Them Bones of Adventure - V: Stealth

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

Introduction

The fact that the use of the Stealth skill shapes the dynamic of play at the table along with the explicitly all-or-nothing nature of its stakes turns this into a design challenge on a league of its own.

Speaking for the characters, failing at most other activities even at a level most dire can result in the loss of one character’s life, but with Stealth this can extend to the whole party: once you’ve blown an attempt, the game is up, which can mean from a chase to an unwanted combat to a whole gaggle of complications in the case of an active enemy compound.

And this without even mentioning the use of Stealth upon the party, something that will lend itself to a whole other slew of problems.

At the table management level, stealth is a black sheep insomuch as it’s generally a lone wolf activity, agressively shifting the spotlight onto the practicioner to the detriment of the rest of the group.

A Comedy of Errors

Due to the potentially huge implications of the use of Stealth, I’ve noticed it as a particularly fertile ground for the highest-horsepowered kinds of DM fiat, leading it to get either (A) brickwalled or, arguably even worse, (B) excessively rewarded. One or more of the following scenarios are commonly witnessed:

- The lone character that lopes ahead of the party scouting for trouble, defying the wishes of the DM that, witting or unwittingly, resists the behaviour and starts calling for a smattering of rolls until the poor sod fails and is forced to desist, bowed to the impossibility of ever beating the unending succession of knee-jerk hurdles as he beats a hasty retreat, possibly with pursuers right in tow, if not worse.

- The player’s subtle realization that the character specialized in stealth is comparatively called out by the DM to roll for stealth checks a lot more times than his more modestly endowed party mates, even in concretely equivalent circumstances.

- The party that clanks along with no recourse to stealth, being implicitly barred from sending out a scout by knowing he’ll always fall prey to either fiat or “rolling until failure” (cross-referencial wisdom: don’t split the party).

- The call for frontloaded stealth rolls that, for better or for worse, condition the entirety of the gameplay that follows.

- The need for the character to overcome a barrage of differentiated perception rolls from every foe in sight.

- The sundry awkwardness associated with managing information between characters who clearly are not supposed to be psychic yet behave pretty much as if they constituted a collective metasynapse.

The above statements regarding the onerous stakes of stealthing through the opposition have to be kept in mind, and it falls upon the referee and not the players the need to aknowledge their underlying cause and take the steps to refrain from driving the game into the hands of the select few with stealth aptitude. If a burden of risk is uncompromisingly affirmed by the game’s logic instead of arbitrariness, I trust that rational choice will emerge that keeps the game going in a way pleasant to all. Sometimes stealth is the desirable and inviting option, at others the forbidding one. The referee’s not directly the judge of that, the circumstances are. And these, despite being drawn up by the DM, once set into place should be gaugeable by the players.

A Gathering of Psychics

I’ve actually experimented with asking players to take a short smoking break from the table for the duration of certain solo and stealth segments (yes, I’ve been one of those guys, but in my defense, hanging with the smoker crowd kind of lent itself to the experiment); Though it served the purpose of not having the players act as though their character were psychic, once the lukewarm amusement from novelty faded I had to admit that the time spent correcting the players as they played “telephone” with the left-out crowd or even rehashing description in case the stealther took too long and the party decided to follow on his footsteps made for rather ill-spent run time.

I’m going to take a different approach now and enforce silence while the stealther goes in to do his thing. All communication with the severed party member is suspended while he’s absent, even if the scene’s not focusing on him. I’m not worried about metagaming (now there’s a windmill if ever I saw one), I’m more concerned with preserving immersion during the running.

The Crunchy Bits

Stealth is a set of means to an end, a tool in the toolbox and not something to be engaged in systematically, as it’s either not logically possible or because it would imply slowing the party’s progress to a crawl.

Procedure for engaging in Stealth:

1) It must be possible to even resort to stealth. A character can’t just vanish in the middle of a featureless corridor or clearing. Stealth represents a combination of actions and subtle physical displacement, not a cloaking device, and certain actions from NPCs can win over any attempt at stealth.

2) Just declaring stealth dispenses any immediate need for rolls, the character is simply pronounced as attempting to move quietly, with the player declaring at what speed.

3) When an creature unwittingly comes into contact with a character moving stealthily the referee privately rolls up a sensorial distance: the basic encounter spotting distance of 3d6*10’, modified by the spotter’s perception serves the purpose well.

This does not represent the full sensory reach of an NPC, merely the distance an unwary creature’s senses will pick up on nearby noise and movement depending on how distracted or attentive it happens to be at the time.

4) Upon entering the perception radius laid out above, the character needs to make a Stealth roll opposed by the creature’s Perception for every turn that he moves within it.

For simulating the ebb and flow of dynamic situations opposing living entities my gut-feeling likes contested rolls best rather than one die-toss versus a static wall of DC, such as it goes for finding objects. The rolls are made in the open, both driving tension and signalling transparency: if a character is caught at the wrong time with no support nearby, it can well be the death of him.

- [Dexterity (Stealth) vs. Wisdom (Perception)] 

The stealther wins tiebreaks against an unwary creature but loses them to an active searcher.

Groupings of creatures should usually be abstracted into one single roll, save for special circumstances (ones that the player is to be aware of beforehand).

- Moving just 5’ means Advantage on the Stealth roll;

- Up to half-move is a normal roll;

- Half to a full move is made at Disadvantage on the Stealth roll;

- Running while maintaining Stealth is impossible.

Armour or other circumstances that would imply Disadvantage in the PHB instead aggravate all the above categories, meaning it starts at a normal roll for a 5’ progress, Disadvantage for half-move, and the rest being impossible.

Closing thoughts – Uses of stealth against the player characters

Ideally, a referee ought to be able to flip a procedure around by simply reversing the roles filled by PC and NPC. In practice, managing a running occasionally necessitates that some corners end up on the cutting room floor, exercising discretion, especially if dealing with potential ambushes that put the characters’ lives on the line. 

As a sample of some shortcuts and adaptations:

- Abstracting the PCs sensorial distance into 3-6 (or d4+2) successful stealth rolls for a sneaking monster. This is necessary for situations in which the party is being followed while moving, which would make structured use of the original mechanic overly difficult.

- Rolling a single die for the Stealth checks of a whole group of similar monsters sneaking on the party.

- Using the party’s highest Passive Perception (or just that of the formation’s tail member), so as to not have to communicate to the party that they’re being followed.

This last one is pretty huge to me, because I don’t much care for Passive Perception and its mechanical implication of each character having a numerically valued “radar sweep” always scanning their environs; yet in this I feel like I found the redeeming use for it, as a reference total for the referee to discreetly roll against when having a creature tailing the party from a distance, without tipping his hand by soliciting rolls from the player.

This can also imply a cornercase reversal of roles, wherein it can be desirable to test a creature’s Passive Perception against a character’s “passive” Stealth, such as when a PC is moving quietly and – without the player knowing it – enters the sensory reach of an unseen observer.