Excellent Stealth

[bpleshek]

How excellent can my stealth be if every single creature can hear me from 5 spaces away through a 2 space wall, a corridor, another 2 space wall and into the next room?

I have telepathy and as soon as i make a move, nearly every creature will mimic me from many spaces away.

Telepathy is sort of a mixed gift. I have to unwield it often to rest to full because holding down '5' is too dangerous.

Brian

[Donald Jonker]

Telepathy is sort of a mixed gift. I have to unwield it often to rest to full because holding down '5' is too dangerous.

Brian

You can get around this by changing one of the disturbance options. IIRC if you set "Disturb whenever any monster moves" to no, you should be in the pink.

Deactivating the "viewable monster" option will certainly do it, but I don't believe you have to go that far.

--J

[aeneas]

How excellent can my stealth be if every single creature can hear me from 5 spaces away through a 2 space wall, a corridor, another 2 space wall and into the next room?

I have telepathy and as soon as i make a move, nearly every creature will mimic me from many spaces away.

Telepathy is sort of a mixed gift. I have to unwield it often to rest to full because holding down '5' is too dangerous.

You can set your disturb options to disturb only when visible monsters move. Excellent stealth isn't enough to really keep things quieted down, though it''s a lot better than Poor stealth. Once you really get Stealth up the dungeon can be a bit like a statue garden, other than hounds and other guardian types, but you generally will need some +ses from equipment for that. I remember once finding something like +9 to stealth in equipment bonuses with a kobold rogue, quite early. Made for a pretty odd game- dealing with hounds became a central concern.

[bpleshek]

I just take issue with the label. It should probably be reworked so that your stealth is compared against some factor of the level you're on or the level you are. That way half-orc mages don't get excellent stealth ever where as other classes may be superb or better the entire game.

I am already wearing boots of stealth +1 i think.

Brian

[buzzkill]

I read this somewhere and I don't know how accurate it is but... Your character makes a certain amount of noise every turn (think of these as noise units). Every creature who's detection area you are within will absorb or collect these units. When they accumulate enough, they become aware of you. Increased stealth decreases the amount of noise you throw off, thus making it take longer before enemies notice you.

[aeneas]

I think that's right, in a ballpark sense. As far as I can tell the points accumulate in game turns as well, so in a lot of cases the best thing for your stealth is more speed. I could be wrong about that (haven't checked the code or anything), but that's the conclusion I'd draw from what I've observed.

Also, Excellent stealth shouldn't be sneezed at- a lot of the more dangerous things seem harder to wake up than most other things (dragons seem particularly heavy sleepers, which I guess would be thematically correct). I just recalled into a room that contained both Ariel and Khamul- I really didn't want to deal with them, but I was able to tiptoe out of the room without waking them. It might have been smarter to tele khamul away, but there was something a little way off I wanted to investigate and I thought he might wind up coming back. My stealth was listed as Excellent at that point.