stealth

Stealth is a Subskill of the Thief Skill. It can be used by a character who has not spent Hero Points on learning it: use Dexterity as the OV/RV of the Perception Check by the potential observer instead, but lose 2 column shifts due to it being easier than if the sneaking character had learned the skill.

Stealth is a Character's ability to move silently and without being seen by other Characters. The APs of Thief are used as the OV/RV against Perception Checks made to discover the stealthful Character.

Positive RAPs indicate success in locating the stealthful Character. Use of Stealth is most common at night or under visually-obscuring conditions. ((HA! “HA,” I say!)) Following are cumulative OV/RV column modifiers to detection of Stealth attempts pertaining to environmental conditions.

Circumstance

OV/RV Modifier

Intruder Alert Activated

-1

Day/Bright Area

-2

No Cover Exists

-3

So as an example:

Feral has a Stealth of 11 APs. She has an Intelligence of 5, a Will of 5, various sensory Powers of mostly 5 APs, the Sharp Eye advantage, and a spectacularly frustrating habit of rolling double-one whammies during a session even though she ought to be fairly good at seeing/hearing/smelling things due to aforementioned Powers.

Rán, alleged goddess of the whale-road, would-be ruler of Pacifica, has a Stealth of 4 APs. She has an Intelligence of 5 and a Will of 5, and she has the Tracking Subskill at 3 APs, but she does not have the Sharp Eye advantage or any pesky sensory-based Powers. (She has underlings for that sort of thing!)

If they are trying to ambush each other in an open field, the leopard woman might be able to hide in tall grass (getting some partial cover) but then again, Rán is a remarkably tall woman who can probably see over anything shorter than a field of fully grown corn stalks. Catgirl's in trouble here. Rán rolls her 5/5 versus Feral's 11/11, does NOT get a column shift off her own character sheet, but -- let's say that it's twilight, and the meadow is primarily switchgrass which grows to about five feet tall -- the GM decides to take 1 column off the difficulty for Rán's Perception Check to account for the height disparity between "tall woman" and "medium grass". That effectively puts Feral's OV/RV into the "9 to 10" column, which means Rán has to roll not just a 15 {which is at the intersection of the AV "5-6" row and the OV "9 to 10" column; she needs at least to roll high enough to earn at least 2 column shifts to get even 1 Resultant AP on the Result Table, which means Rán needed to roll a 21 or higher.

Rán would have done better if Rissa did not know how to stealth. Rissa's Dexterity is still an 11, but she would have lost TWO column shifts right at the start for defaulting. That alone would have moved the OV/RV of the Perception Check down to the "7 to 8" column, plus that additional one for partial cover would have bumped Feral down to "5 to 6". Now Rán needs an 11 on the dice to have the GM flip from the Action Table to the Result Table, where even without the roll being higher than minimum, Rán gets 1 RAP and the GM tells Rán that the crickets in the grass near the southeastern corner of the meadow have gone quiet.

Alas for Rán, Feral does have the Stealth subskill, and spent the HP at character creation to buy it up to a respectable level.

Heh.

— a certain catgirl

Don't be so smug, woman. Let's see how you do at finding Rán in a parking garage, shall we?

A parking garage is normally Brightly Lit, but if Rán is using it for concealment, I am very sure she did something to take out the circuit box on the ground floor. We have emergency lighting for as long as the batteries last, which is not actually darkness everywhere but should be dim enough for story purposes.

Excuse you, I have Ultra Vision.

— a certain indignant catgirl

Oh. Right. Right. "This Power allows a Character to see at night or in the dark just as if it were daylight." Hmm.

Okay, you effectively get the "Brightly Lit" condition here so long as you are using your vision specifically to hunt for Rán.

And I have Sharp Eye.

— a certain VERY indignant catgirl

Right, yes, fine.

Does everyone have moments where their own characters are riled up and giving them a hard time? Or is that just me?

Anyway. Feral would not get much use out of her Directional Hearing in the parking garage because it's a multi-story echo chamber. She would have trouble with Analytical Smell/Tracking Scent because, hey, automobile odors. So "using her eyes" it is!

She started off with a 5/5 versus Rán's 11/11, just like in the previous example. Absent all modifiers, Feral needed an 18 on the dice to get off the Action Table at all and that still results in No RAPs. Three Column Shifts worth of high rolling would have been necessary, meaning at least a 28 on the dice, and we all know Rissa's dice don't like her that way.

The Sharp Eye advantage automatically gives a -1 Column Shift modifier to the OV of all attempted Perception Checks, which bumps us to a 5/5 versus a "9 to 10"/11. Dice adding up to 15 would get us to the Result Table, where it's still three columns of No RAPs; Rissa is not getting even a hint of Rán until she rolls at least a 24. Again, the player's dice are probably not going to show up for that, so maybe Feral should think about paying Hero Points before she rolls.

The "Brightly Lit" condition drops both OV and RV by 2 Column Shifts, in this case "5 to 6"/"7 to 8". Now, suddenly, Feral needs to roll an 11 to get off the Action Table at all. She still gets N on the Result Table there, but is only one column short; if the dice come up 13 or higher, Feral gets one Resultant AP of information about Rán's general location -- maybe spots a shadow on a windshield, or something -- and if her roll did miraculously total 21 or higher, she knows without question exactly where Rán is concealed.

In both of the above examples, one will notice that the person doing the sneaking did not roll dice!

A phase of combat is 4 seconds long, and only allows most characters to take 1 Dice Action (plus 2 Automatic Actions and 1 movement). The person doing the perceiving has to spend that round on the Perception Check. They cannot do anything else that involves picking up the dice until next round.

The person doing the sneaking is not using up their Dice Action with their Stealth. They have other options. They can

• make their own Perception Check
• use a power that is a Dice Action, such as an attack
• use a Skill, since Skills are mostly Dice Actions
• make a Recovery Check if they have one coming to them
• activate a Gadget such as an elevator door
• grab a Plot Device, or alternatively, toss a Plot Device in their possession to where they think the other character will have trouble retrieving it
• get inventive!

Of course, the character using Stealth does not necessarily know whether her concealment has been busted by another character's Perception Check. She would have to be paying attention to the people she does not want to notice her, which is usually going to involve a Perception Check on her own part.