can't sneak up on them (without actual invisibility).

(And if a PC is determined to be Stealth King and invest the resources you can't do anything about it. the flyign invisible ninja who has Silence cast on him is just unspottable by most lesser mortals.)

Though if you are allowed Solid Snake as a character with his cardboard box (as justification for "having my own cover"), then you have no sympathy, I'm afraid.




Like, unless you have some sort of "special" Perception ability like Blindsight or something, you just have a normal everyday person's Perception.
Your Passive Perception could vary depending on the situation. For example, if you're using a d20 system, your Passive Perception might be 10 if you're distracted or not expecting any trouble. This is called Low Alert. Medium Alert would be 15, if you're like a guard on duty protecting a place or something. High Alert is 20, when you're anxious, paranoid, and expecting all kinds of trouble, like in a dungeon or something.


As Vitruviansquid observed, already, if you give the PCs and alert option, they will fiond a way to justfiy being on high alert permenantly. And legitimately; since the first time you spring something on them because they are not at full alert, they have good reason to make that arguement.




This is a wider problem of DMs demanding rolls when they shouldn't. Basically, only time you should roll is when both outcomes are interesting. So, "you find no evidence" is not interesting, but "your looking for evidence attracts the attention of the grandma next door and she goes to investigate with a shotgun/calls the police" is. Failed roll can mean that you do get what you want, but at a significant price (e.g. police attention), not just that you don't find a thing.

If the game's system is set-up for it, you should remind the players to use take 10 or take 20 or house-rule some equivilent. (Some systems are probably not. I don't think it would work in Rolemaster, for example, nor the older edition of WHFRP.)

Otherwise, to take this specific example (as I tend to do with the few investigation-type games I've run), what you should be making them roll for is degrees of success, not success or failure (PC collective dice incompetance notwithstanding). I.e., you expect them to suceed the base difficulty, but the higher they roll, the more clues they find. (This works with any system, even Rolemaster!)

Darth Ultron
2017-05-19, 07:22 AM
They're overrated. Important, but overrated. .

Agreed. Way, way, way too many players are obsessed with ''spotting the bad guys first so they can attack first'' and ''hiding to be impossible to find''. Guess it comes from watching too much anime.


I

I sometimes get frustrated as a GM because the players can sometimes be super Ninja and never have much of a chance to be caught, or the characters are like Sherlock Holmes, noticing and spotting everything around them. Why not just say, "You search the house long enough and eventually find the evidence." Instead of leaving it up to a die roll?


It gets tricky as the DM must ''use'' the skills. A character can have a +100 to spot, but if the DM never uses the hide skill it does not matter.

Like most skills, they scale up fast...way, way, way, way to fast. D&D/pathfinder just have too many skill points and too many bonuses....and then the players that are problem players are the ones that overly optimize and ''interpret'' and ''exploit'' skills too.

As a DM you have to over optimize even more then the players just to keep the game even close to balanced. So that things can hide from the characters and the characters can't spot everything. It's very player vs. Dm, but the players are the ones starting it.

Jay R
2017-05-19, 12:11 PM
Perception and Stealth as skills make no sense, in my opinion, since they're like innate natural things that almost anyone can do without training for.

That's equally true of running or jumping. But we don't all do them at the same level.

On nature walks, Mom usually saw things before Dad, who saw things before my sister, who saw things before me.

Yes, anybody's eyes can see it, but we don't all pay attention.

Katrina
2017-05-24, 10:59 PM
Perception as a skill doesn't represent your physical ability to see. That's represented by actual racial traits. A character with 15 ranks in Perception will never gain Darkvision from it, he still can't see in complete darkness. What the skill does represent is situational awareness, paying attention to all your senses, knowing where the likely places to hide are, and to a certain point conditioning yourself to not have that "Panic" reaction when something moves that you weren't entirely aware of.

Likewise, Stealth as a skill isn't "I Become invisible." That's handled by effects like actual invisibility. A character with 15 ranks of stealth will seem invisible in a dimly lit forest, but that's because he has plenty of cover, crappy light conditions that work for him, black and green clothing to blend in and the training to pull it all together.

And I can say from personal experience that training or improvement in these skills is an actual thing. After training with a Martial Arts instructor who later had to leave the area to go teach military martial arts, I noticed many things. One, his instructions on always keeping my head up, never looking at the ground like I had been, and always keeping an eye on my surroundings had made me notice things my friends didn't. Two, after other training I kept getting accused of "don't sneak up on me" when I was just casually walking up behind coworkers to get something beside them or something. These are skills by every definable merit of the word.

Why are they required in an RPG? The same reason a skill abstraction system is used for hitting people with swords, shooting people with guns, and wielding mysterious and mystical arcane power. They are a necessary part of the concept of the world we are trying to represent. If a character takes stealth, she's wanting to be stealthy. At the same rate, if a character takes Perception, he doesn't want to be surprised. How many movies/fantasy novels/games have battles suddenly become more complex and difficult for the characters by having enemies suddenly reveal themselves to be in positions where the characters didn't think they were. That's a failed Perception vs Stealth conflict right there.

Think about all the actual drama you lose without them.
"You walk into the dark, dank ruin. The sputtering light from your torch illuminates a room that opens farther than your light will reach, but what you can see reveals the maw of a gigiantic stone dragon, its teeth covered in old blood. Shadows flit at the edge of your torchlight. Are they all in your head? Or does something else share this room with you, waiting to sacrifice even more to its dark master?"
Logically, you call for a Perception check here to oppose the stealth of the things hiding in the shadows. Without that skill abstraction, you the gm are forced to determine if they see something or not, and how do you make that call?

Quertus
2017-05-25, 12:17 AM
How many people have you spotted wearing body paint instead of clothes out in public, when a whole crowd of people were oblivious to the situation?

How many times have you been the one to spot the dropped contract lenses in a spot many people had already looked at?

How often do you spot the cause of the "you'll **** bricks" while everyone else is still just staring blankly?

How often do you start running, while everyone else is still trying to figure out what it is you're running from (or, if it's obvious what you're running from, like, say, the cops, where they are, to know which way to run)?

Unless you want to argue that there are people who are just somehow always "lucky", I can only hope you have similar life experiences to draw upon to see that different people have at times obviously, repeatably different levels of skill at spotting things.

And, if you've ever played hide and seek, I can't imagine you haven't noticed that different people can have very different levels of skill at hiding.

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The fact that everyone can hide / seek is covered by the fact that it's an "untrained" skill in... all systems I've ever seen that have a concept of "trained only".

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I can understand the concept of there being nothing to hide from, if, say, all of your challenges are, say, traps, but I can't imagine how boring a world must be if there is nothing to perceive. I cannot imagine perception ever being a wasted stat.

For me, it meant being the first one downstairs for fresh-baked cookies... and a lot of other cool things. :smallwink:

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Good for the ninjas.

Good for Sherlock Holmes.

Good for the concept of "taking a 20".

Are we done here?

-----

Oh, and you absolutely can sneak up on a guard across 50 feet of featureless plane - I've done so on several occasions. The (Jedi mind) trick is the correct combination of ennui and distraction.

AnBe
2017-05-27, 06:41 PM
This has been eye-opening for me. As a result, I have included Perception and Stealth as skills in my latest tabletop RPG system. Thank you all.

Guizonde
2017-05-27, 07:23 PM
This has been eye-opening for me. As a result, I have included Perception and Stealth as skills in my latest tabletop RPG system. Thank you all.

if it helps, dark heresy has perception as a characteristic alongside close combat, shooting, and agility. having a dedicated measurement that is less skill-point dependant is a really practical solution. instead of having the most intelligent person having the points to throw in there, all of a sudden, it's the dude who's used to scanning for details who gets the bonuses. can be a police officer, a sniper, a desperado, iirc even the adept (yup, the paper-pusher who's looking for typos) gets mild bonuses.

in whfrp, stealth is dictated by agility, and so is move silently. on more than one occasion have i been a chameleon moving through cover... with the footfall of your average pachyderm. the enemy knew i was coming, just not from where. we coined the term "half-rumbled" because of that. the enemy's on high alert, actively looking for us. we usually managed to drop one or two before becoming fully-rumbled.

of course, whfrp2e is a lot more permissive regarding untrained skill checks. i remember a merchant goomba-stomping a beastman from a tree (jumping, stealth, and a cc test, none but the cc test were trained skills for the character. still succeeded).

NichG
2017-05-27, 10:53 PM
I played around with some alternatives in a homebrew campaign at one point. The idea came from thinking 'what would I need in a system for players to actually pull off things like heist movie sequences?'. The problem with the usual system is that the second stealth is broken for someone, the entire stealth sequence falls apart and basically can't be recovered. So if one person sneaking has one chance of that everything falls apart, five people sneaking have five chances for everything to fall apart. As a result, stealth tends to be used only for a lone scout, collapses quickly once the party gets involved, or relies on pumping stealth ability up to the point where detection becomes impossible so there's no chance of failure anymore (e.g. Invisibility).

As an alternative, I thought it might work to have a system where rather than having a binary state of 'the party has been seen' or 'the party has not been seen', there's something more akin to an alert level (see for example games like Invisible, Inc.). So the idea here would be that actually you start with some pretty strong guarantees - the first time you're under observation, you aren't going to be irreversibly outed - but you have something like a stealth hitpoint pool and that pool continues to drop over the course of a situation. So then the thought was, what if the Stealth skill doesn't increase your chances of going undetected, but rather just increases your 'stealth HP'? Every time you have to sneak through an observed area, run into a guard, etc, you drop a constant number of stealth points regardless of your skill, but your skill basically determines e.g. how many rooms you can sneak through before you're spotted. The Perception ability then just modifies the damage to stealth caused by a particular guard, with the highest Perception in the room basically determining that damage. This also opened the door to easily having things like stealthy characters in the party be able to cover for non-stealthy characters (they could have the equivalent of a feat which would let them pay points from their pool to cover someone else) - which means that party-level stealth becomes feasible again.

I found that the system worked pretty well, but it did mean that it was more important to explicitly map out buildings and guard positions and stuff in sequences where the party wanted to use stealth. So when there was already a battle mat involved, the players were able to reason about where they could or couldn't sneak and used that to make interesting plans (okay, we can get past two guards but the third will spot us; we can hold off for two rounds after we're spotted, then we have to flee; ...). We had some interesting speed infiltration runs where one character had a short ranged teleport and the party had to get through a set of guards in a very short time window.


Skills in this system work on a 7 point scale. Each skill point gives you a special ability. Ranks 6 and 7 are explicitly supernatural, requiring some sort of special blessing, gift, magic item, mystical training, what-have-you to achieve.

Stealth

The Stealth skill provides a pool of Stealth ’pips’ that can be used during a particular infiltration scenario. Factors which increase the alertness of defenders with respect to the sneaking character reduce that Stealth pool, but as long as the Stealth pool remains and the character does not take actions which explicitly break Stealth, the character has not been detected.

A character’s base Stealth pool is one pip plus one pip per their rank of the Stealth skill.

At any particular time in which a character needs to move or act in a way that would be detected by an observer but where there is some form of scattered cover or usable distraction, it costs one pip of their Stealth pool. If the motion is completely exposed, the cost is two pips. The number of observers does not matter, but their skill can matter in the form of increased costs (from Perception waza). An action that directly involves an observer normally breaks Stealth (e.g. going up to a guard and speaking with them or trying to grab their sword).

For example, a character who needs to pass through a cluttered office in which two guards are chatting would have to spend one pip to cross the office. If the door were locked and they had to take the time to pick it, this would cost a second pip. If the office were well lit without clutter, it would cost two pips to cross it due to a lack of cover. If you want to spy on a meeting in said office, you only pay the pip cost to initially hide in the office — continuing to hide is free, until you take a subsequent action or move to leave.

Monitoring devices, alarms, and the like may modify the pip cost. For example, scattering dry leaves over the floor makes it harder for someone to move without being heard and would increase the pip cost for crossing that area by 1.
A character cannot normally initiate Stealth against an observer who has already seen them and is continuing to watch them. However, things which break line of sight can allow them to do so if they have pips remaining (e.g. smoke bombs and the like).

Waza
Rank 1: Backstab: You may spend 3BP to make an attack while Stealthed which causes double the normal injury (the target receives their defenses as normal). If the attack is ranged, this costs 3 pips unless the attack kills/takes out all potential observers. If this is a melee attack, it automatically breaks stealth unless it takes out all potential observers.

Rank 2: Second Shadow: By spending 2BP, you can use someone else as a form of cover in order to cross an otherwise wide-open space.

Rank 3: Share Stealth: You may double your pip costs to help a group of people all sneak through an area (applying to up to one extra person per your rank in Stealth)

Rank 4: Just a Cat: Once, during an infiltration, if you mistakenly begin to take an action that would cause your Stealth to be broken (e.g. you did not realize that there was a skilled observer and the Stealth costs were different than you expected), you can spend 5BP and retract the action. If it was their action that created the situation, (an observer enters the room) you can use the opportunity to leave the room back the way you came just before they step in.

Rank 5: Exit Strategy: When you spend pips to avoid detection in a particular situation, you do not have to spend pips again to reverse your steps and leave that same way. If situational factors have caused the cost to increase, you do have to pay the additional cost however.

Rank 6: Whisperless Blade: Targets may not Bolster against attacks you make from Stealth.

Rank 7: Fade: When Stealthed, you hide so well that you can pass part-way out of reality, and gain the advantage of the Faded status condition even against area attacks and other ambient hazards. In addition, you no longer suffer penalties from using Stealth to cross areas without some form of cover, and do not need to interrupt line of sight to re-Stealth so long as you have pips remaining.

Perception

The relevant part of this skill to Stealth is that you increase the pip cost to sneak past you by 1/2 your Perception skill, rounded down.

oxybe
2017-05-28, 03:43 AM
Perception and Stealth are what i could call necessary evils in many games.

In games like D&D Stealth is used not just for an advantage in combat, but also to bypass potentially lethal encounters within a scenario without being detected.

The problem occurs when the scenario is setup so that Stealth is a simple dungeon bypass. People who max out stealth don't want to bypass the whole scenario, they just want to be able to do their cool ninja get-in/get-out while avoiding detection, so give them those moments. Let them scuttle up a wall undetected, scope out the courtyard and return with the information.

But stealth alone cannot be the end all-solution. Need to sneak into an area? I can now go all Solid Snake and while sneaking can get me into the place, but it I still need to get past the guards who are looking strait down the empty hallway and into the vault then get back out without being caught. And if I do get caught, do I have a way to fight or flee?

I can't hide in the open... i need to be out of sight to do so. to get pas those guards, it will probably require a bit of disguise and social engineering and getting into the vault will require me to either locate the key/keys or pick the lock, both of which will require different skillsets. Or i could use magic to try to invisible myself past the guards, locate the key or knock the vault open, but those are all resources i may or may not have on hand.

And if i do get caught, can i fast-talk my way out of getting tossed in prison, or worse, killed? pull off a daring escape and get the whole place on high alert? knock out the guards and hope i can finish what i need to before they wake up or back up arrives?

On the flipside, having the skill used against the players can feel like cheating if they're good at countering it, as for the most part it's really just used to toss a surprise attack on them and get a few cheap shots in. Very rarely have I seen the skill be used by an enemy trying to avoid the PCs entirely, being aware of their capabilities. Again, this is because of the structure of most adventures, which rely on the PCs being aggressors and NPCs facing them rather then avoiding them.

In short: adventure design can make or break stealth as it's a skill that generally revolves around how you approach encounters within the adventure. While the specifics of the skill and it's uses will depend on the game in question, a GM should be aware of the skill or it's equivalent and how the players plan on using it or countering it.

Perception... I'm torn. It's basically the anti-stealth check, in that it allows the character to notice when they're being snuck up on (though what they do with that information is up to them) as well as give them a moment's time to react to sudden changes in their environment that isn't immediately trying to kill them (that would be more reflex then anything).

Honestly, from a gameplay perspective, I feel it should be it's own derived stat akin to initiative or your AC in how focused and passive it is generally used, and roll up it's more active uses into something like an Investigation roll.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-05-28, 04:21 AM
I played around with some alternatives in a homebrew campaign at one point. The idea came from thinking 'what would I need in a system for players to actually pull off things like heist movie sequences?'. The problem with the usual system is that the second stealth is broken for someone, the entire stealth sequence falls apart and basically can't be recovered. So if one person sneaking has one chance of that everything falls apart, five people sneaking have five chances for everything to fall apart. As a result, stealth tends to be used only for a lone scout, collapses quickly once the party gets involved, or relies on pumping stealth ability up to the point where detection becomes impossible so there's no chance of failure anymore (e.g. Invisibility).

The simple solution is that if a party of people want to sneak somewhere, the person with the worst stealth is the only one who rolls.

NichG
2017-05-28, 05:00 AM
The simple solution is that if a party of people want to sneak somewhere, the person with the worst stealth is the only one who rolls.

That's more of a statement of the problem than it is a solution...

Koo Rehtorb
2017-05-28, 05:30 AM
That's more of a statement of the problem than it is a solution...

I don't think so. The problem is if a group is sneaking somewhere and they have to make five rolls to do it. That means are chances are one of them will fail, even if they all have decent stealth, just because of dice luck.

If you only make the worst person in the group with stealth roll for the entire party then certainly the chances are lower than if the person with the best stealth did it, but at least you're cutting down on the number of chances they have to roll poorly.

NichG
2017-05-28, 06:38 AM
I don't think so. The problem is if a group is sneaking somewhere and they have to make five rolls to do it. That means are chances are one of them will fail, even if they all have decent stealth, just because of dice luck.

If you only make the worst person in the group with stealth roll for the entire party then certainly the chances are lower than if the person with the best stealth did it, but at least you're cutting down on the number of chances they have to roll poorly.

You're also making investment in stealth above the party minimum useless, and requiring everyone to invest in it if it is to be used at all. Meaning, it's not going to get used - same as before.

Koo Rehtorb
2017-05-28, 06:46 AM
You're also making investment in stealth above the party minimum useless, and requiring everyone to invest in it if it is to be used at all. Meaning, it's not going to get used - same as before.

Only if the party wants to sneak somewhere together. There's still plenty of utility in individual people sneaking without the party.

And really it comes down to the system/GM if untrained stealth is potentially useful or not. I can think of plenty of times where an untrained sneaker would be going up against an untrained... perceiver. But yeah, if the party wants to be a commando team then they should probably all invest in stealth, I don't think that's unreasonable.

Knaight
2017-05-28, 06:57 AM
And really it comes down to the system/GM if untrained stealth is potentially useful or not. I can think of plenty of times where an untrained sneaker would be going up against an untrained... perceiver. But yeah, if the party wants to be a commando team then they should probably all invest in stealth, I don't think that's unreasonable.

Then there's weather. A case came up in my game today* where a character with pretty minimal stealth was slipping past several guards. Normally this would have been pretty difficult, but they were in an area literally known as the fog forest, and while a thick fog is a pretty extreme example it's hardly the only one. A rain storm can cover the sound of motion, a hail storm can do so even better. Cloudy nights are much better for sneaking around than clear nights if the moon is at all relevant. Snow can easily be as good as fog at dropping visibility. Even the very perceptive can be snuck by, and while keeping track of weather is a GM dependent habit** it's pretty commonly there to at least some extent.1

*Technically yesterday, but during this wake-cycle.
**And one that varies by setting.

Yora
2017-05-28, 07:00 AM
It's not even luck or chance, it's simple statistics. The way Stealth checks work is that you can succeed as often as you want, but you have to fail only once. If you keep making checks for Stealth, you will fail eventually. And if your odds of success are in the range below 80%, that will probably be very quickly. 80% sounds good, but the odds to make 10 successful checks in a row with that are only 10%. If you have six characters with a 50% chance each, the odds that the group will remain undetected is only 1.5%.

One approach that I found to be much preferable comes from trying to decipher the authors' intent in the old B/X D&D edition where only thieves have the Hide in Shadow and Move Silently skills and start with ridiculously low chances of success. But notably the skills are not called Hide and Sneak, so the working interpretation I've found is that these checks are really made in situations where the thief is trying to hide without having something to hide behind, and to move without making any sound at all. If characters merely try to stay out of sight orbe quiet, it's a GM judgement call whether the actions as described by the players should work or not. And since it's a game about awesome heroes doing awesome things, I think the answer should usually be yes, if it seems reasonably plausible that someone could make it. All characters can sneak up on a lone guard in a forest who is not actively looking around within arm's reach, if a storm makes loud noise in the trees. Everyone but a thief making a Move Silently would fail attempting to do the same with leaves and twigs on the ground and the forest being quiet.

Knaight
2017-05-28, 07:29 AM
It's not even luck or chance, it's simple statistics. The way Stealth checks work is that you can succeed as often as you want, but you have to fail only once. If you keep making checks for Stealth, you will fail eventually. And if your odds of success are in the range below 80%, that will probably be very quickly. 80% sounds good, but the odds to make 10 successful checks in a row with that are only 10%. If you have six characters with a 50% chance each, the odds that the group will remain undetected is only 1.5%.

There's a lot of ways to avoid this though. You have Burning Wheel's "Let it Ride" mechanics, which explicitly use Stealth as an example of where you make one check, and then you use it for a while instead of rerolling for every single obstacle. You have any number of systems based on one roll versus one roll, most perceptive against least stealthy. You have the group success method where if at least half the group succeeds the group succeeds.

NichG
2017-05-28, 08:09 AM
Only if the party wants to sneak somewhere together. There's still plenty of utility in individual people sneaking without the party.

And really it comes down to the system/GM if untrained stealth is potentially useful or not. I can think of plenty of times where an untrained sneaker would be going up against an untrained... perceiver. But yeah, if the party wants to be a commando team then they should probably all invest in stealth, I don't think that's unreasonable.

Well, for example, in the system I posted, one person specializing in Stealth gives the party the ability to use some stealth during a run, but not an unlimited amount. If that character goes off alone, they can get further on pure Stealth than the party could. If someone else has just one or two ranks, it still actually helps the specialist guy when the party as a whole is trying to be stealthy.

So it solves all of those problems basically. Some stealth is useful. A lot of stealth is useful, even when someone else has none. Some stealth is still useful when one guy has a lot. And in all cases, Stealth's effect is measured by how far it gets you, so its much harder to end up in situations where no matter what someone can't succeed at stealth or no matter what someone can't be seen. Instead it ends up more like 'it will get you past the first room' vs 'it will get you past the first three rooms'. This also lets the players make plans around Stealth more easily, since they can actually work out in advance how far they're likely to get on it before they have to go loud.

Thrudd
2017-05-28, 12:30 PM
I think the question is really whether or not you want a game where people can become those perfect ninjas and Sherlock Holmeses. There is no correct answer. Perception and Stealth can still be attributes or skills that could vary from character to character and be improved on, but the skill system doesn't need to allow a 3e-style advancement into mythical demi-god-like abilities.

If you are playing with classes, you could give increased perception or stealth ability only to certain classes to reflect the type of training they undergo. In AD&D, rangers basically had this - they had a reduced chance to be surprised and an increased chance of surprising enemies that was possessed by no other characters. So these are not general skills that any character can choose and improve on, but things all characters can do but certain classes are better at than others. Just like attack bonus or saving throws - players don't get to assign points to those things, either, it comes with level progression only.

You could disconnect the skills from the ability scores, so that only a level-based bonus applies to it, or you could disconnect the level-progression from it and only a boost of ability scores will improve the skills.
You could simply limit the degree to which these or any skill can be boosted, so that the best results achievable are still within the range of ability you'd like to see for player characters.
Maybe the most that perception can be boosted beyond baseline ability is 50%, or whatever you choose.

You also need to decide how to interpret the results of the dice - instead of using directly opposed rolls for these things, you could use binary states of success and failure, or just a few degrees of success and failure. Or declare there is always a 10 or 15 or 20 percent chance for someone to notice a stealthed character, if the 5% that an auto success on natural 20 gives you is too low.

Psikerlord
2017-05-28, 08:45 PM
I have played a lot of tabletop RPGs and a couple things I sometimes have issue with are the Perception and Stealth systems. I'm fine with it, I just think their could be a better way of doing it than, "I roll Perception vs. Stealth" and vice versa.
There could be some way of doing it that is more interesting, right?

Like, unless you have some sort of "special" Perception ability like Blindsight or something, you just have a normal everyday person's Perception.
Your Passive Perception could vary depending on the situation. For example, if you're using a d20 system, your Passive Perception might be 10 if you're distracted or not expecting any trouble. This is called Low Alert. Medium Alert would be 15, if you're like a guard on duty protecting a place or something. High Alert is 20, when you're anxious, paranoid, and expecting all kinds of trouble, like in a dungeon or something.

Perception and Stealth as skills make no sense, in my opinion, since they're like innate natural things that almost anyone can do without training for.
As far as Stealth goes, why not just say your character is sneaking around, like roleplaying it out. "I take cover behind those pots and this counter, so they can't see me." Or, "I hide in the closet" You might have players make a Luck roll to see if the enemies happen to turn around at just the right time and spot you, and so on.

I sometimes get frustrated as a GM because the players can sometimes be super Ninja and never have much of a chance to be caught, or the characters are like Sherlock Holmes, noticing and spotting everything around them. Why not just say, "You search the house long enough and eventually find the evidence." Instead of leaving it up to a die roll?

And in other instances, Perception can feel like a wasted skill/stat because in some games if you neglect Perception you're screwed. That's points I could be spending in more interesting stuff, like Cooking lol.
Passive perception is broken- it is very easy for PCs to be superninja's when the opponent cant roll above 10 on their perception check. Get rid of PP, just roll like every other contest.

Telok
2017-05-28, 09:58 PM
I don't object to stealth and perception skills on principal, but I think that they are often badly designed and explained. In particular I think that using the d20 is a particularly bad decision. It means that if your minimum and maximum bonuses are less than twenty points apart then even your "super ninja" can be found by anyone and is almost automatically located by a mid-sized crowd. Yet if the maximum and minimum are more than twenty points apart you run into automatic success/failure.
Now while this is true for any dice method I think that the d20 is a particular problem. It's range is large enough to give the illusion of significant variance and easy enough to understand as 5% increments that it appeals to 'simplicity'. Yet you get the same effect if you halve the bonuses and reduce the die to a d10. But nobody would play the d10 version of stealth because the problems are more obvious.
As a counterpoint to this I've never run into these issues with multiple die game systems. I think that's because the designers actually try to understand the percentage chances and try to get reasonable results from the numbers they assign or allow.

Guizonde
2017-05-29, 09:08 AM
could we clear up a lot of what we throw around as "stealth" and "perception" checks? i feel we all are on the same boat, but it might clear up some confusion. i've rarely seen the unseen ninja mentality outside of one-shot beer and pretzel games. most of the time, stealth checks are done by one member of the party to recon enemy forces or set up an ambush. in fantasy games, that's the rogue or equivalent distance combattant. in sci-fi/post-apocalypse games, that's the grim ex-soldier or the sniper. (i'm talking about character archetypes, here, not necessarily the exact class).

one time i saw a group stealth check, the players rp'd it so the "ghostly sniper" of the group went first, then by sign language alerted the others until the coast was clear, giving bonuses to the group so that they didn't get rumbled. well (role-)played, but it took an in-game hour for the group to advance 200m or so. had they gone any faster, they'd have gotten a casern's worth of guards on their butts in the first 5 minutes along with a firefight worthy of any stallone film.

perception is of course used to detect hidden enemies, but i've seen it used as often to spot clues, shady characters, or plot advancement. so, there's that aspect of the ability that's no small advantage to forget about. i don't understand what you guys mean when you talk about "passive perception", is it a character's ability to be detail-oriented?

@telok: i find the d100 system much more legible in general than the d20 system to calculate any odds, not just perception and stealth.

NichG
2017-05-29, 11:27 AM
There's a problem with asking players to 'roll Perception', since that lets them know that there's something to perceive even if they fail. Similarly, making players specify 'I want to try to make a Perception check' whenever they suspect something is going on can bog the game down since the thing to do then is ask for a check every minute basically. So some systems solve this with so-called passive Perception, which treats those characters as effectively constantly taking 10 on their check at all times. This means that the stealthy character must roll against that fixed DC, rather than having an opposed roll.

Guizonde
2017-05-29, 01:45 PM
There's a problem with asking players to 'roll Perception', since that lets them know that there's something to perceive even if they fail. Similarly, making players specify 'I want to try to make a Perception check' whenever they suspect something is going on can bog the game down since the thing to do then is ask for a check every minute basically. So some systems solve this with so-called passive Perception, which treats those characters as effectively constantly taking 10 on their check at all times. This means that the stealthy character must roll against that fixed DC, rather than having an opposed roll.

sounds to me like some people are really paranoid and calling perception checks every other sentence. unless i'm actively looking for something, i don't say i roll perception (again: clues, plot advancement, enemies, depending on if i'm in a lair, in a tavern, or hostile territory). shouldn't it be something to talk about to the players if they're making incessant checks? i get why the mechanic exists, mind you. it is a healthy stopgap, just one that shouldn't be necessary in my eyes.

does that mean i'm getting ambushed sometimes? sure. at least the dm feels like his ambush scenario worked.

NichG
2017-05-29, 06:35 PM
sounds to me like some people are really paranoid and calling perception checks every other sentence. unless i'm actively looking for something, i don't say i roll perception (again: clues, plot advancement, enemies, depending on if i'm in a lair, in a tavern, or hostile territory). shouldn't it be something to talk about to the players if they're making incessant checks? i get why the mechanic exists, mind you. it is a healthy stopgap, just one that shouldn't be necessary in my eyes.

does that mean i'm getting ambushed sometimes? sure. at least the dm feels like his ambush scenario worked.

If you have a system where someone actively has to use perception in order to defend against stealth and perception has no cost, that system is saying 'the correct way to play is to ask for perception checks constantly'. It's not a problem with the player who notices that, it's a problem with a badly designed system. Fix the system, don't ask people to pretend that it isn't broken.

Guizonde
2017-05-29, 08:11 PM
If you have a system where someone actively has to use perception in order to defend against stealth and perception has no cost, that system is saying 'the correct way to play is to ask for perception checks constantly'. It's not a problem with the player who notices that, it's a problem with a badly designed system. Fix the system, don't ask people to pretend that it isn't broken.

i disagree: why would you bog down the game incessantly asking for perception? would that make you a savvy roleplayer? maybe. would that make you a savvy roll-player? indubitably. both are valid interpretations, but i don't play in the latter tables. it's only broken if someone abuses those rules.

i see your point, in that which it could be seen as a "broken" system. i see it more as "loophole abuse". i've very little patience concerning that, unless it involves explosives. be that as it may, unless some player is too paranoid to play without going 23.2 seconds without calling perception, i'll take it as a mechanic of the game akin to salt and pepper: to taste. were i playing cthulu, being clinically paranoid, i'd probably be "that guy" to the dm, if my character were based on that part of me. instead, i'd probably burn everything, opening up another can of worms. let's not get into that one, shall we?

i really like dark heresy's way of doing things, especially compared to dnd's. if we have to argue, let's argue about the merits of the systems, if you're ok with it.

Quertus
2017-05-30, 12:16 AM
If you have a system where someone actively has to use perception in order to defend against stealth and perception has no cost, that system is saying 'the correct way to play is to ask for perception checks constantly'. It's not a problem with the player who notices that, it's a problem with a badly designed system. Fix the system, don't ask people to pretend that it isn't broken.

This.

I'll take it one step further. Outside a few edge cases (like CRobots), I can't see making the players tell you that they are using perception ever being a good thing. In almost any game, it just invites pants on head stupidity, without adding anything beyond overhead. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Can I see anything now? How about now? Now? Yeah, no. That's not engaging gameplay.

That having been said, to put it into D&D terms, someone might get Advantage if they're aware that people walk around in public in body paint, and may even get a +20 bonus to the roll for actively searching for body paint nudists as opposed to, say, pickpockets, or money on the ground, or pretty rainbows, or any number of other things they could be focusing on. And then perhaps they take Disadvantage on everything else they could notice if they're focused on one thing in particular, instead of just generally aware of their surroundings.

Following this logic, for example, unless otherwise noted, my signature character Quertus, for whom this account is named, is looking at and for magic (when his face isn't shoved in a book, at least). And, when not in civilization, ambushes. Let others pay attention to traps, or weather, or valuables, or patterns of floor tiles, or air quality, or what happened to the horses, or how that guy in the painting bears a striking resemblance to the guy who hired us. Sure, Quertus might notice these things, but he's unlikely to be the first.

NichG
2017-05-30, 04:55 AM
i disagree: why would you bog down the game incessantly asking for perception? would that make you a savvy roleplayer? maybe. would that make you a savvy roll-player? indubitably. both are valid interpretations, but i don't play in the latter tables. it's only broken if someone abuses those rules.


That's why you use a passive perception system and avoid the entire problem.

A system that incentivizes behavior that no one at the table wants is a broken system.

Psyren
2017-05-30, 01:05 PM
They're good skills for everyone to have. It's true that someone in the party will usually succeed, but there can be cases where the ones that noticed X get to react and the ones that didn't, don't. While at least one person succeeding is often a given, there's no harm in it being you.

It's particularly useful in PF and 5e where "Perception" includes Search, i.e. finding hidden things. The more people that have it, the faster the next plothook can be spotted and therefore the faster the game itself will go.

And this is of course before we get into party splitting, solo missions etc.

Jay R
2017-05-30, 02:58 PM
If they are rolling to find out if they notice something the party doesn't know about yet, then I roll, and only tell them if the roll is high enough.

In a couple of cases, I've known that the sneak or hidden artifact would be there, and I've rolled for each PC before the game started. That way I knew who would notice, and had a written note to hand out at the right time.

I've got a 2e game coming up in which they will be attacked by gnolls. This has happened a lot lately, but it's an important plot point that these gnolls are starving and desperate. I will roll in advance, and have notes for each player who notices on the first round - and the notes won't be the same. If the Druid notices, he'll see the matted fur and protruding ribs. If the Fighter makes a perception roll, he'll notice that they are fighting more fiercely but less effectively than before. The Thief will notice that their equipment is in worse shape than usual. And the Cleric would notice the despair in their eyes.

In all cases, I'd have a second note to hand out a round or two later making it clearer.

CharonsHelper
2017-05-30, 03:04 PM
I will say - if you want to speed things along, having Perception be a passive DC for Stealth to beat can speed things along since there will be less rolling.

Not that I'd suggest doing that in d20 as it'd make high stealth characters even sneakier since foes couldn't ever roll higher than average.

Quertus
2017-05-30, 08:21 PM
If they are rolling to find out if they notice something the party doesn't know about yet, then I roll, and only tell them if the roll is high enough.

In a couple of cases, I've known that the sneak or hidden artifact would be there, and I've rolled for each PC before the game started. That way I knew who would notice, and had a written note to hand out at the right time.

I've got a 2e game coming up in which they will be attacked by gnolls. This has happened a lot lately, but it's an important plot point that these gnolls are starving and desperate. I will roll in advance, and have notes for each player who notices on the first round - and the notes won't be the same. If the Druid notices, he'll see the matted fur and protruding ribs. If the Fighter makes a perception roll, he'll notice that they are fighting more fiercely but less effectively than before. The Thief will notice that their equipment is in worse shape than usual. And the Cleric would notice the despair in their eyes.

In all cases, I'd have a second note to hand out a round or two later making it clearer.

Well played. Doubly well played, actually - presenting it both in terms you believe will match the way that the character will notice / think about it, and also giving an OOC "in case you missed it, here's what this means".

Jay R
2017-05-31, 08:24 AM
Well played. Doubly well played, actually - presenting it both in terms you believe will match the way that the character will notice / think about it, and also giving an OOC "in case you missed it, here's what this means".

Thank you. But the second note will also be in character - just more complete. "Their desperation caught your eye, and you now notice their ribs protruding, and they are fighting more fiercely but less effectively. These gnolls are starving, and will likely never surrender. They're slavering, as if you are the only food they've seen in days."

[The PCs already know that something has recently chased all the animals out of the forest.]