Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Stealth mechanic

Stealth mechanics? Cool
I think the Rogue series are the games that are used to measure every roguelike RPG game ever made. But even if you can take some hints from there, those are specialized roguelike games only.

One game that has a cool stealth system is POE2. You can buy firecrackers to distract guards and enemies while you position yourself with your sneaky rogue. You can use it to kill but also rob people. The game also features detection UI and backstab-from-stealth skills.

One stealth system very interesting was the one from TES Oblivion: Stealth is skill-dependent, an eye over your character marks your detection chances, stealth slows your character, Pickpocketing needs that the objective is unaware of your presence, so sneak is important. A stealthy attack improves your damage too. The only drawback is that you do not have any distraction nor trap mechanics.
That thievery system also has some good points: guards summoned if you commit some crime, day-night cycles, so people call the guards if they found you in their homes at night. the stolen goods cannot be sold to the same merchant you robbed, you have to sell it to a fence.
The new fallout series took most of this system from TES so it is almost the same, but with a major focus in ranged damage and some cool features. You can even put poisons or bombs into somebody´s pocket to damage him.

I kind of like the stealth system of DOS games. You can see the detection zone of the guards and civilians. Improving your skill allows you to have less detection radius (to be honest is not much needed but...). You need to be stealthy and undetected to rob someone. And even if you manage to do that the objective pursuits you. I preferred the beta version of DOS2: Before launch, the robbed one even called his friends to pursuit you.
The cool thing is that you have skills and actions that do not broke stealth so you can set barrels in the field and use chloroform and jump and the enemies are none the wiser.
I do not care much about the high cost of stealth in combat ( I use a mod that reduces that to 2 AP and it is manageable).

And about damage, the Guerrilla feat is crazy: A ranged stealth attack from an expert huntsman with "guerrilla" is by far the most damaging non-skill attack in the entire game. It dwarfs most skills. I one-shotted mini-bosses with that before I stop using that trick whatsoever because it made some fights pointless.