Hundreds of hours playing sneaky types in this game, and it was already easy enough with intelligent play and withuot using invisibility... until I added ASIS. If you want to add an insta-kill move for undetected sneak attacks, personally I would make it as a percentage based on your level v the opponents, their size and armor having an effect.... If someone's wearing full plate, you're not going to be slitting their throat with a dagger ... you might get your dagger through under the armpit or some other weakspot, but that should not be a certainty.

Things I would love to see aded from an assassins point of view would be throwing knives which take the backstab bonus, and garrottes for guaranteed silent kills on light or non armored mobs( not that that's particularly accurate either).

likewise, the ability to knock people out should alse be dependant on the armor they are wearing. Are you really going to puch someone over the head when thay're wearing a full helm ? Perhaps have a billy club or something. If you want somethign immersive you have a variety of moves dependant on the opponent which you can pick up as stealth perks. so lets say at 30 stealth there's a perk to knock unarmed folk out. At 50 sneak a perk to use a billy club to knock someone out wearing light armor, at 70 sneak you get a perk to use skyrims equivalent of chloroform or something on plated folk.

The one biggest thing though that I could use as a sneaky type early in the game, especially when playing with increased spawns is some distraction method other than attempting to shoot an arrow beyond sometwhere which never seems to work very well for me. .. I know there's throw voice shout, but I was thinking there shoudl be someway of diverting enemy attention to allow a quick sneaky dash behind them.

Anyway .. thats my tuppence worth, hope its helpful.

It's been a while since I updated anything here, but I plan to release a beta tonight. It will not have all featured mentioned in OP yet since they're not all finished yet.

It will have:
- Throat-slitting when sneaking behind someone with dagger drawn
- Knocking unconscious when sneaking behind someone with fists raised
- Killing sleeping targets with 3 hard hits in rapid succession.

Feedback I'll be looking for is:

- Does the AI always respond as expected? Reported as crime if you're seen commiting one of these crimes, and not reported as crime if noone sees you?
- Does the gameplay run fluently enough? Should a menu pop up when you activate someone in the correct circumstances asking you if you want to pickpocket or execute one of these moves, or should they replace pickingpocketing as the default action if all conditions are met? (in the second case, you will be unable to pickpocket with a dagger or fists raised, but you will automatically execute the special moves when activating a target under these conditions and won't see any menus popping up)
- Should you be able to kill essential targets by slitting throats or killing them in their sleep, or should they remain essential?
- Is knocking people out useful in it's current state, or does moving bodies need to be more user-friendly? Is the duration for which people are unconscious too long/too short?

The idea of identity-hiding masks mentioned in the OP has not been scratched, and it actually is somewhat working already, but it is not finished yet and I haven't looked at it in a while so I will be disabling it for this first beta (which is planned to be released tonight).

The mask is the thing that interests me most out of all of this, personally.

I personally feel like if we're going for realism here, targets clad head to toe in heavy armor should be immune to simply being knocked out, which would add a component of evaluating the opponents you choose to KO.

Agreed with if they're wearing a helmet then it should be harder to knock them out.

Perhaps some sort of test.

i.e. % chance based on unarmed skill & sneak and then penalties for helmets.
2*unarmed skill + 2* sneak -head armor rating of NPC.

So 100% chance of knocking someone out not wearing a helmet with an unarmed skill of 50 and a sneak of 50.

But only 75% chance if that NPC is wearing a helmet with 25 armor rating. Or something like that?

First a quick compliment: I use Deadly Combat and Dual Wield Parrying and they are fantastic. Looking forward to this effort as my primary is a sneak character.

I was wondering what you can do with disguises. I frequently role play disguises - i.e. I will steal a guard uniform before pilfering a castle. It might not really make a difference but it makes me feel better. It would be great if game mechanics could be designed that really made them work. Undisguised you should not be allowed in a restricted area. Disguised increases your chances (speechcraft should be high enough to convince people that you really belong there). Probably way too difficult, but thought that I would throw it out there.

Another: using speachcraft to talk your way out of situations. "Really officer, it wasn't me." This would make speechcraft incredibly useful and hopefully would not be that difficult to implement, at least as far as guards are concerned.

I like the idea of context based actions rather than pop ups. Have fists, knockout. Have dagger, cut throat. None of the above, pickpocket. The game play would be much smoother.

Just uploaded the 0.1 BETA version to skyrimnexus, download link is in OP.

Some of the recent comments have already been adressed in the ''Future Plans'' section which can be found in the OP and in the mod's readme.


While I do not disagree that having full functional disguises would be cool, I do think I'll be focusing on quite a few other things before trying that. The most important reason is that for a disguise feature to work properly, in my opinion there would be need for a lot of new dialogue. I know that nowadays there are quite many voice actors on these forums willing to do free voice acting for skyrim mods, but still, it would obviously have to work on vanilla NPCs as well and the change in voice would be very annoying imo.

EDIT:

Could anyone tell me what the custom is on these forums if you want to change a topic's title? Should I press the report button or PM a moderator? In the rules I could find it said the report button was for offensive posts/rule-breaking posts, but if I have to send a PM I wouldn't know which moderator to pick

Personally I'd much prefer this option. I think an activation box will break immersion.

To be honest, you should have both hands available to be able to pickpocket affectively anyway.

Or alternatively, can you not incorporate it into a 'Press E', 'Hold E'? press E to pickpocket. Hold E to perform special move.

I suggested a lesser power that would activate and deactivate a stance in which you would activate sneak options or picpocket..

But the idea without the box seems fine..

You should also make ko possible with a blunt weapon

Yep, that's what I'd do. Report it. It's what you do for moving a topic, too.

For tomorrow I'll look into deciding action based on context instead of menu pop-ups, seems better to me too. Could look into blunt weapons too I guess, although they will probably come with the risk of actually killing your target