Stealth in tabletop ?

[silva]

Im a huge fan of stealth videogames like Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, Hitman, Mark of the Ninja, etc.and I always wondered if this genre could be translated somehow ti the tabletop environment. The answer, sadly, seems to be no. At least in my experience its impossible to convey the kind of tension one gets from the videogames by roling asingle die and listening to the GM say if you pass or not though some obstacle or observer.

One method I thought about lately, though, is using a Jenga tower in a way not too different from that other rpg that uses it (Dread, if I aint mistaken). But I dont know how that game works in detail. What I know is that the jenga tower seems to convey asense of tension much bettet than dice. Perhaps if it was possible to make the process of puling blocks harder the more alerted the oposition is, it could ne a nice match.

So my question here is twofold:

1) Could the Jenga tower work for this purpose ? How ?
2) Is it possible to convey the genre to the tabletop at all ?

[RobbyPants]

Jenga may or may not be a good fit. The tower is nice for building an impending sense of doom/dread/failure, but it only works if it builds. If things aren't getting worse, it makes little sense to keep pulling pieces from the tower.

You'd need to "reset" the tower any time the tension is supposed to drop. If you need increased difficulty, you could either be required to pull more than one piece and/or start the tower at an intermediate state.

[fectin]

Why not just play mood music instead?

[Krusk]

So just like you wouldn't let people who aren't smart play genious characters, you shouldn't let clumsy characters play sneaks?

All you've done is made it so only people good at jenga play thieves and those who are bad do not. That's a new, I'd argue worse, problem.

[Lago PARANOIA]

1) Could the Jenga tower work for this purpose ? How ?
2) Is it possible to convey the genre to the tabletop at all ?

Any game that uses outside context game mechanics for TTRPGs earns my permanent contempt. Why not just tell everyone to buy a copy of Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions and judge peoples' success in the game based on how well they did in the time trial?

[Sakuya Izayoi]

The original Dungeons & Dragons is already a heist game, since it has an XP system that doesn't reward frivolous kills, and spells with reliable effects. Just cut out the garbage, like a thief class that has to pray to the RNG gods to do their 9 to 5 occupation, and you're good to go.

[fectin]

I'm not existentially opposed to outside-context mechanics. I have a hard time coming up with any that would be appropriate for more than a beer-and-pretzels game though.

[silva]

1) Could the Jenga tower work for this purpose ? How ?
2) Is it possible to convey the genre to the tabletop at all ?

Any game that uses outside context game mechanics for TTRPGs earns my permanent contempt. Why not just tell everyone to buy a copy of Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions and judge peoples' success in the game based on how well they did in the time trial?

The only difference I see between a jenga tower and dice, paper, pencil and mats is familiarity of its users. Once you add anything beyond sheer imagination and conversation, you are already using outside context game mechanics. The fact you got used to translate all your fictional interactions to 6 faced polyhedron probabilities dont make it less alien to the context of imaginary make-believe than jenga, rock-paper-scissor or penalty shootouts in Fifa 14.

[8d8]

IIRC Dread has you playing MTP until someone says there's a chance of failure/death, then the person talking/storytelling/narrating/whatever pulls a jenga piece in the dark. It's not so much about trying to pull off a heist as it is making death a constant and likely scenario. You know it's going to happen because you cannot stack a jenga tower in the dark indefinitely (or even more than a handful of times). That is not well suited for what you're trying to do.

Board games do a pretty good job of creating the kind of tension you're after with things like jenga blocks and Operation-like tests. A test of your reaction speed would be at least as good as a test of your muscle control, but I don't remember seeing that in a board game. I could see a CCG-like trial having a lot in common with trying to sneak past someone who's looking for you. Regardless, an RPG isn't usually as fun if it's played like a board game. You want something that isn't wholly random, and responds to your decisions better than a physical trial. I don't have an idea yet on what that might be.

Also Silva, I don't want to assume that "asense" and "bettet" are not actual words in your native tongue, so I'll just point out that it is possible for you to use firefox and install a free plugin that spell checks everything you type on websites, in case you're trying to communicate in English and you're not on a cell phone. If you're on a phone, I understand.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Outside-context game mechanics are stupid because they break the relationship between the resolution mechanic and actions or events that take place in the game. Imagine if you will a game like D&D that used a deck of cards when it was Mass Combat time, something akin to Legend of the Five Rings, and used a the familiar dice RNG for single combat.

Now let's consider a game effect like a heavy but mundane storm. For the traditional D&D portion it does things like obscure your vision and make it harder to hear and if it went on long enough the DM could king in rules like wind and water hazards. Fair enough. But for the wargame portion, Heavy Storm would do something like putting a limit on how many people could play cards per round or sap away at life points or send cards to the graveyard or whatever. You can already see the problems with this: for one, game effects become incoherent. If you had a character with a Heavy Storm, it's not clear when, how, and why they would use it and then becomes both internally and externally inconsistent. For two, the outside-context mechanic throws a divide-by-zero error if it can't model what the inside-context mechanic is doing -- and quickly becomes bloated even if you do try to formulate contingency plans. Even if your rules could account for stuff like people introducing rats to the food supply or your commander getting heat stroke or giving an inspiring speech to the public that gives you a recruitment drive, eventually someone is going to come up with something that can be modeled in one engine but not the other and that's the end of that.

The only ways you could prevent these mechanics from tripping on each others' dicks is to rationalize away (which includes telling the weather controller 'swiper, no swiping') in-context game mechanics with out-context game mechanics until you got the plot point you wanted or to make the systems completely transparent with each other. I.e. a Heavy Storm effect in the CCG portion is identical to what would happen in the traditional portion because the CCG has game effects to model visibility and speed and whatever.

The latter is flat-out impossible to do for any game much more complicated than Munchausen. Not only would you have to come up with rules and an effect for Heavy Storm but also for Extra Reinforcements and Sun in Your Eyes and Halved Rations and etc. Even if you were somehow able to manage the literally intractable task of making the outside-context game mechanic completely transparent with the inside-context game mechanic, you're still left with the fact that you're wasting peoples' time teaching them to and them making them to be pulling jenga blocks or shuffling decks or whatever the fuck when you could've just used the inside-context mechanic.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

If I really had a number of players who wanted to play stealthy characters, I would use HERO. That way, I can say plainly, a mook has X Perception, an elite guard has Y Perception, and a corporate anti-espionage droid has Z Perception, build around those numbers. The idea being, to give them explicit breakpoints they can use to be off the RNG. Both the wizard who turns invisible, and the guy who just sneaks around really well, deserve to know the stakes.

[silva]

IIRC Dread has you playing MTP until someone says there's a chance of failure/death, then the person talking/storytelling/narrating/whatever pulls a jenga piece in the dark. It's not so much about trying to pull off a heist as it is making death a constant and likely scenario. You know it's going to happen because you cannot stack a jenga tower in the dark indefinitely (or even more than a handful of times). That is not well suited for what you're trying to do.

Why not ? The process you describe mirrors pretty well the process of sneaking in a guarded area on videogames - only instead of dying, the player who crashes the tower is caught/captured. Then, the rebuilding of the tower by the GM represents the allertness level cooling down in the area, and the remaining players go out from hiding and try to continue the mission (or to extract). And since the new tower must be built with one less block (as RobbyPants says) , this means security was reinforced. The more players are caught, the more the security is reinforced (the less blocks the new tower is built with) until the point when security is so tight its practically impossible to go through.

How is that not great for mirroring what we see in stealth videogames ?

Outside-context game mechanics are stupid because they break the relationship between the resolution mechanic and actions or events that take place in the game. Imagine if you will a game like D&D that used a deck of cards when it was Mass Combat time, something akin to Legend of the Five Rings, and used a the familiar dice RNG for single combat.

Lago, what youre struggling to see is that dice are so "outside context crap" as cards or jengas. Once you get out of the shared imagined space to look at a piece of paper full of numbers and gamey math, youre already dealing with "outside context crap". The fact you are more familiar with dice and math doesnt mean its any less outside context crap than cards or jenga or FIFA 14 penalty shootouts or Metal Gear Time Trials or Who Cums Faster contests.

[angelfromanotherpin]

There was actually a pretty neat-looking one-on-one D&D adventure for a solo Rogue where the entire thing was a Thief: The Dark Project level. And on some level, I think that's basically what you have to do – it's all about designing the environment for the stealthers to roam around in. Including areas with noisy floors and extinguishable light sources, and the PCs having limited resources to overcome those. Each adventure is going to be a pile of work.

One of the things about Thief is that you basically had areas you could be in that were risk-free. And you explored those, found the risk points, decided which risk you wanted to take, did what you had to do to get to a new risk-free zone, repeat until objective completed. Once you have the player making informed choices about risk management and resource spends, you probably can just go with some kind of a die roll. Especially if there's a resource you can spend for re-rolls.

[Kaelik]

Lago, what youre struggling to see is that dice are so "outside context crap" as cards or jengas. Once you get out of the shared imagined space to look at a piece of paper full of numbers and gamey math, youre already dealing with "outside context crap". The fact you are more familiar with dice and paper doesnt mean its any less outside context crap than cards or jenga or FIFA 14 penalty shootouts or Metal Gear Time Trials or Who Cums Faster contests.

On the other hand, dice are completely random, so no one is being punished or rewarded based on something unrelated to the game. Jenga is not. Think for like six seconds. Have you ever considered that someone might exist who has cerebral palsy? Why are they not allowed to role play a fucking stealth character, or even play a stealth game?


Of course, you are completely wrong about modelling a fucking stealth game in the first place. A stealth game is about passively observing the guards from hiding, and then acting based on that knowledge. The best stealth games add a slight wrinkle like encouraging you to act on limited information because wait to observe as much as you can will cause you to miss opportunities that were only open earlier.

None of that is in any way modeled by a fucking jenga game.

[silva]

There was actually a pretty neat-looking one-on-one D&D adventure for a solo Rogue where the entire thing was a Thief: The Dark Project level. And on some level, I think that's basically what you have to do – it's all about designing the environment for the stealthers to roam around in. Including areas with noisy floors and extinguishable light sources, and the PCs having limited resources to overcome those. Each adventure is going to be a pile of work.

One of the things about Thief is that you basically had areas you could be in that were risk-free. And you explored those, found the risk points, decided which risk you wanted to take, did what you had to do to get to a new risk-free zone, repeat until objective completed. Once you have the player making informed choices about risk management and resource spends, you probably can just go with some kind of a die roll. Especially if there's a resource you can spend for re-rolls.

Neat ideas, Angel. Yeah, carefully designed levels + risk management with some spendable resource makes total sense.

Tying this idea with the Jenga tower, perhaps characters with the exact ability for a task could pass through and bypass the tower once (and just once). This could apply for gadgets too, so a character with the right ability + gadget could avoid that kind of obstacle twince in the mission. Exhausted that, he must face the Jenga tower. (BWA-HA-HA!) So, how does it sound like ?

Of course, you are completely wrong about modelling a fucking stealth game in the first place. A stealth game is about passively observing the guards from hiding, and then acting based on that knowledge. The best stealth games add a slight wrinkle like encouraging you to act on limited information because wait to observe as much as you can will cause you to miss opportunities that were only open earlier.

None of that is in any way modeled by a fucking jenga game.

Have a spendable resource based on planning and observation, which you could spend to avoid the jenga! How cool is that ?

[John Magnum]

How fixated are you on this Jenga concept? Extremely, it appears, but whatever. Can you at least put some thought into it beyond "I want stealth to have tension... And a nearly-toppled Jenga tower is full of tension! Bingo!"?

Dice are a pretty good RNG for a physical board game. They're pretty portable, easy to set up, quick to get a result from, flexible if the designer knows a little about probability. If you want to have a non-deterministic element in your game, dice are a good way to adjudicate that.

Other stuff... less so! For instance, a deck of cards can be a good RNG, but that can be unwieldy and the process of shuffling is more time-consuming than anything you have to do to reseed a die. Other things will have long setup times, are less portable, take non-trivial effort to extract the result from, require some kind of skill that isn't really called for... There's lots of differences besides just "Everyone's used to dice!" And in fact "everyone's used to dice" is, itself, a reason to keep using dice, because a good interface is one that works the way its users expect it to work.

[Kaelik]

Have a spendable resource based on planning and observation, which you could spend to avoid the jenga! How cool is that ?

Well first off, very uncool. But secondly, literally 100% unrelated to any of the things I said. Adding a resource to skip the Jenga does not:

1) Allow people who are not good at Jenga to play stealth characters.
2) In any way at all model the action of safely observing a series of patterns and acting based on your ability to interpret the patterns and exploit them.

I mean, for fucks sake why not just make them run outside and shoot a basketball, it is equally as stupid as your jenga game.

[silva]

I mean, for fucks sake why not just make them run outside and shoot a basketball, it is equally as stupid as your jenga game.

[Aryxbez]

Silva, I hope ye do understand the notion of it being kinda unfair/uncool to punish people who wanna play a concept they themselves are not. It's akin to asking a Bard Player to actually "write" a poem, a full song, sing, play an instrument, or a Strong-man player to actually be able to lift strong things, and so on. Nevermind if the player is capable of that or not, the player isn't the PC, he's just playing "as" that character. That, and it kinda depowers the fantasy of getting to play or explore type of character one wants to do.

So if Jenga, or trumpet-playing, or even asking people to play some Smash Bros (or whatever examples ye wanna use), would disassociate from their character's abilities, that's kinda unfair & possibly unfun as well.

Lastly, for whatever its worth.

[Stubbazubba]

Jenga creates tension, sure, but that's not the only element of the stealth genre, and the rest of the genre just isn't well modeled by a Jenga tower.

The heist genre typically involves gathering information about the defenses you are likely to encounter, preparing tools/skills to circumvent them, and then having things go wrong because your information was bad, incomplete, or out of date. That's something you can already do with most TTRPG mechanics, though you might have to approach designing the encounter a little differently.

The problem with emulating stealth video games in tabletop is that the real-time aspects are the immediate tools you interact with in a video game, but all that has to be abstracted in tabletop. In a video game, the tension exists because you have to observe and then act quickly, timing it all just so. In tabletop, there is no timing, just decisions and probabilities. Which is why the heist genre (as seen in film/TV) is better suited for adaptation; when things do go wrong, how your character chooses to act (finish the job or abort? Bluff your way out or go out guns blazing?) is the defining aspect of role-playing games, and is probably a satisfying choice to make for the player. However, a well-designed stealth scenario would involve decision trees that the player encounters besides the main defenses; take the risk of sneaking into the guards' break room to get an access key that opens up a secondary passage/treasure room, or stick to the relatively safe plan? Create a diversion to cover your tracks on the way out since the guards had to rotate early and these new guys are fresh and alert, or just hope they're not terribly committed to their work? From your ambush spot in the air duct, what's the best way to take out the Russian officer on the toilet reading a paper?

Artificially engineering tension with a distracting game mechanic that relies on player skill and not character skill, however, just creates another level of distance between the fiction and the player, beyond the initial abstraction. Role-playing games revolve around PC choices and their consequences, that's where the tension comes from, not from the physical resolution mechanic.

[Laertes]

I would argue that Shadowrun, at least in its archetypal form, is an example of a stealth game. You cannot win a standup fight because the megacorp can and will bring in assets that will crush you, so you need to rely on speed and secrecy; and if all goes wrong then violence becomes merely a method of facilitating your rapid egress. It's a power fantasy, sure, but it's a fantasy about being the smart, nimble little guy who tricks the big, stupid slow guy.

Dread uses jenga as its resolution mechanic in a horror game and it uses it well, but it doesn't try to be anything more than a gimmick. Nobody has ever run an extended Dread campaign. Nobody ever will. It's not designed for that any more than Ars Magica is designed for one-offs.

[zeruslord]

Also, jenga removes control over the play experience and risk levels from everybody: designer, GM, and players. If a group happens to play jenga regularly things are easier, if they drink while playing things are harder.

[silva]

Jenga creates tension, sure, but that's not the only element of the stealth genre, and the rest of the genre just isn't well modeled by a Jenga tower.

The heist genre typically involves gathering information about the defenses you are likely to encounter, preparing tools/skills to circumvent them, and then having things go wrong because your information was bad, incomplete, or out of date. That's something you can already do with most TTRPG mechanics, though you might have to approach designing the encounter a little differently.

The problem with emulating stealth video games in tabletop is that the real-time aspects are the immediate tools you interact with in a video game, but all that has to be abstracted in tabletop. In a video game, the tension exists because you have to observe and then act quickly, timing it all just so. In tabletop, there is no timing, just decisions and probabilities. Which is why the heist genre (as seen in film/TV) is better suited for adaptation; when things do go wrong, how your character chooses to act (finish the job or abort? Bluff your way out or go out guns blazing?) is the defining aspect of role-playing games, and is probably a satisfying choice to make for the player. However, a well-designed stealth scenario would involve decision trees that the player encounters besides the main defenses; take the risk of sneaking into the guards' break room to get an access key that opens up a secondary passage/treasure room, or stick to the relatively safe plan? Create a diversion to cover your tracks on the way out since the guards had to rotate early and these new guys are fresh and alert, or just hope they're not terribly committed to their work? From your ambush spot in the air duct, what's the best way to take out the Russian officer on the toilet reading a paper?

Artificially engineering tension with a distracting game mechanic that relies on player skill and not character skill, however, just creates another level of distance between the fiction and the player, beyond the initial abstraction. Role-playing games revolve around PC choices and their consequences, that's where the tension comes from, not from the physical resolution mechanic.

Nice post.

I think we are in agreement then about the stealth genre as portrayed in videogames like Thief, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear and Hitman being impossible to replicate in the tabletop environment.

I still dont agree with the Jenga argument, at least partially, because I think the activity of playing an rpg already rewards certain player traits in contrast to others, and players better fitted with those will naturally have the advantage (ie: everybody here probrably seen the more rethoric and verbally apt player to dominate some games) but I think the point is already over-discussed and anyone reading this is fitted with enough arguments to make his/her own mind.

Im curious as how that "Project Dark" rpg thats supposed to be a stealth tabletop game handles it. From the superficial look I gave it, it seems to follow more or less what we pointed here as seemingly good practices: focus on observation and informed decision-making, careful setting design, resource-management, and expanding stealth rules to something akin to combat mini-games. If someone has more info on it, lemme know.

[erik]

My wife has muscle tremors and likes playing rogues. This would be an incredibly shitty pairing. This is not an exception so much as a highlight if why this kind of rule idea is garbage.

Some games have cute gimmicks but you shouldn't try to make the meat and potatoes the gimmick.

[silva]

Someone over at RPGnet posted this about Leverage RPG. It sounds oretty neat.

The Leverage RPG (Cortex Plus Action) has a fairly simple system of timed actions that I've always felt worked really well for multi-person infiltrations and the like.

In essence, the GM breaks the task down into a number of "beats" - distinct dramatic moments within the overall task. Each character involved takes his action towards that task. A successful test "costs" one beat, an extraordinary success costs none, and a failure costs two. You're assumed to succeed at what part of the task you're attempting - the test isn't to determine success or failure, but how swiftly and easily they achieve their goal.

If you finish with 0 beats, you choose between getting what you want and getting out safely. If you run out of beats before you complete the task, you've failed. If you complete the task and still have beats left, then you get what you want, and get out safely. The trick here is that other characters can choose to provide distractions or advantages instead of contributing directly to the task, adding beats to the task and giving you more breathing room to complete the task successfully.

By way of example, because the explanation I've given isn't as clear as it could be:

A team of professional thieves are trying to get into a target's office and liberate files from his safe. The GM sets this up as four distinct beats - getting into the building, getting past security, getting into the office, and retrieve the files. They choose to use deception to get through the front doors, with the grifter getting them through smoothly - one beat down. Getting around the building's security (guards and electronic systems both) is the next challenge, so the hacker makes his way to a quiet spot and breaks into the local network, watching patrols and running interference with the electronic systems - this takes longer than planned, costing two beats. Only one beat remains before everything goes wrong, and the team still needs to get into the office and find the files. The thief disables the lock and slips into the office almost without stopping, costing no beats - they've still got time, but not much. With time running out, the team's hitter rushes to stall a security patrol with the rapid application of fists, rendering them unconscious and adding another beat to the clock. The thief cracks the safe and rummages through the files, calling out particular folders and documents over her radio, while the mastermind determines which pieces will be most useful - costing one last beat for a success.

With one beat remaining (4 initially, -1 for entry, -2 for security, -0 for access to office, -1 for finding the files, and +1 for the hitter's distraction), the team gets away safely with the files they were looking for.

A more complex task could be broken down further, involve more intricate situations and more beats. Spreading characters out as they handle different parts of a task might force characters out of their comfort zone (the grifter can't help here, she's busy keeping the staff distracted with a fake inspection, you'll have to deceive these people yourself).