Making Stealth More Fun · Game Master's Laboratory

Making Stealth More Fun

I've been talking with

a lot recently about stealth, and we've both discovered we dislike how most TTRPGs handle it. My main problem with many game loops is the "progress decay" setup, where you start as good as you'll get and slowly lose your control of a situation. I think that can be a lot of fun, but I also think that in a lot of situations (including stealth in a more "heroic" game) it's more fun to be rewarded for playing well than only punished for playing poorly.

We handle this pretty simply---we set a timer (a clock from Blades in the Dark) on stealth missions that will almost inevitably end in getting caught. The really challenge of these stealth encounters is to see how much you can improve your position (represented mechanically through buffs) before you are caught---the better you roll, the more advantages you can set up for if/when something goes wrong.

What do you think? How do you handle stealth in your games? It's a challenge I hear frequent complaints about.

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