[Basic] Skill of the week: Stealth

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by Crystalline_Entity

How does stealth interact with camouflage? The former is the skill of hiding or moving silently, the latter is hiding yourself by blending in with your environment, from the description in Basic Set. Camouflage seems to be limited to vision, but stealth seems to counter different senses (an opponent with discriminatory smell gives a penalty, it's explicitly stated on B358 that listening for someone moving quietly is a quick contest between stealth and hearing).

If you're using both skills to hide, do people trying to find you get two rolls, one versus stealth and one versus camouflage? Does success at camouflage offer a bonus to stealth?

How do you all run this?

Remember the movie Predator? With his translucent camouflage system?

Once in a while, someone would look right up to it - he failed his stealth because he made some noisy. However, even looking right into where it was, they couldn't see it, because his camouflage was that good. In fact, most of the time humans were only able to his its camouflage if they got luck or if it were moving. Otherwise the Predator were unnoticed.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by johndallman

That was what I thought, until I ran into:

I presume that concealing yourself in a crowd is Shadowing, while concealing yourself any other way is Stealth. This might be because Shadowing is about crowds, and Stealth is mostly about yourself.

Stealth is able hiding by been unseen and unheard. Shadowing is about hiding in plain sight.

When special forces agents are running on a park, pretending to be regular bystanders in order to capture a suspect, that's shadowing. They are NOT trying to be invisible or to make no sound; they are "simply" running on plain sight, without hidding AT ALL. What they are TRULY hidding is their intent. So, you fail shadowing with the most typical give aways - looking at your target, or having suspicious behavior - if you somehow make a fake expression, those more attentive may notice.

Its a totally different set of skills for different situations.

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

If your limit it to both terrain type AND not full penalty is really does need to be Average not Hard.

If you MUST specialize by terrain it is better to increase 5 levels of the skill

[weby]

Originally Posted by KarlKost

If you MUST specialize by terrain it is better to increase 5 levels of the skill

For most adventurers yes, but people who are (almost) always in the same type of terrain are a different thing. As example take the archtypical woodelf forest guardian who wants to move rapidly through the forest and yet be stealthy.