Them Bones of Adventure - XVI: Ambushes and Occluded Rolls

Continuing my exposition on table procedures for common exploration feats & rules, which began here with part one.

Introduction

This time it’s about cornercase addendas, meaning to belabour topics approached in the Stealth and the Rolling Differently entries, supplementing them.

Turns out I couldn’t quite think of everything when laying down the rule apparatus for Stealth, which was concerned mostly with character movement while sneaking about. Here’s the gist of what I’ll try when dealing with static stealthers waiting to ambush a third party. The rest is a refinement to collective and hidden rolls and me ranting about screens.

Far From Sight, Close To Mind

I’ve always been against the institution of the DM screen. The first – and, arguably, the only – necessary reason to put the argument to rest being that it constitutes a barrier to effective communication (if doing things right, body language counts), which, if I may kindly draw notice, is what an RPG is essentially all about, meaning screens are a singularly anti-RPG implement, a profound way of crossbowing oneself in the foot.

They’re also an elitist symbol of unearned status and an invitation to caving in to roll fudging. Even if a referee plays it straight all the way through, statistical unlikelyhoods are sure to crop up and set about the seedings of doubt, depending on how well the players know and trust their referee.

Occluded Rolls

The above statements read that this kind of roll is best avoided whenever possible, the optimum policy being for the mechanics to call for rolls only when a character is already comitted to a course of action. As well, on the chapter of relevance, if a party is making good progress along gentle terrain and provisions are plentiful, there is quite no need to hide the Weather roll from the players, as it will promptly be subsumed into the rolling narrative of the journey anyway and nothing of importance is hinging upon it. If, on the other hand, the party is pressed by time and the gleam of cruel axe heads from an orcish warband looming close by, it will be crucial for the party to know if their tracks in the snow will be suppressed by an incoming storm and an ambush might be feasible… or not.

There will be occasions where knowledge of rolls will warp the running’s immersion and influence decisions that clearly should be made with the players unburdened by external factors. For these occasions I reserve the occluded roll.

When I say occluded, I mean that the roll is indeed made in secret by the referee with the purpose of driving tension and not allowing the players (and hence the characters) information they would not have, but with the particularity that the die roll, having been made in some reserved space, is then not removed or interfered with in any way, that it may be publicly revealed once the situation that precipitated the roll is resolved.

Off the top of my head, this can apply to Random Encounter Checks, Encounter Distance for enemies out of sight, Weather Rolls, Stealth attempts by enemies against the party, Sensorial Perception Range of foes a player character is sneaking upon… or ambushing.

Collective Crimes (Incriminate No One)

As I was squinting at making something with ambush mechanics, feeling like there was a trunk standing in the way of my view of the treeline, I was struck by what follows for a unified method for doling out the modifier to group rolls, one that doesn’t kill the d20’s variance or excessively penalize the whole party by one black sheep not having the prescribed skill.

As I've gone back-and-forth on this, I've yet again chosen to alter the methodology to something more direct and less finicky on the number-crunch front. I've thus gone ahead and overhauled entry nr. IX of this series, rather than disperse my thoughts over several nooks like a squirrel harvesting for winter.

The Crunchy Bits

The Art Of Lying In Wait

- An ambushing side, appropriately ensconced and having previously declared stealth, will lie in wait until the quarry approaches.

- Once the ambushing group’s stealth is challenged by coming into sensorial range of the victims (occluded roll of encounter distance), roll [Wisdom (Stealth)], making it a group check if a whole party is ambushing vs. the targets’ Passive Perception. A successful roll will ensure the ambushers are not found until their quarry gets to half the sensorial distance, being called anew every time the would-be victims halve their distance again to the ambushers' position.

- If the party has had enough time to prepare the ambush and sort positionings, the roll can be made with [Intelligence (Stealth)] instead and, if a group, with the best proficiency modifier found in the party, as the time spent in preparation allows the expertise of the cutthroat party elements to guide the whole set up. Note that the roll is still only put to the test once challenged by circumstances.

- Once the ambushers decide to make their move, they make a group roll of [Dexterity (Stealth)] opposed by individual rolls of [Wisdom (Perception)] from the victims – note how asking here for individual rolls is justified as they equate to an individual benefit or detriment for each defending character, whereas asking the same of the attackers makes little sense.

- Defenders who beat the ambush roll will be included in the normal Initiative group roll as combat initiates, those who roll below the attackers’ surprise threshold are caught flat-footed for the round and lose their turn, on a botch a character loses two whole rounds in confused bewilderment; on a critical success, the character may immediately act.

Closing Thoughts – The Pay-off of Preparation & Collective Doubts

The possibility of engaging a different, more cerebral, character statistic for prepared ambushes was the last thing that I added to this entry and it has left me thinking. What else might be prepareable long-term to the point of it enabling (even demanding) a logical switching of statistics and how does that map to the use of the Intelligence stat, by itself the most immediate action-averse attribute on the sheet?

I’m also not happy with how I can’t really define how long is “long enough” in terms of timing for preparation of an ambush and how much benefit it should afford. I’m of the mind that Advantage is to be granted strictly for circumstantial benefits, but should “take 10” be a possibility? What about “take 20”? How well can something as fluid and wildly unpredictable as an ambush really be prepared? Grist for the mill...