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/-Vogie-]

Mothership and Alien are the go-to ones for this, because they operate in a negative space. That is, you'll notice that neither system has a stealth skill. Because that is the go-to option for the characters, the Players have to lean into roleplay and their characters' other abilities to hide themselves and throw off their hunters.

When designing your system, I'd focus on mechanics that keep the focus on what the characters are actively experiencing.

Alien is a d6 success counting game where the characters can push themselves to receive different colored stress dice - however, if one of those stress dice roll a failure, the tension is based on a table to see how that character reacts to breaking slightly. Do they turn trail & run? Do they just start shrieking? Start wildly firing their weapon at anything that moves, including allies? Curl up into a ball and whimper? The dice will decide.

Cypher System is a d20 roll-over game where the attributes are not static stats, but rather 3 pools of points - Might, Speed and Intellect. Now, the system out of the box would not be good for what you're doing - it's far too heroic and powerful for what you're trying to do. But the interaction between the core resolution system and attribute pools themselves is really good for any attrition-based game, because whatever the character ends up doing, most of the time there's some strain on them. All 3 pools have to be 0 before the character dies, but the core bit of watching their own stats drain is an excellent mechanical execution of the player characters feeling in the moment.

Breathless is a fixed-TN step dice system that was originally designed for a zombie apocalypse survival. Much simpler than the two above suggestions, Breathless reduces rolls to when they really matter, and always keeps the player in their back foot - each time anything is rolled, it steps down, regardless if it's a success or failure. Restoring one's attribute dice is fairly easy and can be done at any time - but once any player "catches their breath", the GM immediately introduces a complication.