Stealth and Game Balance

[Lago_AM3P]

I'll make this short.

How do you balance a game (not just D&D) where characters can extensively use stealth to avoid encounters and to avoid counterattacks?

And if you have a game like this, what can you do to ensure that the PCs won't get screwed by the stealth rules in this game?

[Username17]

It depends upon what you mean by "game balance". There's a couple of important balance concepts:

• Player vs. Player if one player is doing everything another player is doing and more, or if one player is having his special abilties come up a crap tonne more often than the other, there are bad feelings to be had. Not a good thing. So if one player is unable to stealth while others can, there is an obvious problem the instant that sneaking around is determined to be the appropriate tactic. If one player has abiliities that for whatever reason depend upon not sneaking past some or all of the encounters, that's again a problem.
  
  
• Player vs. Environment if the players are finding that their actiosn are too easy, or too difficult, then the game becomes frustrating for everyone. If stealthing past everything becomes routine, that can be problematic.

So what do you do about it? The most obvious solution to the PvP problems is to eliminate the concept of non-stealthy adventurers. That's just fvcking retarded. If you adventure, you need to be able to sneak around. There isn't a single member of the Fellowship who can't sneak. Gimli sneaks, Gandalf sneaks, the whole deal.

But you also want to make sure that it is occassionally in the interests of the PCs to not sneak past enemies. D&D attempts to do this with encounter XP, which makes babies cry and milk turn sour. But by mixing up mission objectives, it seems easy enough to make it happen.

Another thing is that having some good old fashioned overwhelming force on the other side can make the stealth itself the mission - and that covers things to an amazing degree.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

There are other concerns too with a stealth game.

First, monster or NPC stat blocks need to be simple. When you're stealthing you'll avoid a lot of possible encounters without ever starting them, meaning that for your DM to adequately prepare, it better not take him extensive amounts of time to create encounters, otherwise he will get burned out rather quickly as he has pages and pages of material which is never used.

Second, stealth has to not work sometimes. It's one reason I generally don't like hide in plain sight. It really works all the time so long as you're able to max out your hide skill (which is painfully simple in D&D). Eventually the PCs have to get discovered and combat breaks out (or at least there is a chance this may happen).

For a stealth game to be fun, you need to turn stealth into a sort of minigame as well. It shouldn't just be a boring die roll, or even worse a loaded roll based on min/maxed hide scores that confer virtual invisibility. The PCs should have to steal certain passwords to infiltrate, find out the best routes in, plan a good escape route and bypass various types of security. There needs to be a lot happening beyond a series of encounters saying, "I pass right past the guy's face, since I have a +40 hide check and he has no ranks in spot".

[User3]

Why should a third-level wizard be harder to see than the best nonmagical stealth character in the game?

[josephbt]

Umm, because Invisibility gives you a +40 to Hide? How do you plan on getting that much with skill ranks at 3rd lvl?
And if you're a beguiler, you can also factor in silence for a +infinite to move silently.

[Catharz]

1168815080[/unixtime]]Umm, because Invisibility gives you a +40 to Hide? How do you plan on getting that much with skill ranks at 3rd lvl?
And if you're a beguiler, you can also factor in silence for a +infinite to move silently.

I think the question was 'why', not 'how.'

[Cielingcat]

Why should a third-level wizard be harder to see than the best nonmagical stealth character in the game?

Because people have knee-jerk reactions anytime magic isn't objectively better than anyone else?

Slightly more on topic, if you have a stealth system like D&D (that being you have levels of stealthiness, and some people are bad at it and some people are amazingly good), and you have groups that want to sneak around, you have to make sure that there is not a disparity in their abilities. And you have to make sure that monsters have the ability to detect them, but they can't do that too often or else the players will feel that they're wasting their time. A good bet would simply to have the monsters detect them whenever it would be more fun for them to fight the monsters.

I'm getting the feeling I'm being rather redundant here.

[OrionAnderson]

"Why should a third-level wizard be harder to see than the best nonmagical stealth character in the game?"

At higher levels, he isn't. Many powerful monsters have See Invisible, while it takes blindisght to see through a ridiculous hide score...

[RandomCasualty]

Honestly the invisibility series of spells is way too low in level than they should be. This is mostly because back in 1st edition, being invisible was only a -4 penalty to the attack roll (which was basically crap) and stuff got a save to detect you. Changing it to a 50% miss chance and requiring people to guess which square the guy is in totally changes that up, only instead of re-evaluating things, the design team decided to just stick with the old sacred cow level placement.

Invisibility should probably be a 4th levelspell, with greater invisibility around 6th or 7th.

Still, I think silence is a much bigger offender than invisibility though. At least invisibility targets a single party member only and goes away when you attack.

Silence is infinite move silently for everyone, and affects other sounds too. Plus it's a no save spellcaster fuck over. And combining silence and invis is just crazy.

But there are a lot of skill hosers out there. Like knock.

[Fwib]

1168838562[/unixtime]]"Why should a third-level wizard be harder to see than the best nonmagical stealth character in the game?"

At higher levels, he isn't. Many powerful monsters have See Invisible, while it takes blindisght to see through a ridiculous hide score...

Now that there is the Darkstalker feat (Lords of Madness), even blindsight/scent/tremorsense can't perceive the ubersneaker.

[bitnine]

1168795153[/unixtime]]For a stealth game to be fun, you need to turn stealth into a sort of minigame as well. It shouldn't just be a boring die roll, or even worse a loaded roll based on min/maxed hide scores that confer virtual invisibility. The PCs should have to steal certain passwords to infiltrate, find out the best routes in, plan a good escape route and bypass various types of security. There needs to be a lot happening beyond a series of encounters saying, "I pass right past the guy's face, since I have a +40 hide check and he has no ranks in spot".

Yeah, I agree on both parts with the stealth minigame. First off, in a game where stealth is a substantive feature, you've got to create stealth-based encounters. And interesting, well-founded encounters aren't just simple or single dice rolls, or areas where certain characters are always a failure and liability.

The large disparity in skill modifiers that exist means that too often characters pretty much automatically succeed or should go home and not bother trying. And that variance means that the former or the latter will hit some people in almost any party. Except for that a lot of times characters realize that the disparity isn't worth fighting and just use magic to circumvent the whole deal entirely.

I'd really like to see the range of skill checks tightened up and skilled characters instead benefit from better uses of skills, and even 'unskilled' characters given better limited-scope uses of skills. You can give people the ability to contribute mechanically without negating roles or trivializing skill focused characters.

When the party needs to sneak past a giant encampment of goblins, slipping through dense forest past their bonfire and revelry, it would be neat as hell to see everyone with something to do. Let's say the ranger uses Cut a Path to negate terrain penalties. The rogue uses Lead the Way to consolidate the party's skill check into his own. The barbarian uses Listen Intently to monitor the goblin's activity for a reaction. The wizard uses Dim Auras to reduce magical bonuses to detection the goblins might have. And the cleric? Who are we kidding, we give the cleric something like an ability to burn turn attempts to make people flicker invisible and he goes ahead and makes everyone feel impotent as he carts along his wheelbarrow of nightsticks. Which he can keep perfectly silent as a domain ability.

Eh, but almost every mention I've seen of reigning in the ridiculous differences in character skill checks gets met more or less with "omg don't nerf plz!" Neverminding the fact that a more ability-based system as mentioned above might well be a substantive boost to skilled characters. (Hell, it'd also make toning down and removing skillkilling magic easier to implement for many because of less of "I can't possibly succeed? Screw this, let's just use a spell.")

[Crissa]

If you're going to balance against skill check, you're going to have to balance the effect of having four dice being rolled vs one - As it is, it's better to have five guys with no bonus vs one guy with a high bonus unless that guy is off the die roll already.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

I've done a rudimentary rewrite of the stealth based skills here
.

See what you think.