Duck and Cover

I tried, but he just went kablam on my ass

Stainless wrote:Both F1 and F2 MM characters. Never finished Fo2 with him though, as those defensive chaingun turrents tear holes in your leather jacket mk2.

That's what I was thinking. Maybe if you entered the Enclave tanked to the gills on Psycho, Buffout and Mentats you could survive the turrets? Or possibly sneak by them?

Mad Max doesn't take drugs... and he certainly doesn't sneak.

He doesn't do drugs alright, but I wouldn't bet your ass on the sneaking part... Some fights are not meant to be fought, remember?

Max would most definitely sneak if he had to.

Stealth in F1/2 is your friend, if only because it allows for the culling of idiots, irritants and other evil, evil things. All this without (generally) alerting the other denizens of an area to your noble intentions. Though my opinion is possibly solely influenced by being able to run up to someone, remove their eye with one's hand(s), and end combat quietly (i.e not causing everyone else to want to tap dance 'pon your corpse) all in one turn.

Yes, the mega-power-fist does huge amounts of damage with a high unarmed skill. Plus, combat is a bit more challenging with a HtH character than a gauss/minigun character.

The problem is that you don't get xp from stealth, so that leaves you basically no choice when deciding whether or not to blow everybody away stylishly.

This should propably go to FO3 suggestions forum, but don't you think stealth should be awarded somehow? Perhaps 1 xp for every second/10seconds/minute spent next to a hostile enemy?

No. You should get the same amount of XP as you would from killing them, as you technically "defeated" them by getting by their threat. The same would be true for trapping your enemies, fooling them, disguising yourself past them, etc.

Funnily enough, awarding experience for evading enemies was something Lionheart did right (though only 50% of what you would achieve from their deaths, IIRC) ! Yes, I'm shocked too. Other than that, I agree with atoga. Regarding rewards, evasion should at the very least be comparable to killing or talking one's way past those same threats.

Of course, evasion should be made difficult for the player. Rather than clicking "sneak", holding to the nearest wall, and waiting for your character to get to their destination, you should have to carefully consider cover, making distractions, enemy line of sight and patrol routes, etc. (Think Hitman).

Well, yeah, but it should also rely alot on your sneaking skill level. Talking and fighting your way through do that as well, there's no need for an "arcade sneak" thingy. So basically, no matter how great strategies you have for evading those enemies, you'd still require more than 14% sneak.

I think the idea is that it's an RPG, so adding player-reflexes into the equation "cheapens" the amount of skill points you have in Sneak.

I would rather not have sneaking turned into a minigame. If the devs want to dramatize it they should do it with text like critical hits and everything else.

Yes, very much so.

While I agree that making success dependant upon the player's abilities rather than the character's in an RPG is a faux pas - I do believe the elements atoga mentioned which conveniently fall under 'intelligence', could be easily implemented into an RPG stealth system in a non-jarring manner. Even if simply as a bonus to remaining undetected, though not as a necessity (in some instances at least.)

Combat is a minigame where the player's abilities matter as well, why shouldn't stealth have the same depth? I'm only really suggesting a few strategy-related things - taking count of cover, making noise, guard position, lighting (though I think having to time stealth so that it's in tune with guard routes is a bad idea, because it's often quite frustrating as well as harder to implement).

Each stealth situation should make for an interesting sort of 'puzzle' however.

Fallout already does most of that. They can't see you behind walls, your distance from the creature matters, how bright the hex you're on matters also.

Yes. But generally it's pretty boring, like I described above - just going behind walls and stuff and staying as far away from NPCs as possible. The terrain you have to sneak around in is generally pretty uninteresting. What I'm suggesting would merely spice it up.

And turn it into goddamn Hitman, which is not what you want in an RPG. You have your stealth based action and you have your RPG. Keep your damn mayonnaise out of my peanut butter.