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Re: (TFT) Stealth again, and music



On Apr 20, 2012, at 5:58 PM, raito@raito.com wrote:

You need to not have too much knowledge of where you are sneaking...
at the most, lay out of the building/terrain. You should not know
where all the guards are or how many of them you'll see, at least not
usually. There should be multiple ways to each objective. Generally
you must stumble on these ways.

If you're stumbling, then you're playing stupid. You need as much
information as you can get, and then you need to put it toegether.
That's
the interesting part.

You misunderstand. Yes you want to get info before going in, but once
you go in its all about exploring and finding out the parts of the
puzzle, then figuring it out. You basically have to stumble upon those
parts of the puzzle by exploring, though-- if you can figure it all
out before going into the castle or whatever, then its less interesting.

We're nearly on the same page, but not quite.

If you have to find out the parts of the puzzle on the fly, that's poor planning. Yes, in some curcumstances, poor planning is all you'll get, but
it's not ideal.

Hm.... I agree that its poor planning, but I think it can make things more interesting. Really, it depends on the situation. If the players plan very well for their main objective (for example, steal the golden statue thats on the altar, by finding out the entire layout of the temple, how many guards, their routes, etc, all before actually going to the temple and having to do this secretly (so, say, they buy the info off of informants), then thats fine but as a GM I'd make it that there are secondary objectives and possibly some shortcuts to bigger objectives that they didn't even realize were there that they'll only find if they explore.

You DON'T have to stumble around trying to find parts of the puzzle. If
you do that, you're going to fail (or the puzzle is too easy).

I'd disagree. If you can figure out the puzzle without even being at the temple and doing some investigative work (so, finding out the info by buying maps, bribing guards to give you some info, etc), then the puzzle is too easy and its not really even much of a stealth game, its more like a game of bribery.

I don't find it less interesting, on the whole, to figure out the puzzle ahead of time. That's because the time spent prior to the implementation of the plan are more interesting than they are if you insist on stumbling. So there's the same amount of interest, and it's safer for me to find it
all out ahead of time.

Right, but why, as a GM, would you create a stealth scenario where the characters need to sneak into the temple to take a golden idol from an altar, with all the detail in all the rooms, on all the guards, on all their routes, possibly down to how the shadows fall in particular rooms, if the characters are just going to bribe a guard and be done with it?

Also, most of the time the real 'stumbling about and finding things out' has more to do with creating a more detailed game world. If, when searching for info on where the keys are kept/who has them, you can merely find this out by, again bribing the guard or something ("preplanning") then you don't have a chance to sneak into the guards' rooms, read through their journals and such, and find out all kinds of info that might be unrelated to the current mission and objective and might, in fact, be totally useless, but can be interesting and provide red herrings.

As a GM, I've had campaigns where the characters spent years trying to
crack various nuts prior to getting to the meat. Good thing, too, because
those situations were pretty deadly. And they had an interesting time
doing it.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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