Stealth

[Raerick]

I haven't played my favorite class (rogue) since 4.2.1 mostly to give it a break, but I have been just recently trying to get a win with a kobold rogue ironman. However it feels like I am trying to sneak around as a half-troll warrior.

For example in my current attempt I newly arrived on a floor that had Uruks, Half-orcs, wargs, and black ogres nearby. The wargs of course were awake and irrelevant to my point, but within 4 turns of being on the floor and 1 turn of pelting a warg with a pebble, half of the other enemies had woken up. This is with excellent stealth, which isn't too good, but not '4 turns everything wakes up' bad.

I may be forgetting some past mechanic to groups waking each other up, but even if that is the case it certainly doesn't feel like I can expect to be stealthy with my rogue without at least heroic stealth. Even in the previous attempt (who died to a bolt of raw magic from an OOD maia) where I had superb stealth everything seemed to wake up almost immediately whenever I tried to sneak through with the exception of zombies/skeletons/dragons.

I have read some posts on here where others have talked about stealing from uniques and playing like I would hope to play as a rogue, but my experience is even if I manage to steal from a unique they wake up right after and I might as well have just started the fight from range.

[Nick]

There is a new mechanic where groups wake other group members; if all those monsters were in the same group, that might explain that example.

A successful theft does reduce the monster's sleep counter (more the less stealthy the player is), so if it's already close to waking it will wake.

[Raerick]

I see. So half of my troubles could be blamed on the easily alerted wolves/wargs of those groups waking the rest up. Makes sense. How does that work exactly? Is it guaranteed on the turn that one of the group members are alerted that the others also wake up? It seems to happen in waves such as like half the group wakes up the turn after the first with more waking up each following turn. I can understand and appreciate the intended effect of the alerted monsters rousing the group, but the C types are so sensitive that sneaking up on various orcs (including the uniques) is basically impossible.

How exactly do stealth levels work anyway? Do higher levels act like saving throws every turn you are near a monster on whether their sleep clock goes down or do they affect the rate in general (like lower levels subtracting more from the clock each turn)? Are all actions other than battle equal on waking up nearby enemies?

[Nick]

The group waking is actually not enough to fully explain this, I think - if a monster is aware of the player, it will wake a monster in its group at a distance of d one time in 20*d.

More likely it's just the chance of waking at low stealth; chance of reducing the sleep counter is calculated by making a random number r less than 1024, and seeing if r^3 < 2^(30 - stealth). Given excellent stealth means 7 or 8, this is a bit less than 1 in 4 (but halves with every extra point of stealth. The amount the sleep counter is reduced is basically 100/(distance from player). The sleep counter for a monster race is 2*s + a random number between 1 and 10*s, where s is the monster race's sleep value from monster.txt.