Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll write the damned Stealth and Infiltration lesson I cut from the True Game Mastery course, all right? Even though I’m basically just going to be repeating all the same shit I said in that course. Again.

Oh, by the way, this lesson’s part of my long-running — and technically over-and-done-with — course on running games like a True Game Master. This lesson assumes you’ve read all the other shit in that course. If you haven’t, use the link to check out the course.

The True Game Mastery Course Index

This lesson specifically assumes that you can Invite the Principal Character’s Player to Act, that you can manage the Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle even when Everyone is Doing Everything All at Once, that you know the Three Laws of Game Mastering Nonrobotics, and that you aren’t stymied by Problematic Actions.

If you don’t know what any of those phrases mean, you ain’t ready for this shit. And if you do know what all those phrases mean, you ain’t gonna find any major revelations in this lesson. Which is why I cut this crap from the course.

You might find one or two minor revelations though. I wouldn’t have written this if I didn’t have some unique points to add. They just ain’t enough to carry an article.

The point is, if this lesson sucks, it’s your fault for demanding it.

Resolving Sneaking and Skulking Like a True Game Master

Welcome back, dumbasses. You thought this was over, didn’t you? That’s because it was. But you wouldn’t leave. So here we go again.

The topic du jour of the day is Stealth and Infiltration. I’m going to show you how True Game Masters use all their True Game Mastery skills to resolve things when characters sneak around during Encounters and when parties sneak around during Scenes. Because there’s no such thing as a Stealth Encounter, right?

Frankly, I think you can probably handle this Stealth and Infiltration shit with everything I’ve already taught you. But if you don’t feel like you can, it probably starts from your not really understanding stealth and sneaking. Or perception and searching.

So let’s start there, huh?

Stealth ain’t Sneaking

I want to start by slamming a hard-ass wall between sneaking and Stealth.

Stealth is a skill. Or a character trait. Something like that. At least as far as True Game Masters care to understand it. It’s all the related skills, abilities, and training that make a character good at sneaking around. Most systems these days cram all that shit into one skill — called Stealth — but it need not be that way.

Sneaking is an action. It’s an attempt to avoid notice or act without drawing attention. It’s what you do to get past the lookout unnoticed. Or to close position to the lookout to stab him before he can defend himself.

The point is, Stealth ain’t a thing you do. It’s not even a way you do a thing. Stealth is a bonus you get if you do things a certain way and your character has the right background skills.

As a Game Master, you’re always trying to parse your players’ actions into shit like, “I attempt to get through the door without the lookout noticing,” or, “I attempt to get close enough to stab the guard without his noticing,” or, “I attempt to move down the hallway without being heard by the guards behind the door.”

Am I being needlessly pedantic here? No. I’m never needlessly pedantic. I engage only in necessary pedantry. And with this Stealth shit, all the pedantry is necessary. Why? Because most gamers — players and Game Masters alike — treat Stealth like a button. You push the button — and pushing the button is an action — and then your character is surrounded by a cloaking field and can act with impunity.

Characters do not operate in either Normal Mode or Stealth Mode. Characters take actions. And once you understand that shit — and once the players understand it — all this Stealth crap becomes way easier to handle.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Treating Stealth like a Mode short-circuits the Declare-Determine-Describe Cycle. And when that happens, otherwise excellent True Game Masters skip important parts of the whole Action Adjudication Thing.

Consider, for instance, a character sneaking past a lookout. If you just let the player Roll Stealth to Stealth Past the Guard, have you stopped to consider whether the action is even possible? If there’s a lookout on a tower watching an open courtyard, no amount of Stealth is gonna get a character through that space unseen.

For a player to sneak across a space — any space — they need a plan. “I dart from shrub to shrub whenever the guard’s looking away,” for example — assuming there are shrubs — or, “I throw a rock to draw the guard’s attention to that far corner and then dash quick-like until I’m directly under the watchtower where he can’t see me.”

Stealth — the trait or skill or stat — doesn’t replace gameplay. Stealthy characters get bonuses on sneaky actions, but the players have to Declare those actions. And that’s true even in Stealth-based video games. Even if there’s a Crouch Toggle or a Sneak Button to hold, you still gotta pick your path, move from cover to cover, watch the patrols, and all that shit. Tabletop roleplaying games can’t give you timing and execution challenges, but they can demand you explain where you’d move, how you’d know when to move, and how you’d create opportunities to move if the patrols don’t give you any.

Awareness and Alertness

The other side of the sneaky coin is noticing sneaks. You can’t talk about Stealth and Infiltration without talking about Perception. And most gamers have an equally effed-up understanding of Perception.

Now, I’ve talked extensively about Perception already in this series. First, I’ve told you — repeatedly — that being aware of your surroundings isn’t an action. That’s why Passive Perception — or secret-behind-the-screen Spot and Listen checks — exists. Whenever you’re awake and alert — which, in the dangerous world of fantasy adventure are usually synonymous — there’s a good chance anything worth noting is going to catch your attention.

Second, I’ve told you — repeatedly — that noticing a sensory detail ain’t the same as knowing everything about everything. You don’t spot a secret door, you notice a seam in the brickwork or you notice your torch’s flame is dancing in an unfelt breeze or some shit like that. You don’t know there’s a goblin sneaking up on you, you hear a rustling in the brush nearby.

When the players successfully notice something, it should lead to more gameplay — interaction and investigation — not less. Most of the time, a successful Notice or Awareness check should raise more questions than it answers.

Alertness, Awareness, and Investigatingness

You’ve probably noticed I keep using words like Alert and Aware and even distinguishing Awareness Checks and you might be wondering if I’ve got some kind of secret game-mechanical thing going.

True Game Masters don’t think of Perception in binary terms. There are levels of awareness and perception. And that’s true on both sides of the screen. Some folks — Runehammer and Matt Colville particularly — have presented systems for handling this crap. Me? I don’t think a system’s necessary. Mechanical systems are for Mere Game Executors.

That said, like most True Game Masters, I distinguish between Inattentive — or Relaxed — characters and Alert characters. A guard on duty is Alert. A bunch of guards dicing and drinking in the barracks? They’re Inattentive. Player characters taking a watch rotation at camp or acting as a lookout during travel? They’re Alert. Navigators and foragers? They’re Inattentive. Sleepers are very, very Inattentive. And I’ll often judge — in a vague and gut-feely kind of way — how Alert or how Inattentive a character is.

Alertness, though, is the default state. When a character’s Alert, they have the normal chance to notice anything around them. That’s when you use unmodified Passive Perception, for example, in Dungeons & Dragons. Inattentive characters are less likely to notice things going on around them.

An Aware character knows or suspects something is probably present, but has no details. When you hear a rustling in the bushes, spot an unusual floor tile, notice an unfelt breeze disturbing your torch, or see a lumpy shape behind a curtain, you’re Aware. To get any more details about whatever it is, you’ve got to interact with the world. Move closer to the bushes or call out or kneel down and clean the dust and grime from around the floor tile. Shit like that.

Without this understanding of Perception, you can’t handle sneaking and stealth. Especially not if you want to run an extended infiltration scene.

Awareness at a Distance

Do you know what else really screws with a Game Master’s ability to handle this stealth crap? It’s that everything in roleplaying games happens too damned close to the players. Game Masters don’t tell players what they can hear or see way down the hall or down the street or across the valley. Player characters can basically only see shit that’s close enough to spit on. At that point, it’s impossible to usefully skulk around.

Consider again the hallway with the guards’ barracks opening on it. If the players don’t know that there’s a bunch of off-duty guards beyond the doorway until they’re standing in it, there’s no sneaking past without alerting the guards. Hell, there’s no sneaking up to the door to see what’s inside. Or, at least, sending the rogue to investigate.

And most of this is down to a bizarre-ass problem where people — not Game Masters, not gamers, just people in general — don’t know the limits of their own senses. At what distance, for example, can you generally recognize someone you know? At what distance can you tell the difference between a mannequin and a human person? At what distance can you spot a human or an animate mannequin moving against the landscape? And how far does the sound of your voice carry?

Older editions of Dungeons & Dragons — and older roleplaying games in general — used to tell Game Masters shit like this. The AD&D 2E rulebooks are absolutely fantastic about it. I still use AD&D 2E’s rules of thumb for sight distance to this day.

Assuming clear conditions and an open line of sight, you can spot a person-sized thing 2,500 feet away. You can’t make out any details at that distance; you just know that there’s something there and it’s people-sized. And if the thing is moving, you can spot its movement up to a mile away. Or 5,000 feet if you prefer. At 1,500 feet, you can make out gross features: shape, size, and color. You can probably tell a human from an orc or a mannequin. At 300 feet, you can see enough details to identify specific individuals. And you can make out things like coats of arms and uniforms and armor and large weapons and the like. At 30 feet, you can see every tiny detail including facial cues and actions.

D&D 3.5 had great DC-setting tables to determine how far sound might carry. And, from them, I distilled the rules of thumb I follow to this day. In otherwise quiet conditions, you can hear the sounds of combat from 500 feet away and the sounds of normal conversation from 250 feet away. You can’t reliably hear what’s being said at a distance greater than 100 feet, though. An armored person’s movements are audible from 150 feet away — assuming they’re moving at a reasonable pace and trying not to make noise — and an unarmored person’s movements are audible from 100 feet away. At 30 feet, you can hold a loud, almost-shouted back-and-forth but normal conversation needs to happen within about 10 or 20 feet.

Those distances? They’re basically the human maximums. Or good enough for pretend elf purposes. They’re the farthest ranges at which I’d consider checking for Awareness. And you should keep them in your head.

The Emergent Cat and Mouse Game

Here’s the part where I put all this shit together for you. Except I can’t. Because it doesn’t work that way.

It’s like this: if you take everything I already taught you about running a game like a True Game Master and you combine it with the crap about stealth and sneaking and perception and awareness I over-explained above — and which I previously explained as part of my speech on Problematic Actions — you’ll get the secret sauce that makes stealth scenes work. That sauce is called dynamism. Good-feeling stealth moments and infiltration scenes — whether the players are doing the hiding or the seeking — are a back-and-forth game of “this is what you know; now how do you react?”

Take the goblin sneaking up on the party’s camp. Most Mere Game Executors will roll a Dexterity (Stealth) check for the goblin. If it fails, they’ll drop the goblin on the map and say, “There’s a goblin, roll Initiative.” If it succeeds, they’ll give the goblin a surprise round.

True Game Masters, though, they know the lookout might become aware of the goblin while it’s still a hundred feet away. The lookout won’t know it’s a goblin, though, they’ll just hear a sound. “What do you do?” What does the lookout do? Does the goblin see what the lookout does? What does the goblin do? If the lookout starts approaching the goblin, does the goblin freeze in place and hope it isn’t seen? Does it retreat? Does it ready it’s little bow for a sniper shot? Does the lookout see what the goblin is doing? Or does the rustling just stop? What does the lookout do now? And so on and so forth. It’s all down to resolving one action after another.

It’s the same when the party infiltrates Splinterskull Fortress. The players know that if the alarm goes up, the hobgoblin army will overwhelm them but they have to rescue the prisoner. So, what do they do when they have to cross the guarded courtyard? Or when they hear the patrol coming up the hall a few hundred feet away? Or when they have to pass the barracks door? And what happens if the party screws up? Can they silence the guards before the alarm goes up? If an alarm goes out, can they get far enough away fast enough to hide somewhere? Where do they hide? And what do they do when someone comes nosing around their hiding place?

This is emergent gameplay at its best. These scenes don’t arise from the mechanics and how you use them, they arise from the gameplay dynamic. They arise from a Game Master properly resolving one action after another and giving just enough information each time. In short, if you run your game like a True Game Master, stealth scenes kind of work themselves out. Which is precisely what I told you. “You know enough to run a stealth scene already,” I said when I decided to cut this lesson. Remember?

So, let me ask you something, dumbasses: did any of you even fucking try to run an infiltration scene before you pissed and moaned about how I didn’t teach you enough to do it right?

Yeah… I didn’t think so.