It occurred to me, whilst dumping my sixth unconscious guard into a bin whilst playing Dishonoured (I’m British damn you, it includes a ‘u’) that stealth is something that isn’t handled especially well in tabletop games. There’s an issue with the interaction between stealth and perception and simply rolling one against the other doesn’t model the subtlety of it. In many ways it’s a similar problem to the dissatisfaction with having to resort to social mechanics rather than pure RP.
There is a difference though, I think. While some of us find it damn near impossible to play ‘smooth’ or ‘intimidating’ or to come out with a pick-up line for an NPC that has ‘game’, just about everyone can understand the principle of ‘How not to be seen’ (or heard or whatever).
What we need, then, is a way to represent a state of alertness and the fact that, really, it’s only when the sneaking person a) fucks up or b) gets caught unawares themselves that they’re likely to be detected.
Genuine stealth isn’t just ‘being quiet’, it’s staying in the shadows. Using distraction, opportunity, speed, acrobatics and athletics to move unseen.
I think a way to represent this is stealth being the knowledge of how best to go about it and how best to recover from ‘fucking up’. To get away with fucking up.
This would take a bit more preparation and you’d have to start with a guard ‘alertness’ level based on an average or less than average roll. As more incidents happened you would ramp up that alertness level and it would get more and more difficult to get away with screwing up.
Using 3.5/Pathfinder purely as an example (in 4th Ed this would be a skill challenge). Say you had a temple on a cliff, protected by an elite temple guard. A long avenue runs up to the temple with trees every ten yards or so.
How could you approach?
In disguise, climb the cliff, flit from tree to tree, engineer a distraction. Their alertness level would ‘take ten’ so, perhaps DC 15, at night you might drop that to 13 and they wouldn’t expect anyone to climb the cliff so that might be 13 as well.
It would take several rolls to climb the cliff, which would be steep and dangerous, screwing up doesn’t mean you fall (unless you mess up really bad), but for the dramatism of the stealth ‘minigame’ each failure would knock some rocks loose, make a noise, raise the alert level and require you to make a stealth roll against the DC (which would rise with each incident).
Running from tree to tree without being seen? That’s a matter of speed, stealth is really a matter of timing and if you screw up the speed (athletics roll probably) you’ll have to make a stealth roll to ‘get away with it’ and the alertness level will go up.
It makes stealth a bit more involved, adds a little bit more back and forth and, in a way, will make it a bit more like combat.
The other problem we have is that knock-out mechanics also suck. The problem with knock-out mechanics in a lot of games is that if you make the NPCs easy to knock out, that also makes the PCs easy to knock out, and that’s massively disempowering. It also leads to important NPCs being dropped and having their throats slit.
If you’re trying to simulate reality, drugs don’t knock people out that quickly or reliably and knock-out blows are also hard to gauge and its a lot harder to knock people out than it seems in the movies. You can’t expect to render a dame unconcious with a tap to the chin or to press-gang someone with a single blow of a cosh. At best you’re probably going to stun and concuss them.
In cinematic games you can differentiate between cannon fodder and major baddies in a way that lets you be cinematic while also preserving the ‘hardcore’ nature of the bosses, but that’s not an easy option in every game.
What do you think? Any ideas? Any games that handle stealth really well?
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I think RPGs can be very neat at stealth.
Mouseguard treats the subtle approach as an extended conflict: the same as combat. You have a pool of 'hit points' representing how well you are hidden. The opposition rolls to remove those points, and at zero, the group has been found. During the conflict, characters can use different maneuvers to 'defend' the pool, meaning they keep out of sight, or they can make actions to 'attack', meaning they accomplish some of their goals while hidden.
Some FATE-based systems just jump to the action. This is especially handy if only some of the characters are stealth-flavored. The ninja character just decides when and where she wants to appear out of thin air. The master of disguises declares at his convenience, which minor enemy was actually him in disguise all along.
Another interesting approach is of course Blades in the Dark -- which is heavily and explicitly inspired by the Dishonored games.
When I was reading the article, my mind immediately went to Mouseguard.
The problem with stealth in RPGs is that to do it right or well, you have to abstract the conflict. A lot of games (and a lot of players) will fight you to the death to avoid abstraction as presentation, claiming that it destroys their immersion, is too "game-y", and they'll do it while they bitch about how stealth just can't be modeled well and "why isn't there a guard over there?"
The problem for very traditional games like D&D is that conflicts within the mechanics are typically between individuals, and stealth just is not a test between individuals when you're talking about sneaking. Stealth is a greater environmental state which the player or players are attempting to overcome.
The best way to represent that in most games is to simply require X successes within Y time to consider the intent of getting through the stealth section achieved. If you get more successes within that time, keep those in your pocket and use them to do something cool because the enemy didn't see you coming. If you get fewer successes within that time, you have not approached stealthily – and if the group/GM is feeling particularly evil, they'll pocket the difference in successes to use against the protagonists during the next steps because the enemy heard them/saw them/detected them coming.
The best part about this abstracted mechanic is that it works to allow a test for any sort of preparation/buildup/carefulness at the beginning of a particular set of conflicts or right in the middle. You can even keep it going, requiring – as an example – two points of success per turn for every party member attempting to remain stealthy. Sure, you are Ninja finds it no problem at all to cover for himself and maybe even one other person to split away from the group, but they are going to have to keep it quiet out there to avoid being detected, and he's going to have to bank up some stealth successes along the way to help cover the turns in which combat are occurring.
I've never seen all of these mechanics put together in the same place, but it would be easy enough to do. Wushu is the obvious inspiration for this, really, because it already uses invested success pools to talk about long-term plans and preparation. But any system in which you have degrees of success or numbers of successes would be perfectly reasonable to bolt this on.
Awesome concepts! The world needs more DMs with your mindset!
This might just come down to who your GM is and how much time they've put into planning the whole situation. Making hard and fast rules for it would help but how many rules would there be? Maybe we need to bring back basic and advanced sets of rules for beginner and veteran players.
Personally I'd love to see a really in depth home-brew stealth rule book taking the stealth skill and dissecting it into many parts dictated by more than just your Dex. Strength dictating how easily you can knock someone, Dexterity how quickly and quietly you can move, Charisma to disguise yourself; you get the picture.
The larger problem though is how a GM should play the situation. Should there be some luck involved? Maybe a guard just so happens to be going to the latrine and is somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. A breeze comes through and blows out some fires. Stealth is a very complicated thing and until people see some examples of well done stealth situations they aren't going to try to make their own.