tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3092603842974378319.post5324960628869411934..comments2024-01-24T11:36:17.328-08:00Comments on Explore: Beneath & Beyond: Roll With ItJoe Nuttallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02395295081337987607noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3092603842974378319.post-7913428993302743002016-05-27T21:27:11.642-07:002016-05-27T21:27:11.642-07:00Excellent solution to a common problem. I intend t...Excellent solution to a common problem. I intend to try this out. What I've done in the past is use a time-based system. Eg. Have the sneak make multiple rolls, but the time between each roll becomes progressively longer. For example double the time between successful rolls (to a reasonable limit).Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04554944283653710892noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3092603842974378319.post-78909575972222527042016-05-26T05:03:14.973-07:002016-05-26T05:03:14.973-07:00Hi Leland – good to post again and good to hear fr...Hi Leland – good to post again and good to hear from you again (I’ve been playing regularly but too much going on to post).<br /><br />I’ve just listened to that podcast. Stealth points does seem to me to be more a boardgame rule than an RPG rule, but it's got good aims. In the podcast it talks about drawing a card every time you do an action to see if your cover is blown, which I prefer and which has a similar effect to my proposal (though failure would be inevitable eventually). The extra areas they discussed are it not being a pass/fail issue and by default always being able to do some sneaking before you’re caught. The first of these could be addressed by the D6 roll – a roll of 1 or 2 which causes you to have to reroll your check could correspond to a change in circumstances – you could also say that on a fail you roll again and two failures is needed for a fail (one fail is just you cannot sneak past but weren’t spotted). You’d combine this with changes in circumstances giving you a choice – for example you look round the corner and see a guard (location encounter or random encounter) who’ll likely spot you, thus giving you a choice for an extra hard sneak manoeuvre or to take some action to distract him or to take another route. The second issue is common in D20 skill resolution systems where there’s a narrow band between auto success and a high failure rate. It’s an interesting question how to set difficulty here which I’m going to think about further.<br />Joe Nuttallhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02395295081337987607noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3092603842974378319.post-71454624845873517152016-05-24T10:42:08.761-07:002016-05-24T10:42:08.761-07:00Glad to see you post again!
This topic came up fo...Glad to see you post again!<br /><br />This topic came up for me last week in a conversation with Justin Alexander (of http://thealexandrian.net) and some others. We were discussing the forthcoming "Dark RPG" and their stealth system, which was brought up in Ken Hite & Robin Laws' podcast (www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com/, episode #180). One thing that came out of the discussion is that, if you are trying to evoke a sense of tension and anger with your Stealth mechanics, then instead of just "roll to see if you succeed" or whatever, you want the players to have the feeling that "that was a close one." It seems to me that regular combat already has this, especially when using hit points. You can complain about the artificiality of hit points, but there's no denying that players notice when they are running low on hit points, and it adds tension when the enemy rolls an attack -- will this be the attack that takes me down to 0hp?<br /><br />So I've been thinking about schemes where the party gets a budget of Stealth points, which are spent/consumed to overcome obstacles (like guards, or cameras, or what-have-you). Also perhaps letting characters spend extra points or some other resource to mitigate failures -- like, the guard rolls high enough to detect you doesn't mean your cover is blown; instead it means the guard has noticed something odd and is coming closer to check it out, or is suspicious, or moves to activate the alarm. The idea here is to give the players an opportunity to recover from the failure, whether through a silent takedown of the guard, or throwing a small object to distract him, or whatever. Having the default failure mode being "complex is on high alert and now we're fighting a pitched battle" discourages players from even attempting stealth; a failure mode that gives the players a chance to salvage the situation is more interesting IMO.<br />Leland J. Tankersleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17257381741308085613noreply@blogger.com