Hello everyone and welcome to our fourth dev journal about the Stealth Mod we are making for the Sigil System.
Last time we talked all about how your characters can increase the Levels on the Awareness Scale, both through the use of Stealth Skill Checks as well as through narrative actions.
This time we’ll be talking about quite the opposite. This dev journal is all about decreasing your Awareness Level and keeping yourself hidden.
Time
The most important factor when it comes to lowering your characters’ Awareness Level is time, pure and simple. When you have aroused the suspicion, paranoia or rage within someone then the best thing to do is just to wait until it passes. Other than the narrative actions outlined below, this will be the main way of keeping yourself hidden in the Stealth Mod. Each Level of Awareness comes with its own time limit that needs to pass before the Awareness Scale will lower a Level.
Bear in mind that the time is cumulative, meaning that the time shown above for each level pertains only to that level. This means that if your Awareness Level is at Level 6, you will need to wait 1 hour for it to drop to Level 5, then wait 30 minutes for it to drop to Level 4, and so on and so forth. This may seem like an excessive amount of time, but remember that by Level 5 the compound knows you are there and by Level 6 they are actively hunting for you. They won’t just stop after five minutes and forget all about you and think the arrow through their head was just the wind. They will look and hunt and search and only after they have made sure you aren’t around will they relax.
Thresholds
To make things even more difficult for you, certain narrative actions that increase the Awareness Levels will come with a time threshold that will need to pass before that Level’s timer starts ticking down. What actions cause these thresholds will mostly be up to your GM but they will involve a response from the enemy NPCs that will need to be handled before things can continue. For instance, should an enemy disappear and the compounds radios him to check on things, they will become suspicious that he isn’t answering. Other than the 2 level bump in Awareness, this action will come with a 30 minute threshold that will simulate the enemies looking for this vanished guard and seeing what happened.
The longer the response will be from the compound, the longer the time threshold will be.
Narrative Actions
While you can always wait for the time to tick by until the compound has forgotten all about you, you can be proactive and help them along. This is the most vague of sections as there is no way to predict, or write rules for, all the inventive and creative actions that players will come up to decrease the awareness.
However, in saying that, what we can put to paper is that you can use the narrative actions to reverse the narrative actions that led to an increase in Awareness. By fixing what went wrong, you can immediately lower the Awareness Level to what it was before. This won’t work for everything, but you will be surprised what you can get away with.
To use the example for above: a guard went missing and the compound knows about this. This would cause the Awareness Scale to increase by 2 Levels and if you are Level 3 already this isn’t good news. So you think quickly, strip the guard down, put on his clothes and try your best to impersonate him. When the higher ups come calling, you are successful in your Deception Skill Checks and they believe your excuse that your radio’s batteries died. Immediately the Awareness Level went back to Level 3 from 5 without waiting for the Threshold or for time to pass.
And there you have it, everything you need to keep yourself hidden and continue skulking around where you shouldn’t be.