This is what we're doing? Alright. We can play "What is a sufficient argument." Point by point.
That's because you are viewing it in real world terms rather than NWN / DND terms.
Nyet. You don't get to tell me what my position is. You get to tell me your position, I get to tell you mine. That's how this works.
as I said, it's a variation on the finding it ridiculous that a person can hide without any environmental circumstance that would allow hiding.
Not the argument I made, thus discarded.
But we accept magic in this setting and all sorts of other phenomenal abilities in this setting.
Which would be a perfectly valid argument if stealth was ruled to be in any way a supernatural or magical ability. Short of a DM ruling that stealth is inherently magical, this is not a valid or sufficient argument. Discarded.
Why can an herbalist mix two herbs together in front of you and produce an elixir without fail, and your PC do the same thing under the herbalist's oversight and your PC have no chance of success?
Not at all the same kind of fictional scenario.
If you were color blind, I could try to show you red all day long and you woudn't see it.
Stealth is not the induction of a physiological impairment. Otherwise you would not need to keep making stealth checks. A color blind person cannot invest sufficient skill points to see red. A stealther is not literally invisible. This is not a valid comparison.
At the end of the day, game balance, not realism, must prevail in a fantasy game setting.
The main argument in this entire post and I disagree in both premise and conclusion.
I never made an argument for realism. That's your word of choice, not mine. If anything, my argument is for immersion and verisimilitude. Your premise is incorrect from the beginning as these are not the same concepts.
Verisimilitude argues that the thing should obey the rules of the fictional world as set forth by the fiction itself. You can have magic and dragons and elves and whatever other sort of fantastic nonsense you please, but everything is not explicitly stated otherwise is assumed to function in the same ways you would expect in the real world or by the implications of other elements in the fiction.
Viewing stealth
in the terms of D&D declares hide and move silently to be mundane skills. They are not supernatural in nature. And actual D&D is more restrictive on how they can be used than NWN is by miles. Even ignoring that, if stealth is a mundane ability, then we can assume it should abide by some kind of basic mundane restrictions.
Even beyond that, I completely disagree with the idea that "game balance" must prevail. Every time an unpopular decision is made, it is generally reinforced with the refrain: this is an RP server. The decisions made are to reinforce the mood/setting/theme/quality of RP/etc. This is especially true when someone brings up balance issues and gets shot down (for instance, half-orcs being objectively worse than any other race mechanically
in addition to being shut out of a lot of role-playing opportunities and thus having the hardest time getting started...)
Whenever "game balance" and "the setting" or "role playing" has come into direct conflict, the server stance has leaned firmly against the former. Preserving some sense of verisimilitude falls under that heading. As it stands, stealth is abusable to the point of being immersion-breaking. This is actively detracts from the RP the server is supposed to prioritize.
Would this change improve or upset balance?
Good question, except that I disagree with the conclusion you came to. Stealth is already severely broken in a way that contradicts the actual fluff of the skill in question and creates scenarios that could never happen in
even in tabletop D&D.
If the DMs want to make an official ruling that stealth is all inherently ninja-magic, then fine. We can treat it as a supernatural ability and all of this is moot. Until that point, I am going to be in favor of changes that make the stealth system in the game behave like a mundane skill set.
