I forgot where that stealth thread is, but yeah I'm just repeating what I said on there years about about warhams infiltration and skill challenges or something.
Going into the minigames territory...
In the "skill challenge but it's fixed" system...
- There's X amount of turns to succeed, failure is personal so everyone contributes
- To encourage variety there's 'skill fatigue' or synergies that occur
- Degrees of success can be measured by how much you exceed the TN at end of challenge
Got me thinking about how FFXiV has turn based crafting, it's pretty similar but adds in some things like...
https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Crafting
-Succeeding and quality of the end product are measured differently, actions to raise quality do not raise success
- A limited resource to spend on giving extra turns, increasing
- 'Control': Every turn there's a chance (but it's like drawing from a deck, boons and banes will always happen, just in a random order) of your skills getting boosted or penalized, so you may want to 'save up' certain skills for a good or bad 'control' turn
So a generic legwork/out of combat time system could be...
- Abstracted time, including retroactive "actually I hacked the security so the camera didn't spot us"
- X amount of turns for everyone to do one skill roll at a time
- One 'meter' to fill up is the Success bar, if you don't fill it you fail at the task
- Another meter to fill is the Quality bar, if you fill it you have bonuses if you also succeeded
- A limited resource for giving an extra turn, raising quality, raising success
- Some factors to make things flavorful like locking/bane/boon on appropriate skills for the challenge
We can treat 'whole army' as an 'equipment' or 'encumbrance' modifier to the player's rolls.
Perhaps run an opposed test if you have 2+ sides actively trying to sabotage, get the jump on the other. So you save up some limited resource ability for the final turn in case the enemy forces used their limited resource to lower your amount of progress.