Blades Runner
Posts: 616
Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19
Monday, 25th May 2015, 15:50
Re: Stealthier when still
This sounds like a good suggestion to me. One point I'd like to mention that I haven't seen is that with experience, you can have a notion of the direction a creature is heading. Furthermore, you can influence the direction a creature heads. For example: you are a stabber, you enter LOS of your target... you want to kill it, of course. If you decide to go for it, you move in for the kill. Oh no, the monster wakes up and wants to smash your face in. More likely, it's a big pile of orcs... time to beat it! You get your behind into gear and ditch the orcs. It's not that you have no clue where they probably are, and which way they likely are heading.. looking for you... but at this point they aren't sleeping, they are seeking. Based on the terrain - and how far away you escaped, there is a decent chance the big pile will have dispersed some. At this point however, you're hiding around a corner waiting to ambush. However, you're not going to get the stab as they step into your LOS to a distance of one. Let's say, they come around the corner and they are a couple spaces away from you... but heading your direction.
If you move one at them, while they move one at you, you might end up next to them to get the stab, but, you will have also possibly compromised your escape route and/or placed yourself into LOS of two of those other orcs seeking you but that didn't round this particular corner. On the other hand, if you pause, in wait a turn, and that orc takes two steps towards you, you maintain your position for a strategic reason, and as he steps in front of you, *blam*, ambushed him. It makes sense to me, the assassin is crouched in wait, in the shadows, being as silent as possible during that time period.
My suggestion, although it is a bit more complex would be to have a totally different command rather than rest ".", that is something like an "ambush" command, which expends some energy to boost your stealth and lay in wait in one position until the first movement is seen from any creature at any speed and then it interrupts giving you a chance to take an action. This ambush skill's effectiveness would be tied to stealth skill. It would eventually put you into an exhausted state similar to berserk where you cannot maintain it any longer. This would put a damper on general non-stealth characters from trying to use it in any sort of non-specific, non-tactical manner like a stutter-step move . move . move . thing which could be more difficult to fully assess the entire game impact.
To say that it is always safer to move out of LOS rather than to try to ambush it, implies that you're not really ever going to kill it.. and/or that the current means of stealth without an ambush-like tactic for stealth characters would be more simplistic, less interesting and less reliant on player skill and tactics.
One more thing, I think a command such as this ambush should probably require that you be standing next to a wall of some sort, rather than out in the wide open.
If you move one at them, while they move one at you, you might end up next to them to get the stab, but, you will have also possibly compromised your escape route and/or placed yourself into LOS of two of those other orcs seeking you but that didn't round this particular corner. On the other hand, if you pause, in wait a turn, and that orc takes two steps towards you, you maintain your position for a strategic reason, and as he steps in front of you, *blam*, ambushed him. It makes sense to me, the assassin is crouched in wait, in the shadows, being as silent as possible during that time period.
My suggestion, although it is a bit more complex would be to have a totally different command rather than rest ".", that is something like an "ambush" command, which expends some energy to boost your stealth and lay in wait in one position until the first movement is seen from any creature at any speed and then it interrupts giving you a chance to take an action. This ambush skill's effectiveness would be tied to stealth skill. It would eventually put you into an exhausted state similar to berserk where you cannot maintain it any longer. This would put a damper on general non-stealth characters from trying to use it in any sort of non-specific, non-tactical manner like a stutter-step move . move . move . thing which could be more difficult to fully assess the entire game impact.
To say that it is always safer to move out of LOS rather than to try to ambush it, implies that you're not really ever going to kill it.. and/or that the current means of stealth without an ambush-like tactic for stealth characters would be more simplistic, less interesting and less reliant on player skill and tactics.
One more thing, I think a command such as this ambush should probably require that you be standing next to a wall of some sort, rather than out in the wide open.
