Attacking From Stealth

[beaushinkle]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

The obvious way to spotlight a player with a high stealth skill would be to have everyone roll stealth separately, and be hidden or detected individually. If Stealthy Sam wins his stealth contest but his comrade Clumsy Carl fails his, then Carl is spotted and the fight is on, but Sam remains undetected for the moment and has a wonderful opportunity to open up with a backstab while the opponents are focusing on Carl.

This is rolling to failure. As in, if there are 10 sneaks, and all of them individually have a 90% success rate, the chance they all succeed is 35%. Avoiding this was an explicit design goal!

Reiterating that checking the original article is super useful!

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

This is rolling to failure. As in, if there are 10 sneaks, and all of them individually have a 90% success rate, the chance they all succeed is 35%. Avoiding this was an explicit design goal!

Reiterating that checking the original article is super useful!

Reiterating that when the Alexandrian says "One way to do that is to specify that the character with the lowest Stealth skill in the group makes the check. This makes sense because they’re the one pulling the rest of the group down, right? Personally, though, I’m not a fan of this approach. It penalizes the Stealth specialist in a way that other specialists are NOT punished, robbing the Stealth specialist of their well-deserved spotlight," the underlined portion is not actually correct because other things in the game such as combat work the same way. Having a movement rate higher than the monster does you no good if you have a slow buddy along who will still get eaten by it. If you want to kite the monster, you have to leave your slow buddy behind.

Essentially ALL defenses are like this: they target the weakest link. Since Stealth is essentially a defense against enemy perception, it makes perfect sense for Stealth to work this way to. Stealth specialists should get the spotlight by ranging on ahead of the party--in fact DFRPG explicitly calls out advance scouting as a good idea!

"When the delvers send a scouting party ahead, roll only for the spies. If they win, they may opt to return to alert the others. The whole group can then set an ambush or move up to kick in a door. Roll vs. their best Stealth modified as in Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem (p. 6) – or, if the party sets an ambush where they are, they may use their best Tactics skill, if better. Simple success means the whole group achieves surprise."

Emphasis mine.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

This is rolling to failure. As in, if there are 10 sneaks, and all of them individually have a 90% success rate, the chance they all succeed is 35%. Avoiding this was an explicit design goal!

Then make a single roll and compare it against everyone's skill, if your goal is truly to have large groups no more likely to be noticed than small ones.

[beaushinkle]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

Then make a single roll and compare it against everyone's skill, if your goal is truly to have large groups no more likely to be noticed than small ones.

From the Goals section of the Original post:

• I would like for whatever solution to be generic in that it applies fairly to both players and monsters.
• The solution should reflect that getting 10 Hunters to simultaneously ambush a party is more difficult than 1 Hunter.
• The solution should reflect that ambushing multiple alert Prey is more difficult than a single alert Prey.
• The solution should avoid rolling to failure (having all 10 hunters make individual rolls against all 4 prey has an extremely high chance of at least one failure.)
• The solution should avoid spotlighting the least stealthy player (rather than spotlighting the most stealthy). IE: If we're always making the player with the lowest stealth do the rolling, why did the highest-stealth player invest the points? See the alexandrian.

I explicitly do want to have large groups more likely to be noticed than small ones! I just don't want to roll to failure

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

I explicitly do want to have large groups more likely to be noticed than small ones! I just don't want to roll to failure

Why not give a logarithmic penalty then? E.g. -3 to stealth for 10 hunters.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

They should always be equivalent: adding the number of people with the skill, and then subtracting the group size is equivalent to subtracting the number of folks without the skill.

The DFRPG wording is less math!

I’m not sure how I missed that. Thank you for the crystal clear explanation!

[beaushinkle]

Originally Posted by Dalin

I’m not sure how I missed that. Thank you for the crystal clear explanation!

sure thing!

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

Why not give a logarithmic penalty then? E.g. -3 to stealth for 10 hunters.

That's exactly what I proposed! Here was my original proposition:

It's a quick contest of The Hunter's Stealth vs The Prey's Perception or Observation.

The best of the Hunters roll Stealth modified by

• encumbrance
• -5 if moving faster than Move 1
• -1 for each Hunter without training in Stealth
• Group Size: Use the Size and Speed/Range Table. Treat the number of Hunters as Yards, and use the associated Range penalty. So, 9 hunters would be a -4.

The best of the Prey roll Perception or Observation modified by

• +5 if using vision and the Hunter needs to come into an open area
• light penalties if using vision
• ambient noise penalties from blind fighting for hearing (DFA32)
• Group Size: Use the Size and Speed/Range Table. Treat the number of Alert Prey as Yards, and use the associated SM bonus. So, 20 Prey would be a +6.

Purposefully not included are range penalties to Perception. They're used to calculate detection distance.

If the Hunters win the contest, they're able to start the fight from whatever position they'd like, and the Prey side has Mental Stun. On the other hand, we use regular initiative order, which may mean that the Prey gets to act first (though they're stunned). Finally, when combat starts, we let any Alert Prey decide which direction they are facing after the tokens are on the map.

If the Prey win the contest, we use that to calculate how far away the Prey notice them, using the Speed/Range table again. For instance, if the Prey won the contest by 5, they wouldn't have won the contest if they had a -6 range penalty, which happens at 16 yards. Thus, the Hunters were noticed at 15 yards (the -5 range penalty row in the table). The hunters arrange themselves to be 15 yards away, the Prey choose their facing, and are mentally stunned, and combat begins.

Note: the original proposition also used identical mechanics to the Action 2 Exploits Teamwork! rules that mburr003 proposed: "-1 for each Hunter without training in Stealth"

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

That's exactly what I proposed! Here was my original proposition:

So, you're good now and the thread is done, right?

[beaushinkle]

It's a basic feasible solution, but there's always room for improvements!

As far as I'm concerned, threads are done when they're locked, or when no one comments in them any more. Who is to say when that happens?

Sometimes threads that we thought were done get resurrected 1 year and 16 days after folks thought they were done. So who is to say? Maybe someone else searches the internet for dungeon fantasy stealth sometime in the future and has a good idea and wants to share. Maybe other folks find my original idea useful, or find this new idea more useful.

[sjmdw45]

Originally Posted by beaushinkle

It's a basic feasible solution, but there's always room for improvements!

As far as I'm concerned, threads are done when they're locked, or when no one comments in them any more. Who is to say when that happens?

Sometimes threads that we thought were done get resurrected 1 year and 16 days after folks thought they were done. So who is to say? Maybe someone else searches the internet for dungeon fantasy stealth sometime in the future and has a good idea and wants to share. Maybe other folks find my original idea useful, or find this new idea more useful.

Well, I posted my suggestions and got no response, whereas you seem happy enough with your own solution, so... I don't know what more to say.