Stealth Discussion

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 1:55 am

You Lost me stop instinctively arguing and listen because I am definitely right and you are definitely wrong. Stealth is the pre-awareness game. The stealth game begins before the defenders are aware it is occurring. The game ends when the defenders are aware it is occuring. You keep placing the action on the defenders side and that is wrong because once the defenders are declaring actions the game is over.

I seriously recommend taking a step back and examining your stealth system. It's awkward. It has rules holes. Please think before you write.

Even if the two people you are sneaking past are deaf and mute and literally incapable of communicating the existence of more than once person's sight lines are harder to avoid than one person's sight line. Action you take to avoid person 1 makes it possible that you reveal yourself to person 2 so they attack the same hp. Both of their existence makes stealthing harder on you. "But why isn't it even harder when both of them are working together to find you?" I hear you say but that question makes no sense in context and that's what you need to realize. No one is working together to find you. No one is doing anything at you. You are undetected. When the stealth game is happening you are not there in the eyes of the defender. The Hobgoblins exist and will react when they see you but until you run out of stealth hp they do not see you. The cooperative nature of the guards when they know something is happening doesn't matter in the state where they definitionally don't know something is happening.

OK, now you have created a brand new and equally insane problem. The PC runs out in the courtyard to hide, Guard A says "look for him!". Guard A and B now look for the PC. Apparently the stealth game is over(???) despite the fact that the PC has yet to be found. If your system doesn't handle hiding in the middle of combat it is not a good system.

It doesn't matter because neither is allowed to make choices. They are both static defenses and they have to be that way if the game is to work. Imagine this from the opposite side. If the PC's have made camp and set someone on watch the stealth game will function if an enemy Warg makes stealth checks against a PC but it will absolutely not function if you tell the PC "You are being stealthed by something you can't see yet, what do you do". That sentence is the end of the stealth game, not the start of it. To summarize; The defenders in the stealth game can NEVER make choices in it if the game is to work.

It really does because they do get to make choices. Being on watch is a thing. Looking for people you are tracking is a thing. I didn't argue against that because I assumed your system wasn't so crazy that people knowing your general vicinity make it crash and burn.

I understand that I haven't written a complete rules system here. I never said if people get notice penalties when they are sleeping or bonuses if they're "On Patrol" or "Alerted" or whatever. It is definitely true that I have not written out an entire working subsystem with all details covered but when we're just talking about getting the basic concept of a thing across that shouldn't be required yet. It's as if I described d20's basic attack and damage rolls to you and you've declared them nonfunctional because I didn't describe what happens if you attack from higher ground, or if you attack someone's eyes.

That is actually completely unlike the current circumstances, and the fact that you think they're similar betrays the fact that you don't even understand your own system.

Please write out your quantum stealth system. Please make sure it has some way of not exploding when someone uses an active spot check or knows the general vicinity where to look, and please demonstrate how two people will both know your location simultaneously when your stealth HP hits zero despite refusing to communicate at all. And don't forget it should have some benefit over static values, because that is what got the whole conversation started.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 3:04 am

Who are you quoting?

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 5:24 am

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Who are you quoting?

He is quoting Dean, picking up from the Pathfinder thread (which got derailed with stealth system discussion for a couple of pages)

Antariuk · Post by **Antariuk** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 4:15 pm

That Stealth discussion is the most interesting thing happening in the PF thread for months, and instead of cherrypicking quotes without names or context for some argument the whole discussion should probably be swapped into a separate thread.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 6:33 pm

I'm doing it simply to stop the thread from being derailed. You are welcome to do some copy/pasting if you so desire.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 8:09 pm

Here's an idea for a Stealth system:

Sneaky is a Stance.

When a character is being sneaky they have the following limitations on actions <blahblahblah>. When a character is being sneaky, then enemies have the following limitations on actions they can take against them <blargblargblarg>.

Off the top of my head, I'd want to go with something like

<blahblahblah> == must expend a move action each turn to maintain sneakiness and while sneaky the following additional options may be available <stuff like sneak attack goes here>

<blargblargblarg> == must expend a move action to locate a stealthy character before targeting (in combat time) or must succeed at a perception check against <fixed DC> (out of combat time); with possible flipping of rolls to make the single roll a stealth check or to set things up so PCs are always the ones rolling dice whether hiding or seeking).

Thus once you are in combat with figures on a battlemat, nobody is rolling dice for sneak / perceive, but there are still tactical options involving ranged weapon superiority and moving around corners and such that can deny opponents any chance to target you

Reynard · Post by **Reynard** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 11:35 am

>Sneaky is a Stance.
Nice. But needs to be elaborated further. Being/becoming hidden during combat with multiple participants can get annoying quickly: 4x4 battle means 32 variables that had to be kept in mind - it would be somewhat strange for character to attempt to detect Sneaky character he is not even aware of.

Stealth system also needs to deal with party walking in into an ambush / party making an ambush and NPCs/PCs sneaking past PCs/NPCs in non-combat mode.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 3:12 pm

I think people are starting from the wrong end. The first thing is you list where and when your system happens, and what the outcomes can be. After that you assign dice and shit to accept the right modifiers and produce the right odds. Actions are about the last thing you care about, as they merely limit what can be done at the same time (which is almost no limit, because you can just fucking kill people while being stealthy).

So there's scouting, where you want one PC to gain information about stuff nearby and then bail out and convey it to the other PCs, which means it's one or two die rolls so it doesn't take all fucking night. Dying while scouting is not fun, so the default is you can't (but maybe ruin surprise chances on a failure, or something). The die should determine how many things the scout can tell you.

There's sneaking up to some mook and stabbing them in the neck before they can scream. Often as a team so as to neck-stab multiple mooks simultaniously. This is basically forcing surprise, so fold it into your surprise mechanics.

There's ambushing a passing target, which is also forcing surprise. Sniping too.

--

But then I just want to use (cleaned up) 1st edition AD&D mechanics. Where there's just a team-surprise roll at the start of combats and if you're being sneaky (DC 15, move silent for neck-stabbing or hide for ambushing) you get a bonus to it. Fuck all that opposed check or AC vs Stealth noise: let surprised folk act if they can hit a DC 20 spot or listen check.

Scouting can just work like Gather Information, where the DM imagines up some info by thinking about the 18 you got on your stealth check and we don't bother playing it out.

--

What's left, mid-combat hiding? I don't think I even want it, do I? Sniping is where you fire from total concealment as a surprise round action, and then they can't see you because total concealment so you keep shooting. Bows make no flash.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 3:46 pm

Bows make no flash but arrows aren't exactly tiny speed of sound projectiles. And the twang and swish aren't soundless either. Hit or miss, most bow hunters don't get a second shot at their prey

Edit: not that this matters greatly big picture wise. I'm just being internet contentious.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 5:24 pm

Reynard wrote:>Sneaky is a Stance.
Nice. But needs to be elaborated further. Being/becoming hidden during combat with multiple participants can get annoying quickly: 4x4 battle means 32 variables that had to be kept in mind - it would be somewhat strange for character to attempt to detect Sneaky character he is not even aware of.

Oh, I see I wasn't being clear enough.

In my off the cuff suggestion, the idea was that Sneaky / Not is strictly binary and once you are in combat / battlemat there are no rolls whatsoever. Thiefy McNinja can declare "I'm being sneaky" and then he burns a move action (or something like it in whatever action economy your game has) every round to maintain it. Once he has done that, then Enemy Fighters 3 thru 7 cannot target him without each burning their own move action looking around for McNinja. But if Enemy Fighter #6 expends a move action in combat, he auto-succeeds, no roll needed and can now use his Main / Attack / Whatever you wanna call it action to shoot an arrow at McNinja and EnemyFighter#5 can totally tell EvilHenchWizard "Fireball the South Battlement" or otherwise direct his forces to target McNinja's location with AoE and terrain effects that do not require targeted attacks.

Now it does run into some of the issues with multi-stealth vs multi-sentry scenarios that other systems do, but the elimination of in-combat sneak vs spot rolls streamline those greatly. You're not actually asking "does Guard3 know where Steve is; where Bill is; or where both of them are -- who can and can't he attack?" So you do not need to track that. Instead you are asking "Does Guard3 burn a move action seeking this round in order to be able to target any characters in the stealth stance?"

Stealth system also needs to deal with party walking in into an ambush / party making an ambush and NPCs/PCs sneaking past PCs/NPCs in non-combat mode.

Yeah, this part you're right about.

The bigger issues with my suggestion would come with transitioning between out-of-combat and in-combat stealth, since anything where resources are spent from the in-combat action economy becomes imbalanced as soon as anybody can expend those actions before combat, and yet running a game which is always in combat time requires inhuman patience and bookkeepping.

TarkisFlux · Post by **TarkisFlux** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 7:45 pm

It's obvious that the roll structure of d20 stealth leans on iterative probability to cause you to fail quickly, and once you fail it's stealth over because of retry rules and seeker bonuses. Most of these are solvable problems.
[*]You can vastly reduce the rolls required and make stealth a single check compared against all of the perception scores in the area to avoid detection, like we already do with whirlwind attack vs. AC.
[*]You can remove the reactive non-action perception checks by letting people take 0 all the time forever or take 5/10 if they're using an action to 'be on watch' or whatever. This mostly just boosts the DC of the stealth check above.
[*]You can make a failed stealth check not the end of the stealth game, either by then requiring conscious perception checks with an action cost on the seeker part to actually detect them ("Hey, what was that? Hmm, must have been a squirrel.") or just requiring multiple failures to be properly noticed.
[*]You can make the familiarity spot bonuses harder to obtain, requiring more than just a single accurate detection.
[*]You can add group stealth checks to reduce the LCD aspect of detecting multiple stealthers.
[*]You can remove the cover / concealment requirement, and you should because there's no fucking facing in the game anyway.

But I'm not sure that even solving those problems really fixes the stealth game. It still forces you to split the party if you don't add stealth scores on non-sneak characters (or stuff them in extra dimensional spaces) when a stealth scene starts. Even with team stealth rolls, non-sneaks just drag the group down unless they get to come along for free. There's also potential spotlight issues with group rolls as well.

And it's still rolls in combat time whenever you could trigger an encounter, and that still means every roll is a potential failure that ends the stealthing. You can build in a lot of failure tolerance and expand on the tactical aspects of it so that you have some control over when to make those rolls, but I'm not sure there's a lot of desire to play tactical stealth games that turn into tactical combat games. Moving to goal based stealth or skill challenge stealth instead of task based stealth has its own problems. Saying fuck it and just rolling a different mini game like Dean and Frank propose is something I'm pretty sympathetic to.

The mini games proposed so far seem pretty narrow though. Can you use stealth to disappear into a crowd while fleeing guards? Or hide on a dance floor at a ball? If it's just "hiding in shadows, the game", I'm not really interested. It might work better to reclassify it as a problem with infiltration or evasion more generally, where "not noticed" is just one of the tools in your belt for getting into sensitive areas without raising the alarm, or out of them again after the alarm is up without killing everyone. Sometimes you create a distraction and slip in while no one is paying attention, sometimes you put on a disguise and bluff your way past whoever you run across, sometimes you just stealth behind everyone's backs, and sometimes you use a combination of these or all at once among different party members to get in. I'm not sure all of this could be built into the game, but I think it'd be a better one for the attempt.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 8:42 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:running a game which is always in combat time requires inhuman patience and bookkeepping.

I've played a million turns in a single game of Magic the Gathering before, and that was definitely not the slowest, most boring time.

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 9:11 pm

Foxwarrior wrote:
Josh_Kablack wrote:running a game which is always in combat time requires inhuman patience and bookkeepping.
I've played a million turns in a single game of Magic the Gathering before, and that was definitely not the slowest, most boring time.

Not in any non-automated or meaningful fashion you haven't.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sat Feb 07, 2015 9:18 pm

Exactly, that's my point.

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 1:09 am

Foxwarrior wrote:Exactly, that's my point.

Then I honestly have no idea what your post was about, and I'm not being snippy or sarcastic.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 1:18 am

The thing is, the game is played by people, not computers. If you can describe how things go to the satisfaction of everyone, you don't need to play it out in a step by step manner. Once you recognize that, you don't have to make a big distinction between "combat time" and not-"combat time", and you can let people take "combat actions" with the lack of granularity that the situation demands. With Josh's Sneaky Stance thing, it'd generally be pretty obvious that if you do it all day, you end up being slower at marching but not any worse at spamming Create Water cantrips to fill a pond, and you don't have to count the number of rounds with any precision for this to be apparent.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 2:40 am

Foxwarrior wrote:The thing is, the game is played by people, not computers. If you can describe how things go to the satisfaction of everyone, you don't need to play it out in a step by step manner. Once you recognize that, you don't have to make a big distinction between "combat time" and not-"combat time", and you can let people take "combat actions" with the lack of granularity that the situation demands. With Josh's Sneaky Stance thing, it'd generally be pretty obvious that if you do it all day, you end up being slower at marching but not any worse at spamming Create Water cantrips to fill a pond, and you don't have to count the number of rounds with any precision for this to be apparent.

Then you should probably read what Josh actually said, because his entire point was that the transition between combat time and not would cause oddities in stealth.

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 3:33 am

Oddities that only exist because the transition actually has some mechanical effect.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 4:16 am

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Feb 08, 2015 12:35 pm

Sarcasm carries so well on the internet. </sarcasm>

Can you use stealth to disappear into a crowd while fleeing guards? Or hide on a dance floor at a ball?

Chase rules are a whole mini-game of their own, because regular combat rules are far too deterministic for that. Hiding in a crowd is one possible stunt, like all the other chase stunts (tipping things, summoning a crowd, acrobatic cornering, area knowledge, bla bla bla), and if it gives you the last token or whatever you've evaded the chase.

That's sort of where 4e-style skill challenges could have worked if they weren't stupid, though you need opposed actions for PC vs PC chases (or even statted NPCs).

For the latter, disguise should probably be easier when everyone in the room is wearing the same disguise. Like, automatic. Unless you're 6'4" or have the wrong mask on, it's not really stealth in the first place. Faking the costume from curtains and pillows in the room you entered upstairs, that's your disguise or craft or savoir-faire or whatever you like check. Bullshit up some random new synergies just for the occasion.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 1:40 am

I've been following this conversation so I can crib notes for Midgard, but it seems to be spinning it's wheels a bit.

Can anyone layout a set of goals for a Stealth system? That seems to be the first thing one needs to do in creating a system. I laid out no goals for Midgard's combat system, and some of you saw what happened there.

At a first pass, it would seem the goals of a stealth system are/should be-

minimize rolls as much as possible, without becoming purely deterministic
allow for heroes to reliably sneak past/spot mooks (alternately- not allow heroes an innate advantage over mooks, it depends on what you're trying to emulate)
allow for a fleeing character to use a crowd to hide from pusuers
deliver outputs that makes sense more than they are necessarily accurate to reality.

Then I guess you have things like "(don't) allow a character to snipe with near impunity" that are dependent on the exact sort of game one is designing.

For Midgard, I know I'd want a system that allowed hobbits to sneak around dragons decently before equipment comes in, characters to use knowledge of how certain things worked to potentially be harder to spot than their actual training might indicate (so, circumstance bonuses should exist for certain behaviours), and for a small company to reliably sneak into a monster's lair, because my inspiration is The Hobbit, Discworld will always influence me*, and my source material is Norse myth.

*Vetinari failed Assassin Guild hiding classes because his instructors couldn't see him attending, and this is primarily attributed to his knowledge that dark, non-black clothing is better for lurking in shadows than black clothing

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 3:03 am

It's been a while since I read The Hobbit, but didn't Smaug sniff out Bilbo basically as soon as they were both in the same dungeon?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 3:26 am

Sniffed out yes, but couldn't pinpoint him

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 3:48 am

This means that "your enemies are alerted to your presence" should not necessarily be "game over" for the stealth minigame.

e.g., it should not be the case that, if your enemies are good enough at spotting you to conceivably become aware of your presence, then once they start looking for you, you're basically guaranteed to be found.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Feb 09, 2015 6:18 am

This discussion isn't spinning it's wheels it's just gonna take a bit to warm up. I want to lead off with a detailed Stealth rules proposal that's playable with that single post's content alone so it might be a bit.

That said I agree with Radiant. I think that stealth defense basically always needs to be automated on the part of the detector. Active spot checks don't need to exist and probably shouldn't. There also isn't any reason to model stealth fluffed combat powers in the actual stealth system. An ability where someone disappears from your sight to sneak attack you is a combat power and can be represented perfectly satisfacorily without a stealth system as DnD already demonstrates. Sneak attack and the ToB Shadow Hand powers are stealth flavored combat effects and don't need to be modeled in both systems at once.