Tab Creations @tabcreations.com · Apr 27 How often does "we'll sneak past the guards" turn into a bloodbath for your party? #ttrpg #dnd #rpg #meme #ttrpgsky #ttrpgcommunity
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"Leave no Survivors" comes from the experience of guards running off deeper into the complex to call for help.
If nothing survives first contact and is able to report back, then it was a successful stealth mission
Famously, a failed stealth roll to get past a cybernetically-enhanced grizzly bear resulting in a TPK is why I was banned from playing Shadowrun. (With that group, anyway. Humorless gits.)
But to answer the question: never. My players are all quite lucky on dice when it counts, and NPCs are ridiculously bad at opposed rolls. There have been many, many sessions in which I rolled all the nat 1s for the entire table.
The issue is that most systems are designed for the PCs to fail at stealth. It only takes one bad die roll from any party member to expose everyone, and that makes the encounter more interesting than if the stealth succeeds.
Depends. Am I running the game or playing in it?
Me in AC: Odyssey
Percentage of the time my arcane trickster says "I've got this" and succeeeds at every roll because i spec them for utility: 100% Percentage of the time an asshole paladin fucks it up because they REFUSE to let the rogue go alone: 110% of the time.
If you want your group to sneak past the guards make sure there is a way to do it without a skill check. The problem is often you want the group to roll on a skill that only one of them is good at. Design the encounter so only that one guy has to make the check and that opens a path for the rest
My players' last attempt to sneak past the guards resulted in me giving them a diplomatic out and them instead taking on 20 armored knights. Fortunately for them, I rolled VERY poorly.
"In plate armor?" "Sure, it is a piece of cake..." "Don't you mean peace of cake?
If one had a gold piece for every single time this exact scenario played out, one would have enough gold to bribe the damn guards and get on with the campaign three sessions faster
At some point I would imagine there’s group of rogues complaining about members of their groups who somehow fails to notice a branch on the ground or can’t open a door without making it squeak.
🤣 Nuff said.
They less sneak past the guards and more sneak up on them.
How often? Yes.
How often is this the end of a game of Call of Cthulhu before something explodes? @tabcreations.com
I prefer to play martial types - usually armored. It usually goes like this:
I find talking your way through to be almost twice as likely to succeed as stealth when it's specifically guards you'd rather not kill for moral reasons.
"If the infiltration plan in any TTRPG requires more than three successful d20 rolls, it's not gonna succeed." - Wilder's Law
Oh, about every single time. 💀
Often enough that at one point, when we ran into a scene of death and carnage everyone turned to look at the Shadow Monk posing as a kindly nun. For once, it wasn't her. She actually went "it wasn't me this time. Honest!" And was insulted we'd think she'd ever do such sloppy work. 😛
We don't prefer the term bloodbath. We prefer alternative "forms of announcement and stealth" =)
"Silly players, never succesfully sneaking past the guards!" *Proceeds to ask 3 stealth checks from everyone and declares the whole thing a failure if anyone rolls under 15 once.*
The current party in the campaign I am running are an armored fighter, a ranger with protection issues, a cleric who thinks she's a rogue and a rogue pretending to be a wizard (npc). "Sneak past" is not in their lexicon
omg tho, when one party tried to sneak past a dragon.. in its lair... disguised (under a SHEET - not with magic even) as another dragon... 🤣
I usually play the "Why don't we just say hi? They might be just nice after all" kind of character to spice things up. 😆Never works, but to me is still much more fun.