Silent Takedowns with Surprise
I’ve been thinking on simultaneous combat resolution lately, and came across this great blog post by Underground Adventures discussing it, as well as surprise rules from Traveller which I like quite a lot (if you didn’t click through, the jist is you roll a d6 for both sides and if the difference is 3+ that side gains surprise. More importantly they keep surprise until something happens that would end it). This immediately evokes the trope of a squad sneaking through a camp, silently eliminating the enemy.
To that end I thought of some rules or guidelines for those silent takedowns for eliminating unaware enemies without relying on standard combat rolls (obviously, a lot of this is down to ref adjudication but here are some rules anyway):
Surprised enemies are generally found in one of two states—unconscious (sleeping, drugged, knocked out, bespelled, etc.) or aware (on guard duty, eating a meal, otherwise performing normal tasks).
Unconscious encounters:
- Coup-de-grace: If you encounter an unconscious enemy while you have surprise, you can silently and instantly kill them or knock them out. This assumes you have some sort of weapon to facilitate this, like a dagger or blackjack (movie rules apply where acute head trauma is no big deal). It also assumes human-equivalent enemies, or medium to small beasts. You cannot instantly kill a dragon, for example. For more powerful enemies, you can strike at them, automatically hitting and dealing the maximum damage for your weapon (or treat as a crit in your system).
- Sleeping neighbors: In the case there are many unconscious enemies near each other (like soldiers bunking in the same tent), there is a 1-in-6 chance they are roused for each enemy silently killed or bound. This obviously doesn’t apply if they have been drugged or are under magically induced sleep.
Aware encounters:
- Takedown: It is harder to silently eliminate someone who is awake. Doing so requires a check (against a DC, a contest vs. the NPC, or they get a save, depending on your system). On a success you kill or incapacitate them silently and immediately. On a failure they call out, raising the alarm and ending surprise. This applies to any human-like creature, even if they are a leader-type with better armor and stats than regular mooks. Against more powerful targets (like the aforementioned dragon), you can instead auto-hit and deal your weapon’s damage, rolling twice and using the better result.
Common sense applies: an unarmored thief stalking guards and taking them out one-by-one is doable, a party of 4 laden with gear sneaking behind each person not so much. But there is good opportunity for combo actions (gagging and tying up someone you want to carry off, distracting a guard looking at another so the second can be eliminated).
If surprise ends, start combat normally, which leads to the second part of the blog post, positing phased actions which are resolved simultaneously in each phase. I like this as it allow some tactical action while still being snappy and deadly, especially if paired with an auto-hit system like Into the Odd and it’s many derivatives.
As with my Mothership simultaneous initiative post, I really like the idea of giving the players opportunity to take priority, resolving their actions before enemies, but with a risk. To add this here, I’d say in each phase a player may make a check (probably dexterity, or a speed save, or similar) to take priority, but if they fail their action will resolve after the enemy’s.
Anyway, simultaneous resolution is really appealing to me, and I hope to try it out in various forms soon. Also the blog post above ends with a nifty little adventure, always a plus.