Stealth

Stealth is the movement skill that turns Hiding from a one-shot defensive trick into a proactive infiltration tool. With Hiding alone, a character must remain still or risk revealing on every step. With Stealth, the character moves silently while invisible, gaining safe-step distance proportional to skill, and can reposition for ambush, recon, or escape without breaking concealment.

Prerequisite and basic rules

Stealth requires at least 30 Hiding to function — below that threshold, the skill returns "You are not hidden well enough. Become better at hiding." This means Stealth is always trained alongside Hiding, never independently.

The character must already be in the hidden state before invoking Stealth. Hide first (via Hiding skill, Invisibility spell, Invisibility Potion, or Smoke Bomb), then activate Stealth. On success the message "You begin to move silently" appears, and the character remains gray-shadowed during movement. No footstep sound plays.

Other restrictions:

• Cannot Stealth while mounted. Dismount any horse, ostard, or hiryu before activation.
• Walk only. Running halves safe steps and always fails the Stealth check on the next step.
• Not on the move-and-action. Any non-walking action that would break Hiding also breaks Stealth — casting, attacking, looting another's corpse, etc.

At 25 Stealth or higher, Stealth activates automatically on every walking step taken while hidden. Below 25, the player must manually invoke the skill.

Safe-step distance

Stealth allows a character to take a number of "safe steps" before another skill check is rolled. The distance scales linearly with skill:

safe_steps = Stealth / 5    (when walking)
safe_steps = Stealth / 10   (when running, plus the always-fail rule)

A GM Stealth rogue walks 20 tiles between failure-roll points — enough to traverse most rooms in a dungeon between checks. Running while stealthed always reveals on the next step regardless of skill, so committed stealth movement is always at the walk pace.

Armor restriction

Stealth is heavily impacted by armor weight. Wearing anything heavier than Leather Armor or armor with the Mage Armor property reduces stealth success.

The skill can be successfully used in heavier armor only at higher skill levels — but it remains harder. Conventional rule of thumb: don't wear anything heavier than leather/mage-armor for combat stealth, unless skill is at GM and the situation tolerates the higher fail risk.

The training method explicitly leverages this — see the gradual armor-piling progression below.

Special-move requirement

Stealth counts toward the special-move skill thresholds (70/90 + 30/60 Tactics) and toward the 200/300 combined-skill mana-discount tiers, despite not being a combat skill. This is a build advantage for stealth dexers — Stealth + Hiding + a weapon skill at GM clears the discount tier without requiring Bushido or Anatomy.

Training

The Stealth skill gains on every successful step. The hide-step-step-step-step (or in-house hide → re-stealth) cycle is the conventional grind.

Two complications:

1. Hiding failures interrupt training. If Hiding fails to re-engage after Stealth breaks, the cycle stalls. Solution: train Hiding to 100 first (so it never fails), or train Stealth inside a player house (where Hiding always succeeds), or use Moongates (which automatically hide characters upon arrival).

2. Armor weight scales the difficulty. The conventional training schedule progressively adds armor pieces as skill rises:

The "Charity from uopowergamers" alternative schedule is more granular:

All training armor pieces are NPC-bought, intentionally cheap, and discarded as skill levels up. Don't wear a helmet during training — most schedules omit it.

Build context

• Stealth Archer. 100 Hiding + 100 Stealth + 100 Ninjitsu + 120 Archery + Tactics + Anatomy. Opens with Mortal Strike from concealment, smoke-bombs out, re-hides for the next shot.
• Ninja. 100 Hiding + 100 Stealth + 100 Ninjitsu + 100 Wrestling/Fencing + Tactics + Anatomy. Smoke Bomb in combat, Mirror Image decoy, Animal Form mobility.
• Stealth Mage. 100 Hiding + 100 Stealth + 120 Magery + 120 Eval Int + Resist + Wrestling. Spell openers without committed engagement. Niche but viable in PvP.
• Stealth Thief. 100 Hiding + 100 Stealth + 100 Stealing + 100 Snooping + Wrestling. Felucca-only PvP thief.
• Stealth Sampire. Hide-and-engage Sampire variant; Hiding + Stealth + Bushido + Necromancy + Swordsmanship + Tactics + Anatomy + Lumberjacking. Re-hides between champion-spawn waves.

Strategy notes

• Mage Armor property restores Stealth viability. A studded leather suit with Mage Armor on each piece allows the rogue to wear high-resist armor without the stealth penalty. Property-slot tax, but well worth it on a stealth-focused build.
• Don't run. The single most common rookie mistake. The "always fails next step" rule on running stealth means a character who runs once is revealed and visible. Walk pace, always.
• Moongate auto-hide. Recall through a moongate (or a lit moongate) automatically hides the arriving character. A stealth character can move between cities without breaking concealment.
• Smoke Bomb for combat reposition. Ninjitsu Smoke Bomb fires while taking damage; Stealth alone cannot fire while engaged. The bomb is the build-essential combat-stealth tool.
• Detect Hidden counters. A defender with Detect Hidden can reveal a Stealth character within close range. The contested-roll: (Hiding + Stealth) vs (Detect Hidden). 100 Hiding + 100 Stealth = 200 against ~120 Detect = 80-point advantage — usually safe.
• Combat skill revelation. Hiding + Stealth do not survive a successful weapon hit on a target — entering war mode and swinging breaks both. Plan the engagement to be a one-shot ambush, not a sustained fight; or use Smoke Bomb to re-hide post-attack.

See also

Hiding, Detect Hidden, Ninjitsu, Smoke Bomb, Mirror Image, Animal Form, Stealing, Snooping, Mage Armor, Medable Armor, Leather Armor, Studded Leather, Ringmail, Stealth Archer, Sampire, Moongate, Recall, Special Moves, Magery, Invisibility, Invisibility Potion.