Stealth Boy redone?

[scheckles]

Stealth/sneak in FO 3 is mediocre at best. What I was thinking would completely change the stealth boy from a 1 time use item to a repairable (potentially equipable or even schematically fused with recon armor) multi-use item. Instead of making you near 100% invisible it would give you variable levels of invisibility much like Oblivion's chameleon ability (which I admit I know little about) based on its condition. Due to the relatively limited amounts of stealth boys, I do not believe this would be overpowered.

 

Stealth boy's would degrade when a player fires a weapon while under its effect. My rationale for this is the stealth boy creates an effect around your body and the quick movement of attacking with a melee weapon or a bullet leaving this field of effect disrupts it causing it to shut off rather than overload the stealth boy resulting in destruction. Might go even as far as to include a low percentage of this happening at any level of repair.

 

With this dynamite could even be introduced back into the fallout universe, so potentially a sneak/stealth character could drop a couple sticks on a few enemies before popping out and atacking another enemy. I'm sure the CS would be needed for something like this but all we can do is plan until then.

 

As for making the sneak skill obsolete, there are many ways to address this. 1st, the various stealth boy conditions could have a sneak requirement (kind of unwieldy as someone could repair one out of their usable range. 2nd, there could be a synergy between the two, such as the stealth boy only giving 75% (example number) and the sneak skill at 100 would comprise the other 25% (also example number). 3rd, the sneak skill could be made obsolete or very underpowered... as it is now (not my favorite option).

 

If someone wanted to get really crazy with this they could try to create stealth assassination type animations liek were created for one of the oblivion stealth mods (name escapes me but I could dig it up if nesessary).

 

Let me know what you think!

[Circuitous]

I dig the idea. Depending on the rate of degradation it could end up balanced overall. Maybe just using it degrades it over time?

[dra6o0n]

Just mod a new headgear/suit that is called the 'stealth suit/goggles" It gives a better amount of sneak skill points and allows you to look camouflaged when sneaking (for bodyparts that has the gear on).