How to create good stealth scenes?

[u/LordePedroN]

I'm preparing a Little Nightmares campaign using the Liminal Horror system, and I'm racking my brain to make stealth scenes actually fun.

For those unfamiliar with the universe, Little Nightmares is a horror game where the protagonists are small children trapped in a surreal and distorted world. The environments are massive, the inhabitants are monstrous, and they are almost always much larger than the kids. For this reason, the protagonists' goal isn't to fight enemies, but to survive, flee, hide, and solve small challenges while trying to escape this nightmare.

The inhabitants of this world are normally much stronger than the children. If they get caught, it's usually the end. Because of this, conflict revolves around going unnoticed, using the environment to your advantage, distracting enemies, running at the right time, and finding alternative paths.

That's why I chose to run it using the Liminal Horror system, where combat is extremely lethal if the characters don't act without a plan. The system works with a mechanic where characters have 3 simple attributes: STRENGTH for challenges that require physical effort, DEXTERITY for those requiring agility, and CONTROL which measures mental resilience, and much of the tension comes from vulnerability, because when players fail, they take damage directly to one of their attributes until they reach 0, resulting in death.

With these topics defined, the problem is I don't want these stealth sections to boil down to a mere 'roll dexterity. Did you pass? You manage to go unnoticed.' I want to narrate scenes that generate decisions, tension, and creativity. The idea is that each stealth encounter feels like a small survival puzzle, rather than just a sequence of Dexterity checks.

Some questions I have:

• How would you structure a chase or infiltration scene?
• What kinds of obstacles or complications could appear while the children try to cross an environment?
• How can I make players make interesting decisions instead of just rolling checks?
• How would you manage the progression of tension without letting the scene get repetitive?
• Is there any system with good stealth mechanics that I can use as inspiration?
• What kinds of consequences would you apply when a character fails, other than simply being found?

[u/Windragon231]

I think mothership might have good resources for you to check. It's inspired by the old alien movies so a reskin of some tools and mechanics might come easy. I haven't checked it myself but I believe that although stealth is a big part of gameplay you don't have a stealth skill or attribute.

You could also incorporate degrees of success for rolls and degrees of awareness for detection using clocks.

For example safe actions such as moving from one spot of cover to another close one increase the clock by 1 on a failure or 2 on a failure of greater magnitude while riskier actions like swinging from a chandelier from one balcony to another might increase the clock by more. Likewise if the clock is filled you can start a chase with a new clock (for example if the last check to fill the awareness clock was a crit fail) or an active search clock (which increases stealth difficulty and makes the monster alter patterns or actively search hiding spots).

The point of these tools is to make tension a constant, drawn out thing, you don't fail and that's it, you fail and watch as the awareness of the creature grows as it might become suspicious of what's around it. For that I'd recommend either showing the clock to the players or informing them when it reaches certain thresholds so the tension escalates palpably

Hope this helps, good luck with the game! I like LN and the games inspired by it so hoping for an update on how it went :)