1KM1KT Free RPG Community

Its been really quiet around here lately. Where are you all hiding? Lets try to get some conversation going by working on some new mechanics.

Sneaking in a tabletop RPG isn't too much fun - make a skill roll, see if you're heard. Not much actively going on. How would we make a game like "Theif" or "Deus Ex" with an actual emphasis on stealth rather than just an extra motion to get a critical back-stab?

The Video Game curmudgeon Yahtzee over on the escapist has an interesting article about the various types of sneaking: . He mentions three different kinds of stealth - avoiding sight, disguise, and social engineering. Another important point is that there needs to be a way to recover from a failure state, rather than a frustrating "spotted equals game over" situation.

Amongst the ideas that come to my mind, is to make it rather like stealth aircraft. They are not actually invisible to radar, but rather reduce the effective range and then slip through the gaps. A "field of scrutiny" (FOS) that surrounds a character, bigger in front, but generally all around and If you pas through it, you're very likely to be detected. Wearing a proper disguise, various powers, or careful movement reduces this FoS.

New levels of the sneaking skill only increase the effect of the techniques intermittently, but but between bonuses grant escape points that allow re-rolls or passes in certain situations. Out in the field, the ninja really can stick to the story of being just a farmer, but no one carries a rake in the castle.

In turn, there are several different stealth skills so a character can specialize by environment or situation. Dressing like a bum might make you invisible in New York, but not really help in a jungle. Name dropping forms and supervisor pay-grades will con your way through a government building, naming bands and explaining wiring will get backstage of a concert.

Chances are this is a game built around sneaking, so yes, a character does get multiple stealth skills. Or one skill with a tree structure like choices in many videogames.

Since timing also tends to be a factor, there probably needs to be a way to constantly monitor how long an action takes. Splitting everything into discrete tics/action points (like that review a while ago about "") Getting a bit meta, players themselves could be allowed only discrete periods of time to make a choice or describe things - say ten seconds or fifteen words. New levels of the skill give more time and words, letting them make more detailed plans as the character more expertly asses the situation and includes more factors.

Suggestions, Alterations, Additions?

nothing to add to this but yeah, has been quite around here

A whole game based on stealth huh? (And yeah, it's been too quiet.)

So in real life, what would be the solution to being spotted? Maybe social engineering, fast talk smooth talk, bribery, could help. The problem with that is that it's hard to imagine those methods being successful against an invested guard.

I like the costume idea. That there should be some prep work before hand that would make being caught a non-critical failure.

Maybe if you had the system that a failure in stealth starts to raise awareness. Instead of dead give away sounds, you make a slight creak in a floorboard that starts to give you away.

My first thought in simulating that is to have each failure give a negative modifier to each subsequent roll. Penalties would build until the character was unable to pass a roll. Finding a good hiding place and staying still could allow you to shed these penalties.

I imagine the scenes where the little girl is hiding in a closet and the bad guy comes within inches of the door and she has to control her breathing so he won't hear her. Or our comic hero hides under a desk to let the situation cool but a office worker pulls up a chair and sits down.

Perhaps "invisibility" could be like hit points or wound levels. Screwing up or acting obvious removes some and makes the guards more aware. You can intentionally harm your rating for some abilities - the obvious example being a quick dash - running isn't quiet, nor is it normal in most places, but it is faster than a sedate walk. Each person has their natural maximum cap with things like body armor or large amounts of equipment lowering the top end threshold. Some skills could act as healing spells to replenish the pool. Alternately, much of the focus could be pre-event equipping (Mission Impossible?) building up tokens/disguise/gadgets that can be expended instead of the actual stealth rating.

Another advantage of stealth HP is that it can be transplanted to any game, while visual fields and timing might require the whole system built around it. (Not that new systems are a bad thing, but lets also improve others.)

I tried to think of a few settings specific to the idea of a Sneaking game. Unfortunately, they haven't been all that original.


Some of the other offshoots of the Homo genus line were stronger or smarter than what became modern man, but almost all were either out competed by the social h. sapiens, or intentionally eradicated. One sub-type managed to survive through being social chameleons and escaping notice. Their ability lies somewhere between cold reading an audience, acting as a living polygraph, and actual psychic mind reading.

Functional mind reading of course presents all sorts of legal challenges. Is it admissible in court, can you prove someone was stealing ideas, if its a police officer can intuition be probably cause, and so forth. There would be shady business deals, or people competing to hire them. Invisible ones that actually have taken power probably don't want it compromised.

Think vampires secretly among humanity, but no blood drinking or immortality.


Rather than stealth readers being around since the dawn of humanity, its instead a recent phenomenon. If torture is unreliable (and usually illegal), AI pattern-matching algorithms only partly functional, and intelligence devices bringing in ever more amounts of data - you need a truly super operative to make sense of it all. So they used genetic science to make some. It worked, at least until they escaped.

I recall there was a TV series called "The Pretender" , and I think its plot something like this, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say for sure.


This is an old William Gibson story about bar hopping aliens. Although we learn what the visitors are over the course of tale, their motivations and means of arrival are never expanded on.


Everyone lives in a off-world colony, the rulers have a version of hydraulic-despotism in place based on their control of the air circulation systems. You must be extra careful that your anti-government activities don't get the entire sector suffocated. (Yes, I remember the 1980's "Total Recall")


All of the above are true.

You're part of a society that knows about the the puppetmasters that pull the strings of every major government. You know that you and your people will be simply labeled conspiracy theorists if you try to go public with the information. The only way to expose them is to take them apart from the inside.

The puppetmasters are of course aware of you and have labeled your people terrorists. Violent confrontation will only cement their charges. The only way to fight them is to find out what they're up to and expose it. The more plans that you uncover the more credibility your society will garner.

Two Funny Ideas

Pizza Guys from Nowhere
Show up at a house, bring pizza and a folio proving they know everything about the owner's life and have solved their life problems. Its like "The A-Team" meets Big Brother.

Covert Temping Agency
Possibility One is that its a real business, but nothing ever gets done because everyone is a spy ffor someone else and workplace politics may actually involve assassination. Spy vs Spy meets Office Space.

Alternately, the business was intentionally set up as a front for covert operations, but ends up turning a profit, while the intelligence gathering is always screwed up for reasons similar to the above.

I've run a few 'heist' games using the old Hong Kong Action Theatre system - something similar could be interesting.

MacGuffin Recovery
Players are members of an anytime/anywhere/anything recovery service. The beginning of the game lays down the initial framework of what/when/where, as well as some default security. Through a barter system, players both design the security and grant themselves dice to represent the social/physical/technological abilities needed to get past the security.

Once security has been designed (and a few surprises thrown in), the players have a go (singly or in teams - they're on commission, after all).

In Sci Fi, sneaking enters an arms race. On the surveillance side you have cameras, building sensors, artificial intelligences to replace humans to watch all the data, secure access and so on. To combat that you create a series of technologies to defeat them, which then increases the surveillance tech and so on until you get to the point a fly can't break wind without something recording it.

In Icar, I neatly sidestepped this by saying that people believe in their privacy so much that companies are not allowed to do lots of surveillance. You're not allowed to record people unless you a license to do so and the Imperium don't give out those licenses. Getting rid of what little surveillance there is becomes the job of the hacker in the team and means that stealthy-one-man-armies are highly unlikely and that a team-based stealth is important instead.

As for mechanics, Icar uses a Stealth skill but I agree it's not all that fun. Skill check and then deal with the consequences. Perhaps the scarcity mechanic could be used well here. You start with a D20 in "inconspicuousity" and then each time you are tested and you fail, it goes down a die. The starting die depends on how good you are and how much effort you put in to being undetected.

I love your scarcity mechanic, CA, have you noticed?

Scarcity die would work.

I was thinking about the stealth hit points idea, the thing that bugs me about it would be that you have to track that value all the time even if you have no purpose for it.

So I thought, what if you normally start with 0 or it's a non-stat most of the time. No need to track it.

Then, when you need to go stealth, you'd use your surveillance skill or costume skill or whatever you'd use in that setting. You'd build up a pool of hit points (or build up your scarcity die).

The problem with that is, there's no automatic consequence of failure. Success gives you points, failures should give you some kind of interesting complication.

I haven't come up with what that should be yet.