The Group Stealth Issue

Well, this didn't go as planned. I had expected to have an internet connection in my new place within a week after moving in, but then the technician from the provider saw that for the connection type I ordered they would have to replace some ancient hardware on the building's cabling. A week after that they still did not have a date for the upgrade, and couldn't even tell me yet when they would do the scheduling for the upgrade with the landlord. So I did make use of my 14-day annulment right and made a contract with a different ISP that was able to set me up with a temporary mobile network connection within two days. But this was data limited and it took another two weeks to finally have the landline up and running. But now I'm fully back in business, one month later than planned. And long after my summer break had ended. But I do have two half-day workdays every week now, so that's something.

I've not been doing any Blender practice for the last month and only a little work on game concept designs, but I do now have some new thoughts about implementing stealth in a CRPG:

In pen and paper games, it has long been a known issue that when you have all the characters in the party make a stealth check every time they sneak past a hostile NPC, or even every game turn, it becomes statistically impossible to stay hidden from guards very long even if the whole party has very strong stealth skills. But in practice, only one or two characters in any given party will really have specialized in being stealthy. With three or four characters who are relatively bad at stealth, having the whole party try to sneak anywhere is basically a completely pointless attempt. You just can't sneak with the whole party.

Since pen and paper RPGs are group games, it's generally understood that you shouldn't split the party for more than a scene or two, so that the other players don't have to sit in silence while one or two players go on their own stealth adventure by themselves. So in most campaigns, infiltrating a hostile stronghold by stealth is something that just doesn't happen.

But when we are talking about single-player videogames, this issue doesn't apply. There is no actual gameplay reason why you couldn't split the party and have just two characters go on an entire adventure by themselves. Many party-based CRPGs don't even give you the option to leave most of the characters behind and continue with just one, and force you to gather your party before venturing forth. Games descended from Knights of the Old Republic have you keep most of your character roster in some kind of camp while you play with a party of only three or four characters at any given time, but even those don't actually design their levels to make it actually feasible to go through the whole place entirely stealthy without being spotted and getting into fights.

But why not? I think this is actually a really interesting idea. Kenshi is a game that allows you to do exactly that. And in such a kind of game, I think it actually becomes a nice feature that the statistics of making skill checks make it statistically much harder to sneak around undetected with every additional character in the party. Even if you have a party of six stealth specialists, your odds are still better if you only have to make two stealth checks to get past a guard instead of six stealth checks. Which is exactly what you would realistically expect. And it creates an interesting choice for the player to make when deciding to explore a dungeon not with a big assault squad but a small infiltration team. Every additional member in the party will greatly increase your odds in case that a fight does break out during the exploration. But it will also increase the odds that a fight will break out in the first place. Which is precisely the kind of open-world decision making that I find really interesting.