Hello everyone and welcome to our third dev journal about the Stealth Mod we are making for the Sigil System.
Last time we showed you the Awareness Scale, the central mechanic around which the entire Stealth Mod revolves and which governs all of its actions. It’s a simple scale from 0-10 with the notice and then aggression of the compound increasing with the scale.
This time we are going to talk about the ways you can increase that scale, whether by design or accident.
Stealth Skill Checks
This being a Stealth Mod, the Stealth Skill would always have been front and centre among the ways to increase the Awareness Level.
When you roll a Stealth Skill Check for the compound (not the individual like we talked about in the first dev journal) and you fail, the Awareness Level will rise. It’s as simple as that. By failing that Skill Check, you have alerted the compound to your presence and as such they are now more Aware of you.
The way this works is that you take the first digit of the number by which you failed your Stealth Check and that is the number of Levels that the Awareness increase by. To put it another way: Let’s say you had to beat your Stealth Skill Level of 50 but you rolled a 75. This means that you failed your Stealth Skill Check by 25, the first digit of which is 2. Thereby the Awareness Level increases by 2.
How this happens is up to the narrative control of your GM and will depend on a thousand and one different contextual clues such as the genre, the setting, the compound and the enemies.
Stealth Skill Checks might be the easiest way to keep track of how the Awareness Levels are increasing, but there is more to life than Skill Checks.
Narrative Actions
There is a world of things you can do to raise the Awareness Level of the compound, narratively speaking, that simply can’t fall under the purview of a Skill Check. This can range from the good old fashioned turning off the ray shields, to making enemies disappear or even leaving bodies lying around for the rest to find. Some actions will be intentional, others accidental, but all will serve to influence the awareness scale.
When we publish the Stealth Mod we will provide a (non-exclusive) list of actions that will increase the Awareness and by how much, but in general your GM will be able to look at the Scale and whatever it is that you just did to determine by how much the Levels increase.
For example, should the enemies find a suspicious corpse lying about this would raise the Levels by 8! Should you start at Level 0, this would immediately send the compound into lockdown, which from a narrative standpoint is quite reasonable.
In contrast, a simple distraction like throwing a coin to distract several enemies and make them move after it will only increase the Level by 1.
Level Limits
Various actions that cause only a few bumps in the Awareness Scale will have an upper limit to which they can affect the Awareness Levels. You can’t throw a coin ten times to distract guards and end up with them tearing the compound to pieces and declaring war on everyone they see. After a while, they will know you are in the compound and then it won’t do any good.
As such, this sort of action will only ever increase the Awareness Level up to Level 3 and not beyond it. Other actions will have other Limits that will prevent accidentally ruining your plans and allowing the narrative to continue.
So there you have it, everything you need to know how to increase Awareness.
However, increasing Awareness is often the last thing you want. You want that Level as close to 0 as possible. So…