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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5862988" data-attributes="member: 4937">Good stealth rules are very hard to come by because really you are dealing with something intensely complex.  Some amount of abstraction is probably required lest it get too tedious.  To this day, stealth is a less refined concept in virtually all RPGs than combat, with stealth tending to vary from useless to broken without a lot of in between. IMO, the mechanic is always 'opposed roll'.  However, in my situations its more practical to assume the DC than to make 4-20 rolls for the NPC's.   So for example, if there are 4 NPC's talking with each other that might hear the PC I might make the assumption that the best rolled a 16 and set the DC to 16 + listen skill - 5 for distraction - X for distance.  This is just to save having to make lots and lots of DC rolls.   Alternately, I'll assume that all the NPC's took 10 which is a reasonable assumption if the NPC's are relaxed.   This are all off the cuff short cuts that have more to do with speeding the game along than the system, and are akin to just deciding that a statistical average of 4 of the 40 low CR archers hit rather than rolling 40 d20's.The four mechanics don't really introduce a difficulty.  Hide/Spot is for line of sight with less than 100% concealment/cover.  Move silently/listen is for non-line of sight or greater than 100% concealment/cover.  Note that unlike combat, you'll probably want to track the facing of sentries if you want to do a complex stealth challenge.There are several really important issues that the rules either get wrong or else fail to adequately address:a) How much cover and concealment is available and needed to hide?  By this I mean that there aren't good guidelines for figuring out how much cover is available in typical terrains.  The D&D guideline of treating shadows as concealment is particularly vague and perhaps not well thought out, because it doesn't seem to correspond to practical experience except in cases of nearly total darkness since the outline of someone in the open is almost always clearly visible even when the features of their body is not.  b) If you have better than normal cover or concealment, do you get a bonus to hide, and if so of what sort?c) And perhaps most importantly of all, though the rules suggest that the difficulty of hearing/seeing a target increases linearly with distance this is WRONG.  The most badly crafted least well thought out rule in all of 3.X is the linear -1 penalty to spot/listen per 10' of distance.   It essentially grants perfect invisibility to just about anything attacking from cover/concealment beyond 400' or so and will give reasonably stealthy PC's effective invisibility at much closer ranges than that.  It's a rule that kinda sorta does ok and is easy to calculate if you are in 30'x40' rooms in a dungeon, but otherwise is useless.d) There is a degree of ambuigity between spot and search in my opinion.  I typically notice spot used for creatures and search used for objects, but there are times when it seems more sensible to think of the object as hiding and make the initial detection dependent on spot.  In most cases I think the real division is "You generally must be within 10 feet of the object or surface to be searched."  In point of fact, I tend to require you to be able to touch something to 'search' it, and apply a -5 penalty to the check if you can't or won't touch the thing being searched.</blockquote>

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