Work in Progress: Sneak Tools

Gameplay Additions for sneaking in Skyrim

Much like my currently released 2 mods (Deadly Combat and Dual Wield Parrying) aim to make combat in it's entirety for the first mod, and especially dual wielding in the second mod, fun gameplay to me, this mod will do the same for sneaking. I aim to reward skillful play, and give the player as many fun and realistic options in their gameplay as possible. For sneaking gameplay, this means I'm working on the following tools and abilities:

- Useful fists. Your fists are already a tool in vanilla skyrim, but a pretty useless one. I aim to improve this by having to option to knock someone out in a non-lethal takedown with your fists. This works by sneaking up behind an opponent and, if you have no weapon equipped and your fists raised and you activate an NPC (does not work on creatures), you'll be asked what you can do. You can choose to pickpocket (which in vanilla skyrim would automatically happen in this situation), or you can choose ''Knock out''. If you choose for the second, you will see your character hitting the target with his fist, and if the target is hit, he will drop down unconscious for 5 minutes of real time. If you are seen by other NPCs, this will be treated as a normal assault. If noone else detects you, but the NPC you are knocking out does detect you in the last few moments before you hit him, he will have a chance to remember who hit him and raise the alarm when he regains consciousness. There will also be a chance he lost memory of those last moments before the assault and won't be able to recall who hit him.

- Useful daggers. In vanilla skyrim, daggers already have powerful sneak attacks once you have a large enough skill and the right perks, and should this damage be sufficient to instantly kill a target, you will have a chance to see a nice killmove slitting an opponent's throat. This is bad gameplay design in my opinion. In my opinion, once you have succesfully sneaked up to someone and remained undetected, you should ALWAYS be able to slit an NPC's throat. So, when the situation is exactly the same as described above for knock out, but instead of fists raised you have a dagger unsheathed, you will get an option to ''Slit Throat'' instead of ''Knock Out''. Choosing this option will automatically play the throat slitting kill move, and instantly kill the target NPC. If the NPC is essential, he will only lie down on the floor for a little while instead of dying.

- Masks hiding your identity. Remember the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal from Oblivion? I intend to make similar masks, only then non-magical ones. If you wear one of these masks, any crimes you are seen commiting will have bounties put on a ''mask identity'' instead of on yourself. However, if you are ever seen equipping a mask concealing your face, they will know who you are and all bounties will be redirected to the real you. Similarly, if you are seen unequipping the mask, they will know who you are. On top of that, the people of skyrim will obviously not appreciate someone being able to conceal their identity like this, and therefore wearing a mask like this will be a crime itself as well. This means that to properly use it you will first want to infiltrate somewhere, then when hidden equip your mask, perform the crime, make your escape and only when safe out in the wilderness remove your mask.

- Maybe more ideas when I get them

A little question about which I could use some input from you guys, it's about the ability to move the bodies of unconscious NPCs. I have currently found no way to make them actually ragdoll like a dead NPC and therefore easily moveable. They do fall down and all that, but it's currently impossible to move them. I still think it should be possible to move the bodies of NPCs, so would an implementation where you kind of ''loot the NPC'' having an NPC appear as an item in your inventory and then drop him again somewhere be acceptable?

I'll be honest, I don't care much for the two other things, but daggers always giving killcam? SIGN ME UP.

Hi Borgut,

Small question: uppon getting close enough to a NPC and provided the other conditions are met, how would you give us the options? (pickpocket, knockdown etc) Would you freeze the game and open a menu with clickable options? Or would it be possible to, say, configure 2-3 special keys and pressing those would trigger one of the options automatically? (like, when behind an NPC and with fist up, press 'x' to perform knockdown and 'e' to pickpocket. I would much prefer the later alternative but I understand it may be more complicated and for sure would require SKSE

Love these ideas, hope you pull it off.

I remember you talking about this... I absolutely endorse this idea. It would seem more fluid to not have menus every time I come up behind somebody as it would ruin the immersion, but the aim of the mod still adds immersion in itself. Overall it sounds very neat.

Perhaps (if there's anyway to do it...) you 'hold' down the button to perform a stealth kill, and just tap the button to perform a 'knockout'

All good things come from Holland!

Very nice!

The menu isn't a very elegant solution for knockdowns/killmoves, if you ask me. The people who would use this mod often go through a whole dungeon by sneak-killing their enemies, and with that way of playing, a menu for every kill or knockdown gets tiresome really fast.

Also, I don't understand why you need this menu in the first place for daggers. Why don't you just increase the backstabbing bonus for daggers so that they always kill?
Not that I'd prefer that option really - I think what you're trying to do here is very unbalancing, and not necessarily realistic. If you aren't skilled with your dagger or if you have a blunt dagger, it's very likely that you won't kill someone, even if you're undetected. You might still cause sufficient damage to give you a big advantage in the following combat. I think this basic idea isn't bad game design - the execution (pun?) of it is a different matter though. I think daggers could be slightly more and all other weapons slightly less powerful for backstabs - with my rogue, I started out using daggers for sneak-kills, but in the end I just used my longswords, because it had the same effect - the enemy was dead. I would have preferred it if, as a rogue, I had been forced to use daggers even later in the game.

Okay, but now let's talk about the stuff that really interests me here - the knockouts. I myself had been working on a mod for that before I decided that learning Papyrus wasn't really worth it, and so I never refined it to a release-worthy level.
The idea of my mod was this: If you sneak up on an enemy and perform an Unarmed sneak attack, you knock them out - if you have the corresponding perk which I created. Very simple, yet horribly complicated once you realize that fists cannot be enchanted.
It did kind of work, however, and I bet with a bit of scripting it could be done flawlessly. And your mod looks like it has already an improved knockdown - in mine, it was impossible to loot knocked out NPCs. So I'm wondering why you haven't considered this approach? It would blend in with the rest of the game so much more smoothly.
Also, why only have the NPCs knocked out for 5 minutes? I mean, I guess it's realistic, but then it's almost always easier to just kill them. I'd prefer a number that's high enough that there's a good chance that everyone's still asleep when I leave the dungeon/building - but low enough that one of them might wake up just at the wrong moment. Something like 20 or 30 minutes, maybe a bit randomized even. (By the way, when they wake up, are they alarmed? I think they should be, probably.)

I hope I don't sound too negative, I'm always looking forward to seeing interesting approaches to stealth gameplay. But some of your design choices I can't understand. So try to take this as constructive criticism, or maybe your ideas are actually much better than mine - if so, please explain.

Ah, one more thing: Any plans for improving escape scenarios? I really think that hiding somewhere should be beneficial for a thief/assassin. I remember that I spent an entire night crouched behind a rock in Solitude while the guards were looking for me (for stealing a loaf of bread!), and they never gave up their pursuit, even when after a long, long time, the eye finally said "HIDDEN". That was very unsatisfactory.

The way I've currently implemented them is just like how in vanilla skyrim for example the ring works which allows you to eat corpses, or the blood extractor for that quest where you need to get blood off the corpses of all elf types, which is just a pop-up which appears when you activate your target. I realise that on one hand it would be cooler to just have a button to do that without getting a menu in the face, but there are 2 problems with that:

1) would require SKSE or SD
2) Too many buttons to remember. We've already got all vanilla buttons which actually already take up all buttons on an xbox controller (which some people use to play on PC as well), then there's an extra button for my dual wield parry mod (which maybe not all of you guys use, but I myself do ) and more buttons might follow later when more mods come out with extra moves (like kicks, that kind of stuff). In my opinion, such things which are required in the middle of combat should then be quickly accesible with a keyboard button, and activating the target and then choosing what you do is no problem if you're sneaking anyway and not in the middle of a fight.

Maybe I'll look into things like a player character with a low skill trying to assasinate a highly trained soldier having a chance to fail, but right now first priority for that move is just that I want to have a reliable way to assasinate people, so this is my first implementation

There are a few problems if you try to make a knockout from an unarmed sneak attack, namely:
- like you said, fists can't be enchanted
- ''apply spell on combat hit'' perks also don't seem to work for fists
- If knockouts follow from getting hit by an unarmed sneak attack instead of through activation, it means the game only ''knows'' someone's gonna get knocked out when you've already hit him. This means that at the moment of impact, the NPC is not already prepared for getting knocked out, and will for example still be able to detect crimes and therefore will report getting hit as a crime right before going unconscious. In my implementation, once the option to knock out has been chosen I already set up some preparations while the animation for the player hitting is still playing. Then once he's hit he actually falls down, and is already prepared and won't report the crime instantly. Should he walk out of reach of the animation, I just remove the preparations again after a second and nothing has happened.

5 minutes is just an unconscious time I picked initially, but that can be easily changed (actually, for testing purposes it's just 15seconds, I'm not gonna wait 5 minutes every time I'm testing )

I think there already are some mods which improve general aspects of detection/sneaking, so I think your last point would mostly fit into those mods or in a mod like Reneer's Crime Overhaul (is he still working on that by the way?) So, for now I'm really just focusing on new options. That's also how I'm treating my combat mod currently by the way, I try not to touch a single vanilla thing for the sake of compatiblity. If, in the end, I've added everything I want to/can, and there aren't any mods which change vanilla aspects in the way I like, I'll probably look at them as well, even if I don't want to Can't help it, if I run into something annoying and I've got any ideas at all of how I could mod it, I'm simply unable to play the game until I've fixed it

Love the idea. And I can move corpses just fine by holding spacebar.

Not necessarily true Borgut. In Deadly Reflex (SkyCaptain's Oblivion Mod) buttons were tied to different actions. Pressing a certain button, let's say Q, allowed:
a bash move when in combat
a impalling move when in combat and provided the enemy had been knocked down
a jumping sneak kill when sneaking and provided there was a certain distance between you and your enemy
a silent sneak kill when sneaking and provided there was a certain, smaller distance between you and your enemy

So, with SKSE and by making actions contextual you could perhaps sidestep the menus altogether and without relying on too many buttons.

For instance...

If you're sneaking, undetected and with fist up, pressing a certain button triggers knockdown. To pickpocket, you do as in Vanilla Skyrim.
If you're sneaking, undected and with dagger ready, pressing the same button as above triggers slit throat. No need to provide knockdown option in this case because by having dagger ready you are declaring that you don't want to consider non-lethal options.

So far that's it. Just one button.

Borgut, I think what I'm not getting is this: Why activate an NPC in order to kill them when you can attack them? Okay so for the knockdowns, you have a good point there - you need to prepare some stuff. But I just don't see it for the backstabbing. You're talking about extra buttons, but in this case no extra button is required.

There are two things you apparently want to do here: 1) Kill people in one hit if undetected. 2) Have the animation played instead of a normal attack.

Concerning point 1... well that's already in the game, isn't it? The only thing that seems to put you off currently is that in some situations, the damage is too low and doesn't actually kill them. So... increase damage for dagger backstabs. You can do that in the same way that the perk in the Sneak tree does it. OR what you could do is to have dagger backstabs ignore the armor rating of the NPC in addition to the usual bonuses (similar to the perk for maces). That would be a believable and balanced solution, I think. After all sneak attacks are all about finding a vulnerable AND unprotected spot.
For point 2, I don't know the numbers but my impression was that when you sneak-kill someone, 90% of the time you'll get one of the corresponding animations. This could probably increased by changing the chance of it happening or by removing the restriction that the killed enemy has to be the last hostile NPC in the area. Could also be that increasing the damage for backstabbing attacks automatically increases the chance of it happening, not sure.

Maybe I'm being the stupidest person right now for not getting why you need a menu here, but... it seems to me like there is absolutely no gain in it.

Yes, but an unconscious NPC won't act the same way as a corpse does unfortunately


Hmm yes that's right.. Maybe if SKSE with key input is out before my mod is I will just go for a seperate button immediately


At first I thought that I'd have to change the kill move currently in game already, which would make the mod partially incompatible with some real killmove mods. But I think I can just make a copy of the move and give it a higher priority.. I'll try and if it works out reliably and in all cases I'll ditch the menu for daggers

Just a quick update, I think I'll wait with a full release until after the first full Papyrus-supported SKSE version is out, and the mod will probably require SKSE (this does not mean I actually already have everything finished, it's still work in progress regardless of SKSE). The reason is that for some things like perfectly dealing with crime detection when knocking people unconscious, I will have to use huge workarounds if I wish to do them now, which will become much easier, cleaner and faster once I've got some SKSE functions. So I'll rather just wait for that while finishing things I can already do properly without workarounds.

Loving the ideas, sounds awesome.

Hey, some suggestions/comments:

Why do you need a new button for this at all? is it not possible to detect a player attacking (with animation type, if nothing else), check the weapon equipped, and assume from there? i.e. use the button currently assigned to attack, seeing as you are attacking, anyway! or you could use a dagger bash (would be nice for that as a knockout move), but that'd require having one hand empty. would be handy, having a lethal or non lethal option on the same weapon, with button combinations already in the game.
Also, instead of fists, a blackjack style weapon might be good. It'd mean people can't 1-hit kill (alright not kill, but remove) from the very start, if they manage to sneak. They'd have to make a blackjack, or get it from Thieves Guild. Perhaps a sneak skill requirement for making one? The main point is that you could run scripts on it.

With regards to dragging bodies, etc, would it be possible to kill the character who is "knocked out" and then add an effect to resurrect them in 5 mins (or longer, and I like random.) Then looting, dragging, would be fine.

I like the mask idea. Will it have conditions to ensure the player has to be hidden before removing/equipping the mask?
Slightly related, I've heard and liked an idea that guards should try to take you alive, i.e. when they kill you, you kneel, essential style, and then you're automatically dragged off to prison (with a higher bounty/sentence of course). With the mask, this would also entail them removing the mask, so if you used the same mask after serving your time, it would no longer disguise you. (obviously this can't be permanent, else that aspect of the mod is useless, but between multiple varieties of mask, and a month or so cooldown, it'd work.)

Let me know what you think. I particularly think the dagger bash would work well in not requiring buttons, etc. I think Windshear applies an effect on bash? as a point of interest.

@evilgiraffe

I could see if I can get bashing with a dagger to result in an assasination to work well yeah, will write that down.

I have thought of blackjack instead of fists for knocking out before... it might cause problems with crime detection though, because I won't know that you're trying to knock someone out until you've already hit someone, and then the person you're knocking unconscious might still be able to report you for the crime.

Killing unconscious characters and then resurrecting them would definitely make everything easier, but I've read that resurrecting dead NPCs screws their AI up, so that won't work.

Mask probably won't have conditions preventing you from removing/equipping it, but if you are detected while removing/equipping it, they'll know it's you. You'll have to make sure yourself that it's safe to remove/equip.

That was pretty much what I had in mind. Not preventing, but... discouraging. Like an axe in the face so often is.

With enough love, this mod could revolutionize the sneaking system in skyrim, making it more challanging and realistic, so keep working on it cuz i see a great potential for this mod!

Hey about the masks, is a hood going to be enough to cover your identity? That could be very useful for both dark brotherhoood and thieves guild's questlines.

Also i wanted to say, about dragging bodies, you could make it that when you sneak you move the body instead of looting it, just like with alive people were you pickpocket them instead of talking.

Not sure yet how I'm going to go about deciding which hood conceals your identity, because there's no possibility to actually determine what a hood looks like using scripts and then have script decide if it conceals your face or something fancy like that. I will have to manually assign the ability to conceal your identity to each hood which I feel should have it.

This means that I'm currently planning to just have it work for all masked hoods I can find in vanilla skyrim (masked variants of dark brotherhood hoods, nightingale cowls, etc) and probably include a short description for how other modders can make their newly added hoods from their masks have this property (and maybe make such patches myself for hood mods which I personally really like and use myself )

Are you going to modify the detection system? if so, i recommend that you should be instantly detected when they are looking at you and there is no darkness to hide you, and also i dont find it normal that when you shoot someone in the head with an arrow (and they somehow survive) and they dont find you they say "i must have been hearing things".Also, i dont find realistic that when you draw your weapons while suppossedly trying to sneak the enemies dont know youre there even though it sounds like SSSSHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!, so maybe you could replace the standard with a more steathy one.

Look at games you sneak in a lot and base it off those.. Such as Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, etc..

Currently not planning that kinda stuff, I think there are already some other mods trying to solve this kind of problems. For now, I'm just planning new actions/options you have available in the sneaking gameplay, not overhauling the existing parts.