How to handle stealth & detection without bogging it down? (biglemmowski.win)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by taaz@biglemmowski.win to c/pathfinder@ttrpg.network

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Considering the last few posts are about stealth and detection I might as well kick this off:

I skip and short circuit stealth/detection as much as possible.

None of my players have built a stealth based characters - probably also because of the complexity with detection and the seemingly bad action econ when dealing with "actually getting Hidden".

I have two main problems with it:

comparison explosion? Whenever you have to resolve who sees who (esp at init) you have to at worst compare a roll for each character on one side to all the perception DCs of the other side and this gets really slow for me [^1]
tracking who currently sees who / at what detection levels they currently are to others

Any tips and tricks very much welcome:)

[^1]: Both me and PCs track chars digitally (pathbuilder) and it is definitely slow to gather this information quickly on a laptop. A sheet of paper with highlighted bonuses/DCs for both the party and NPCs would go a long way for this but our play table is rather small and already pretty packed :/

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[-] taaz@biglemmowski.win 1 points 6 days ago

let them track which NPCs the PCs can see

yep, already noted, that's about the best I can do in my case I think

They do track things for their own characters (HPs, statuses etc) and I obviously track NPCs. I am not sure about the init order, I use Pathbuilders Encounter builder thingy to do that and players do not have access to that, someone could absolutely do this once I build the order but I would have to change my workflow a bit to accommodate it.

this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025

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