I've been watching a friend play through the Metal Gear Solid series for the past few weeks, so stealth gameplay has been on my mind.

Last week, two of my five players were absent. The week before, they were trying to take down a renegade tech priest because the arch militant decided he wanted to pursue a bounty on his dataslate full o' bounties. They managed to take out a bunch of combat servitors sent by the Heretek to stop them (after the astropath let it slip that they were visiting him to collect the bounty, which the rest of us found amusing). They did, however, lose a few "redshirts," and one of the players took a critical hit.

Since two of my players were missing, I told the players that after discussing their situation, they decided the best way was to sneak into the area. One of the redshirt crewmen was formerly involved in stealth operations for the imperial guard and would accompany them. He happened to be named Sam Fisher. My game is somewhat silly.

Anyway, they managed to disable all the automated defenses, before a servo skull sounded the alarm and servitors started awakening from their storage tanks. The players ran into the next room to confront the boss.

This was my first time trying this type of gameplay. All in all, it was an interesting session, but I felt it could have been much better. Thinking about it from a fresh perspective, I could have included things such as shadows, and being able to create distractions. The astropath did dominate one of the servants, so that was pretty cool.

Anyway, I was wondering if any of you have tried anything like this? The great thing about stealth games is that there are plenty of alternate paths for the characters to achieve their goals. How would you set it up? I realize this type of gameplay may be more commonly seen in Dark Heresy, or maybe even Black Crusade, but I still thought it was fun.

Usually any sort of espionage I have going on is not handled by the players directly I let them buy agents using aquisition tests on their enemies ships and planets of intrest. I adapted the rules for having a contact from the Dark Heresy Inquisitors Handbook for my players to set up spy networks.

Rogue Trader can definately accomodate stealth and espionage play. The characters are by and large quite capable in their fields and can afford masses of useful gear. Hostile Acquisition adds a bunch of concealed weapons and a stealth upgrade for armour. Camo-cloaks, stummers, multi-keys, combi-tools (for breaking into devices), disguise kits and twitch-mask implants for false identities. Again on Hostile Acquisition, they have guidelines for criminal endeavours which include heists and theft. A RT group breaking into a facility to steal valuable data and artifacts is completely doable.

In yesterday's session one of the characters managed to blow up a large section of the Breaking Yards void facility, killing thousands of people, because he aced so many stealth and tech-use tests, but had no idea how big the explosion would be when he rigged a space-ship's engine to explode. Not a starship's engine, thankfully.