Stealth Stinks- Lets Fix It

[Deepbluediver]

My D&D group likes to post D&D-memes to each other in our discord channel, and one of our players just linked us this: https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/co...m_source=share
And it's not wrong.

Since stealth had already been on my mind from another Youtube video (animated spell, I think; thanks Zee Bashew), it got me wondering what sort of improvements we could make to Stealth, or other sorts of group-challenges where everyone is required to make the same sort of roll, but competency can vary EXTREMELY.

So I'm wondering what sort of improvements people on this forum might be able to suggest.
Anyone with a smart-phone has a pocket-calculator on them at all times, so you could do something like an average, but that can slow down the game a tad. Personally I've been pondering a type of system like the use for judging-gymnastics in the Olympics: drop the highest and lower scores, and determine the outcome from the rest or the median-score.
Now, what sort of thoughts do all of you have on the subject?

[Zaile]

A couple things we've done in my groups for 5e.

1. Heavy armor wearers can move at half speed to eliminate disadvantage from armor, but cannot gain advantage without magic.

2. When scouting, the scout rolls stealth and perception, DM tells him what he sees. PC moves 5-feet at a time, then the DM stops he PC on whatever square he thinks is necessary, say at an intersection, doorway, pit, or corner. Repeat checks, repeat process. We've also been on roll20, so the DM reveals the map (but doesn't remove fog of war) of the scouted areas and has tokens of the monsters the scout found (though they often move final positions when the party gets there). This is always assuming the PC is sticking to walls/shadows, etc. to be sneaky, and when PC gets back reports everything to party. It works really well and is pretty fast time-wise so the rest of the party doesn't have to play a game of EDH to pass the time.

2B. Depending on the success of the scout, the party gets bonuses/advantage/eliminate disadvantage on checks going through the scouted areas.

You could apply this to 3e and PF too.

We are moving to just "stealth" and "perception" in our 3e games. You get these skills if you have either of hide/move silently and spot/listen.

[Yakk]

If you get a +1 stealth for every 10' range against hearing, and every 100' against vision, then scouts who are ahead and clanky types behind can be equally stealthy.

Throw in the ability to grant someone advantage on stealth at the cost of you getting disadvantage.

[MoiMagnus]

I've tried to organise my though:

Offensive checks VS Defensive checks
Offensive checks are active actions that a character make. The DC for an offensive check is often quite high, as it gatekeep peoples that are not proficient in this act.
Defensive checks are checks that are forced onto the character. The DC for a defensive check are better when they are quite low as:
1) It feels terrible to be beaten by a danger you specifically build your character to avoid.
2) It feels unfair to be forced on a check you have no chance to success just because you don't have the good character.
This is of course, a gameplay perspective, which can conflict with realism and immersion. But that's a great guideline. You don't give to your players unprompted a "by the way, Athletics check DC 20 to everyone or you're dead", because that's a DC way too high for a defensive check. But if a player decide to jump above an huge pit fully knowing how hard it is, this DC 20 is already much more reasonable.

Dealing with multiple checks in a row
Having to succeed to two checks is the same as making a single disadventaged check.
Having to succeed to one of two checks is the same as making a single advantaged check.
This also work for group check, asking for everyone to succeed a stealth check is indirectly giving to them a huge disadvantage, while asking for at least one person to succeed a perception check is indirectly giving to them a huge advantage.
+ The easiest solution to this is the group check, where only half of the team needs to succeed, but this might feel a little unrealistic.
+ An intermediary solution is to allow for each huge success (by more than 5, or more than 10, your choice) compensate for a failure. Or at the contrary huge failures to compensate for a success. If you like math, you can also sum up all the results and compare to a team DC instead of individual DCs.
+ The best solution RP-wise is "backup plans". Whenever a stealth check is failed because of someone, don't interpret it immediately as a failure of the stealth mission, but more as a "you will need both ideas and successful checks to save this mission, but it's still doable". In particular, PCs who succeeded at the check should be given the opportunity to act to prevent the failure (casting Silence, assassinating the guard before the alert is given, etc). If your table is fine with limited backtrack, those ideas can even be put retroactively as "my character did that to prevent the Paladin from making noise in the first place".

Exploration
My preferred playstyles are (a) battlemaps where you get more information than you should because of convenience, but it's fine because with all the OOC discussion there is already a lot of meta information and (b) theatre of the mind, maybe with some quick drawing but no precise position of the character and narration of the exploration instead.
I find the intermediary of trying to have a precise fog of war unsatisfying, and particularly unpractical IRL. (And the main reaction of my main DM when trying roll20 was "Wait, I have to prepare maps and terrain before the session? Well, I guess we will remain on Discord with a shared white board.")

Organised exploration
In one of our homebrew, we had a much more formal approach to exploration, where every character was asked what position they were taking and what activity they were doing (possibly two activities for long explorations):
+ Vanguard => Scooting, Tracking, Looting, etc
+ Front line => Combat-ready, Trap-disarming, Direction, etc
+ Central => Direction, Spellcasting, Knowledge checks, Helping front line or rearguard, etc
+ Rearguard => Combat-ready, erasing the trace, etc
Everyone does a skill check associated to their activity. Then the DM announce all the dangers that were present, look at whether or not they are all avoided thanks to our actions, and we suffer those we didn't avoid (possibly with some advantage)

[Dienekes]

Honestly, I've "solved" Stealth in my games by essentially doing this.

The Party Leader can do the main Stealth check. This is the one who's leading the party and gets to direct where everyone goes. They're Stealth roll is the most important to determine if the stealthing is successful. If the enemy has scouts or the party is traveling really close to those and you need to beat the passive perception the Leader's roll is what determines it.

Other members of the Stealth team have to make a Stealth DC 10 "follow the leader" check. If they get that they are considered as Stealthed as the Leader, provided they're not doing anything particularly dubious. Like if they decide they're going to get closer to the enemy for some reason, or are performing some other maneuver that might cause some racket then they may have to make a Stealth roll on their own terms.

And that's it for the player's side of things.

The rest of making Stealth fun is all on the GM side of things. And that's to create Degrees of Failure.

If someone messes up their Stealth roll you should almost never jump straight to The Enemy Sees You, Roll Initiative! Instead play them like a really easy Stealth game. Give the players time to set something up to negate the loss of Stealth.

"What's that?" Says one of the guards.

"What's what? I didn't hear nothing."

"Sounds like something clanked over in the dark there. I'm gonna check it out."

Alright guys, you see one of the guards moving in the direction of Paladin Bob hiding behind the Sofa. You have about 12 seconds to do something. What are you going to do?

"Can I cast a quick illusion spell over the Sofa to hide Bob?"

Sure that could work. Bob, you see Yucks McKenzie the Wizard casting an illusion overtop you. But the guard is still coming closer. You have to try and contort yourself and hold absolutely still as the guard gets close. You can't even breathe. I'll accept another Stealth check with Advantage out of you or Athletics without Advantage. Either could work for this.

And basically do that sort of thing unless they fail at something so spectacularly or they try something they know is incredibly risky and there needs to be consequences. Then you can jump straight to total failure and combat.

The other thing I've been doing recently is allowing the players to use whatever Ability Score they can think a reason to use when they're just trying to Hide. Not move around sneakily very much but in the situation where they just need to not be seen right this very second. You get the amusing moments of the players trying desperately to figure out a way to use their best Ability Score to hide. My favorite was when someone was coming and the Barbarian decided to jump and grab onto the rafters of the room they were in and just hold himself over the head of the enemy and praying he didn't slip. Let him use a Strength (Stealth) check for that one. While at a different time a player tried to blend into a crowd and make small talk with random people to get the Charisma (Stealth) check.

This sort of thing has made it a lot more fun than the rote roll a Stealth check and whoops the Knight in Armor rolled terrible and now we're fighting method.

[Deepbluediver]

I really like all these ideas- particular of having different roles (or maybe we should say "assignments" to avoid confusion) and requiring different types of skill-checks as part of the activity, and/or giving bonuses for doing really well.
What MoiMagnus said about gamefeel I particularly agree with- a test with difficulty X and a bonus for doing really well puts the group in a different mindset than a test with difficulty X and a penalty for not passing.

Of course there's often ways to do a spectrum of success or failure as well, especially if the whole party is making rolls. For example, for every failed roll in the test, the final boss will be guarded by 1 additional underling, making that fight harder. I agree that realism need not be the final metric, but when you can have something that feels like a logical outcome I think it helps people get into both character and the spirit of the game. Then the only other thing I'd wonder about is how much to tell the players- sometimes GMs ask for a check and you don't immediately know what it's for, or you never find out. If you tell the players "your checks here determine the difficulty of the next encounter" is that good, bad, neutral? I guess its probably a question of how much meta-knowledge your group likes.

And then my only other though is about splitting up the party to scout ahead- in one of the 5E games I'm in at the moment the party is a bit scatterbrained, and we sometimes end up taking slightly different paths through a winding and twisty dungeon. And if/when someone inevitably gets into trouble, having to run all that distance can mean your multiple rounds out-of-combat before you can help. I'm not sure if it's just our group or our GM or the entire edition, but 5E seems like have a lot of hard-hitting monsters where for anyone who's not a tank or has a built-in escape strategy, getting caught out alone can be super-dangerous; like "break out the diamonds for rezzing" dangerous.
I don't really have a point there I think, I'm just sharing some experiences.