Sneaking is the ultimate engagement strategy, the benefits are top notch (+1 round with surprised enemies, first attack with advantage, chance to stay hidden on successful stealth roles, etc.)
Sneaking (cautious) is incentivized to be always on in order to adress the player need of not "missing out" on secret doors, footsteps, etc.
This leads to a player behavior of always sneaking, unless one really doesn't care. But playing seriously and properly, it is the way to go.
So when playing seriously, the game design basically incentivizes that mode to "always on", in turn standardizing movement speed to a crawl, which negatively affects game flow and playability, as waiting times increase for characters to reach destinations, and the general feel of the pace of the game goes down the drain.
Basically the design puts the player into a position of 2 bad choices:
-Player at normal speed and flow, but suffer gameplay disadvantages.
-Play with gameplay advantages, but suffer out-of-game disadvantages (annoyed feelings, waiting times, slow gameplay).
-Besides being annoyed by the sluggish pace, there is no in-game game-play relevant factor to not always be in cautious mode.
This is a bad concept, if the reason to not use it is out-side of game punishment.
Suggestion:
-Stealth should be handled like on the world map travel. Either you suprise the enemy upon encounter, or you don't. Independent of cautious state. Encounter settings could further define if a stealth-start of combat is even possible for that particular encounter.
-Stealth also breaks some encounters in a weird way, where the enocunter is spawned by triggers (presumely portraying an ambush), but the monsters do not see the party when combat starts, because the party is in stealth.
-Increased perception should not be tied to cautios mode, but instead distance to object. That way finding hidden things is not promoting permanent cautious mode, but instead the player has to actively navigate the characters close to possible secret doors, buttons etc.
This would also increase the player's connection the to leveldesign, as the need is not to just "pass along in cautius mode" but to actively engage in the specifics of the environment.
(e.g. walking 2 or even 1 grid next to the wall that then gets hilighted as a secret door.)
Besides being annoyed by the sluggish pace, there is no in-game game-play relevant factor to not always be in cautious mode.
At the tabletop, if my D&D players start insisting that they're "always sneaking" or "always looking for traps" then I start dishing out exhaustion points. Unfortunately, there are no written rules explaining why you can't do a thing all the time without getting tired. Passive Perception and Passive Investigation cover the normal level of attention a character can give all the time.
So what would work in Solasta? Could the characters have a limited quota of cautious time/distance?
I agree that simply burning player time isn't a great mechanic!
I rarely use cautious in Solasta because of the mentioned tedium. But I also do feel that always sneaking is kinda cheesy. So here's my suggestion:
What if we can assign one "scout" in the party who gets to always stay in cautious mode while staying in the normal speed? That way a scout character can feel awesome without being too cheesy. Let's call it a half-cheesy compromise?
I rarely use cautious in Solasta because of the mentioned tedium. But I also do feel that always sneaking is kinda cheesy. So here's my suggestion:
What if we can assign one "scout" in the party who gets to always stay in cautious mode while staying in the normal speed? That way a scout character can feel awesome without being too cheesy. Let's call it a half-cheesy compromise?
Isn't there already a feat that does what you're describing?
Quoi que tu dises, quoi que tu fasses... I speak bad English... so what?
I rarely use cautious in Solasta because of the mentioned tedium. But I also do feel that always sneaking is kinda cheesy. So here's my suggestion:
What if we can assign one "scout" in the party who gets to always stay in cautious mode while staying in the normal speed? That way a scout character can feel awesome without being too cheesy. Let's call it a half-cheesy compromise?
Isn't there already a feat that does what you're describing?
I don't think so. But if you find it, let me know. ;)
Lots of whining on this one. Can't speed up time in a computer game like you can at the tabletop. (Unless you use the fast travel options)
I don't think it's that much of a problem really. Probably a matter of different experience ^^
First of all, you may have parties where characters are just so inept at Stealth (looking at you Paladin) that crawling together is just inefficient if you ever want to anticipate enemies. So if you want to mix in-world efficiency and real-time efficiency, just send your one scout ahead to check for traps and enemies "continually" while the other catch up "by steps" at normal speed, taking some pauses in rooms to explore.
Second, you don't necessarily need the advantage of surprise round (if you can get it) either: if your party has a decent pool of resources left, on Authentic or the first step above difficulty, you'd need real bad luck on Initiative to get wrecked. ^^
IMHO the best way to resolve this, provided it's not too hard to implement would be...
1/ Add quests with *actual timers*. Whether "weekly timers" (to prevent long rest spams for weak-minded people who like to trivialize their game by breaking narrative instead of just adjusting difficulty xd) or "short timers" (typically the quest where - no spoiler - some place starts crumbling and it's clear staying there would be death, I really expected some kind of rush with X mn to just get out (enough time to not punish players having trouble moving characters since it's not an action game in core, but little enough they cannot just take a short rest or make a big detour to loot everything that was left).
2/ Improve the Ready action in two ways
- Allow to combine it with any feature (unless I've missed it all this time) like spells or Channel Divinity
- Give a short list of "fight starting behaviours": player choose one, if they get into an ambush and trigger is met character acts as specified along with Initiative rolls unless it was actually surprised -> you don't get the benefit of surprise yourself but it still represents the fact everyone was on guard and ready to act, seems to me a nice middle ground although I'm not sure of how (un)balanced it could end (on top of being a definite houserule over the RAW).