kichae

Yeah. At least for my sessions, the biggest sources of stealth play tend to be things like bushes (which I scribble on my play mat like I'm 4 years old), or things like furniture, so I hear you. It's easy to say "here are all the ways stealth could happen", but the reality is that most spaces that people will actually spend time in will not have an abundance of hiding places, and trying to create them can feel very contrived. Feint gets used so much more often than Hide/Sneak.

taaz@biglemmowski.win said in How to handle stealth & detection without bogging it down?: > I should try the offloading though that is good tip, my players are bit meta/gamey

Be judicious in what you off-load to them, then. Maybe don't let them track which NPCs can see which PCs, but let them track which NPCs the PCs can see. Make sure they're all tracking their own HP, and not leaving that to you. Let one of them handle calling out initiative, telling everyone who's up and who's "on deck". These all work towards treating you more as the player of the NPCs and less as the person who's organizing/running the game.

One thing you can do with stealth and initiative, when the NPCs are the ones hiding, is just be transparent about how many enemies there are. Say something like "You think you can hear three distinct sets of sounds." This makes it so that NPCs are never Unnoticed (which is how the designers seemingly wants you to treat it, anyway). This lets you roll initiative for all of the hidden NPCs openly, and incentivises the players to start looking for them. This keeps it so the players can keep track of the initiative order, even when there are hidden enemies.

Sure, but the Champion gives resistances, and even the ability to just move for free. Plus, it has a significantly higher offensive output, which means it can both protect their ally and punish the attacker.

The Guardian inserts itself between the ally and the attacker and says "you're wasting your time attacking them". The Champion sees the attacker targeting the ally and says "I'm going to make you wish you didn't do that".

One of the things that people new to the system kind of trip over -- in multiple areas of the game, but Stealth is one of the most common ones -- is that the rules make sense from the perspective of someone actually doing the thing. They're not simulating the process by any means, but they're much, much closer to trying to (or at least look like they're trying to) than people seem prepared for. Or that people pick up on on first reading.

So many of the rules are written in a deeply systematized way, and if you're not used to discussing or building systems, it can all seem really wordy and complex.

It all really just boils down to a few questions, though (hence the flow charts):

• Is there anything obstructing the view between Creature A and Creature B that would make it a little bit difficult to discern where the other character's edges are? If so, the other creature is Concealed.
• Is there anything making it so that one creature cannot see the other? e.g. did Creature B duck behind a fully opaque wall and are they standing away from the edge? Then they're Hidden.
  • If Creature B is standing right at the edge of the wall, you should assume they are still visible, in part. This just gives them cover. The 'Hide' action represents making an effort to be fully occulted by cover.
• If Creature A loses sight of Creature B (e.g. they ducked deep behind a wall, or they took cover and hid) and then Creature B moves stealthily, then Creature A no longer knows where Creature B is. Creature A now no longer able to detect Creature B.

Picture yourself in a little wooded glade. Unbeknownst to you, I'm approaching in an attempt to ambush you. You hear something in the woods, but you can't see what it is, and you can't tell exactly where it was. That means I'm Undetected. If you were to enter the woods and catch a glimpse of me as I duck behind a tree, that would mean you know where I am. If you can see parts of me poking out from behind hte tree, I've lost all stealth, but if you can't see me, I am Hidden. From there, if I successfully sneak away from the tree without you noticing, you no longer know where I am, and I'm Undetected once more. On the other hand, if I slip from the tree to behind a bush, where you can see me through the leaves, I'm now Concealed.

I have so much to say about stealth in the game, but I won't bore you with most of it. Stealth, though, is the system that highlights to me most directly just what Pathfinder 2e is as a system, and how it's not what many of the game's most vocal online fans seem to think. In short, the Stealth system highlights that PF2e is much more simulationist and fiction-focused than most people are willing to admit (which is not to say that it is a simulationist game, just that it is making some pretty direct but oft-overlooked efforts to be as flexible and multi-purpose as possible).

Party stealth is a multi-comparison system in no small part because hiding and perceiving things in real life is a multi-comparison system. In real life, it's just not systematized. But also in real life, you only need one person on your team to be detected by one person on the other team for the other team to mobilize. This hints at multiple ways to track the interactions, or multiple ways to modify Stealth to help create a smoother experience.

Unfortunately, I don't think any method really works well, like, in Pathbuilder. But Pathbuilder's GM mode should make it easier to see what the actual Stealth rolls are.

The first thing that I do when preparing a pre-made encounter, or crafting an encounter in advance, is create a table and pre-roll initiative for the NPCs. I'll usually do this on my laptop, in Excel or in my note-taking program. Rolling initiative first isn't actually important here, especially if you're using something like Excel which will let you easily re-order the table, but it helps create just one table if you're doing it on paper. The table includes the initiative roll, some signifier of the skill used for initiative, and the NPCs key stats: Perception, Ref, Fort, Will, AC, and max HP, (plus columns for current HP and status). This helps make stealth roll comparisons much easier.

You then compare the max Perception DC to the lowest Stealth roll. If Stealth wins, everyone is Undetected (or Unnoticed, if you're at my table, because screw that discrepancy). If not, I'll jot down which PCs the NPC notices. After this, I'll switch to initiative order for comparisons. I'll make note of the first NPC's Perception DC and then compare it to all of the Stealth rolls to see who's noticed, and make note. If it's everybody, I stop there. The first NPC will spend their turn pointing out the hidden PCs to everybody else. If there's anybody left after that, I move down to the next NPC and only check the remaining PCs.

This can be streamlined, but doing so involves allowing for contested skill checks. Instead of comparing the Perception DCs to the Stealth rolls, you can instead choose to compare the NPCs' Perception-based initiative rolls to the PCs' Stealth-based initiative rolls. Following the procedure above, this actually cuts out one of the steps.

Multiple comparisons can also be reduced if you just let the lowest roll stand for the whole party. Then you're just comparing the lowest stealth roll to the initiative rolls.

To overcome the writing space issue, pick up a clip board. It's back-to-school season in the northern hemisphere, you should be able to find something on sale right now without any problems.

For actually tracking the changing stealth statuses during play, how you play is important information here. You say the table is small -- does this mean you're not using maps/minis? If you are, you should actually be able to tell at a glance for most creatures whether someone his hidden or not at the time the player rolls Stealth to hide. The actual range of Perception DCs should be small, and with them written on a clipboard or spreadsheet, you can hopefully just make a mental note and remember. If you have a lot of NPCs, that might be harder to do, but with 2 - 6, it should hopefully be OK with a little bit of practice.

Concealed/Undetected is slightly more complicated, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of the fiction of the game, and I've found that that makes it a lot easier to track. Standing behind something that crates partial blockages to line-of-sight (such as a bush?) The enemy can't quite tell where the edges of your body are! Concealed! Hide and successfully snuck away without anyone noticing? Undetected! Wearing camouflage but standing in the open? You have fuzzy visual boundaries! Concealed! Standing in a thick fog cloud? Fuzzy boundaries again! Concealed! Ducked around a corner, out of line-of-site and then moved in a way that no one could reasonably hear you (i.e. used 'Sneak')? Undetected! Ducked around a corner, out of line-of-site, but didn't sneak away? Hidden! Ducked around the corner, but ran away so that the NPC could hear your movements? Hidden!

If you want, you can assume the state applies to every NPC on the board until you look down and see where that doesn't make any sense. Or, you can make it apply to every NPC on the board, but extend Seek to allow NPCs ot make an unlimited range, 360 degree Perception check for stealted creatures that they have line-of-site on (this super-charges Seek, and kind of nerfs stealth, but making it cost an action turns it into an active choice with an opportunity cost). You could reduce it to 180 degrees for the sake of better empowering stealth (and also introducing better sense of directionality to sight).

I don't know if Guardian is a better tank than a Paladin, but it's definitely a better brute-force damage-sponge than one (or 'classic tank', as [ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]](https://wanderingadventure.party/user/professorowl_phd%40hexbear.net) said). Since tanking is really about managing party damage, not just taking it, there are a fairly wide variety of potential tank builds in the game.

Guardian is just the WoW Warrior version of that, right down to the taunt function.

Aye. And there are things the player can do that lets them take 2 attacks for one action, but you get a normal Multiple-Attack-Penalty progression between each attack, and there are things that let them take 2 attacks for 2 actions -- as would be normal -- but which do not progress the MAP until after the second attack is done. And there are a lot of each. Or rather, there's functionally 1 of each, but it's often named different things for different classes.

The single-action variety can be seen, in-world, as being very fast, taking multiple individual attacks in very quick succession, like with Flurry of Blows. The two-action variety can be seen as hitting someone with two different weapons at the same time, as with Double Slice.

It does bother me that both let/make you pool your damage for dealing with resistances/weaknesses. Given the choice, I'd probably have the two-action varieties pool damage, and the single-action ones count as multiple instances. But nobody asked me.

There's a Pathbuilder 1e, but I think it might only be for Android. I haven't seen a web-based version.

Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they're on the ground (prone), when they can't see where they're being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).

Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.

It's not available yet on iOS (though an iOS port is in development). You can find it on the web at pathbuilder2e.com. Mobile and web apps don't sync, though. The paid versions allow you to save characters to Google Drive, which you can use to sync them.

No one complains more about a product than long-time fans of the product. They're the ones who have had the time to feel betrayed by something, be it minor design choices, or things the owners have done, and who also feel a deep sense of ownership over the product.

Haters are just fans that feel alienated somehow, and can't move past it.

The baker's dozen is 13, because one of them is sacrificial.