Rules Refresh: Hiding, Surprise, and More
Author: Icebrick1
Being hidden and obtaining surprise at the start of combat is one of the most powerful tactical advantages available in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. A number of the builds and analyses on our website highly value abilities and spells which aid in obtaining it, such as the pass without trace spell. However, the actual rules for Stealth and surprise in the game is an area of the game that can often seem opaque and difficult to interpret. This article serves to collect and distill the relevant information on Stealth and surprise in the game, as well as provide some mild recommendations on the more ambiguous aspects of the rules.
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Hiding
In order to fully explain the rules, careful examination of the exact wording is required to decode the meaning. Let us begin with the section on hiding from the Player’s Handbook:
You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly, and if you make noise (such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase), you give away your position. An invisible creature can’t be seen, so it can always try to hide. Signs of its passage might still be noticed, however, and it still has to stay quiet.
In combat, most creatures stay alert for signs of danger all around, so if you come out of hiding and approach a creature, it usually sees you. However, under certain circumstances, the Dungeon Master might allow you to stay hidden as you approach a creature that is distracted, allowing you to gain advantage on an attack before you are seen.
What Can You See? One of the main factors in determining whether you can find a hidden creature or object is how well you can see in an area, which might be lightly or heavily obscured, as explained in chapter 8.Player's Handbook (p. 177)
When you attempt to Hide, you make a Dexterity (Stealth) check and you keep that roll until you are discovered or stop hiding. To decide whether a creature will notice you, your roll is compared to their passive Perception.1 Generally, you can hide if the creature you want to hide from can’t see you, and you can’t hide if they can see you, but this is subject to the DM’s discretion. Hiding ends if you make excessive noise, make an attack, or come out of hiding and approach a creature.
What the rules don’t clearly explain is what being hidden actually does. First off, it is relevant for surprise, which is explained later. Secondly, it makes you actually undetected, meaning that a creature will need to either take the Search action (described below) to locate you, or guess what square to attack. This can be inferred from lines such as this:
This is distinct from not being hidden, as generally all creatures in combat are assumed to be aware of other creatures, even if they’re invisible or otherwise unseen. (See Battleship Invisibility below.)
It is unclear if you need to be unseen at all times to remain hidden, or only when you attempt to Hide. The rules only say that “if you come out of hiding and approach a creature, it usually sees you,” which means that by Rules As Written (RAW) once you are hidden, you remain unseen and unheard until you approach a creature. This leads to strange and nonsensical outcomes, like a hidden character standing in plain sight and remaining hidden as long as they don’t walk closer to an enemy.
If it is instead ruled that a character can only remain hidden if they stay out of sight, this also leads to some undesirable outcomes. It becomes impossible for a Rogue to hide behind cover and peek out to gain advantage on an attack, something that would be possible RAW.
One way to solve this is to say that you do need to be out of sight when you start hiding, but it is up to DM discretion if you can remain hidden after that, since “the DM decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding.” This could allow you to peek around cover to make an attack while remaining hidden, while still preventing you from leaving cover completely. This will unfortunately vary from game to game, but this might be preferable to strict adherence to either of the extremes presented above.
Lead Designer Jeremy Crawford seems to take this middle approach: he has said that “running out into the open” would not allow you to remain hidden. But he has also stated that a Rogue could leave cover and remain hidden. However, it should be noted that designer tweets aren’t official rulings. The final playtest version of D&D 5th Edition made it clear that at least half your body needs to be covered to remain hidden, this would be a reasonable ruling to make use of.
1 It is unclear what exactly occurs if the roll is exactly equal to a creature’s passive Perception Score. Hiding is not an actual contest in the mechanical sense, despite the usage of the word “contested” in the rules. This is because one side is not making an ability check, but using their passive Perception score, and the side hiding does not have to roll an ability check every time someone tries to perceive them. Even if it was a contest, it’s not apparent how the tie should be resolved. According to the rules:
Obscurement and Light
An obscured area has some kind of hindrance to sight, and can be used to determine if a creature is able to hide or not. Here is the actual text of the rules:
A heavily obscured area—such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage—blocks vision entirely. A creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area.Player's Handbook (p. 183)
Sadly, we are again left with a lot of ambiguity. Particularly this sentence: “A creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area.” Does this mean that a creature in the area is effectively blinded whenever it tries to see anything, or that any creature is effectively blinded when attempting to see something in the area? Both interpretations don’t quite make sense all the time. This also extends to a lightly obscured area: does it only give disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight to creatures in the area, or does it also apply to a creature outside the area trying to see in? However, for the purposes of interpreting this rule we will focus on heavily obscured areas.
In the former interpretation, a creature in heavy obscurement is basically blinded, but anyone outside the obscurement can see inside just fine. This doesn’t really make sense in any normal scenario, unless it’s some kind of magic cloud that makes you close your eyes inside it.
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Let’s go with the latter interpretation then: it prevents everyone from seeing things in the area. This makes sense if you’re heavily obscured in the darkness outside the light cast by a campfire. Someone by the campfire couldn’t see you, but you can see them. This doesn’t make sense when you’re in the center of a smoke cloud. You can somehow perfectly see things outside of the cloud, while an outsider is unable to see you.
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The problem is that it makes perfect sense to be able to see out of darkness, but not a cloud of smoke. However, by the rules both are simply heavily obscured areas, so RAW there’s no rulings which makes them behave differently from each other.
A third way to look at these rules is to say the second sentence is superfluous: all you need is “A heavily obscured area […] blocks vision entirely.” This means that nothing in the area can be seen, and any creature in the area can’t see either. Now the smoke cloud example makes sense, a creature inside can’t be seen, nor can they see outside of it, but it makes natural darkness nonsensical, as you should be able to see someone near a lit campfire in the darkness of the night.
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Sadly, there isn’t really a way to overcome this. A cloud of smoke and natural darkness should function differently, but again, they are both just an area of heavy obscurement. A DM might rule that they work as we expect them to, but then we run into problems with magic where we cannot look at reality to see what makes “sense.” Can you see outside the area of the darkness spell? You can see outside of normal darkness, but maybe darkness absorbs all light and is like an opaque black blob that functions similar to fog cloud. The only solution to this is to have a conversation between players and DM on how these effects will function.
Lightly obscured areas are normally not relevant to hiding; while the rules are indecisive and up to DM discretion, they implicitly convey that a creature should normally not be able to hide in a lightly obscured area, as evidenced by the existence of features that explicitly do allow this, such as Wood Elf’s Mask of the Wild. Remember that having disadvantage on a check reduces a creature’s passive Perception by 5, but for a lightly obscured area this will generally only apply to spotting purely visual phenomena like secret doors and not hiding creatures because those are usually heard, not seen. Otherwise a creature would be harder to detect in a lightly obscured area than a heavily obscured area!
Unseen Attackers and Targets
Aside from allowing you to hide, being heavily obscured or otherwise unseen has additional benefits.
This is pretty simple: If a creature can’t be seen by the target of an attack, the attack has advantage. If a creature can’t see the target of its attack, the attack has disadvantage. Note that if both targets are in complete darkness, the area of a sleet storm or are in some other scenario where neither the attacker nor target can see each other, the advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out (Player’s Handbook, pg. 173).
Invisibility
A common way to become unseen is to become invisible. As is traditional, here’s the text of the invisible condition:
Attack rolls against the creature have disadvantage, and the creature’s attack rolls have advantage.Player's Handbook (p.291)
So, an invisible creature can’t be seen and is always heavily obscured for the purpose of hiding. Additionally, they have advantage on attack rolls and enemies have disadvantage on attack rolls against them. An invisible creature can always attempt to Hide, since it’s always heavily obscured, but until it does successfully Hide, its location is known, due to some sign other than sight such as by leaving tracks or making noise.
Astute readers will notice that neither bullet point of the invisible condition is connected to the creature being unseen, which we covered above. This means that even if you can somehow see an invisible creature, they can still try to Hide from you because they are always heavily obscured for the purposes of hiding, and they still have advantage on attacks and enemies have disadvantage on attacks against them by RAW. The latter of which has been confirmed by Jeremy Crawford (20:05). Some spells like faerie fire do remove all the benefits from invisibility, but something like see invisibility won’t prevent invisible enemies from using most of the condition’s benefits.
In this case, it would be fine to rule that seeing an invisible creature makes them effectively not invisible for you; it’s more intuitive and makes abilities that let you perceive invisible creatures more impactful.
The Hide and Search Actions
In order to hide in combat, a creature must take the Hide action. This means that even if a creature goes invisible or enters an area of heavy obscurement, its location will be known until it takes the Hide action. The Search action allows a creature to make a Wisdom (Perception) check to spot hidden creatures (or find something else, potentially using an Intelligence (Investigation) check instead). The searching creature will need to roll against the total of the Dexterity (Stealth) check the hiding creature made when it first hid, as described in the rules for hiding. Note that passive Perception acts as a kind of “floor” for this check. (See our Ability Check Guide.)
Battleship Invisibility
Many DM’s and players forget how hiding works when it comes to invisible enemies or obscurement like fog cloud. They allow a creature to hide without using the Hide action, and oftentimes without even making a check. We refer to this as Battleship Invisibility, because you are left randomly targeting squares hoping to score a hit, as in the popular game Battleship. In some scenarios, like an invisible creature in the area of a silence spell, it might be possible for a creature to become unseen and unheard without hiding, which would still conceal their location. We recommend not being overly strict with how difficult it is to hear a creature, though. Even if it might occasionally seem nonsensical for creatures to track each other so well using just sound or other indirect signs, while potentially distracted by combat, this is ultimately healthy for the game as Battleship Invisibility makes being nigh-untargetable way too easy with the likes of something like fog cloud. The designers of the game also indicate that the general assumption in combat is that a creature’s position is known unless it is hidden, even if it is invisible (Dragon Talk, 29:30).
Initiative
To understand surprise, initiative must be explained first. Let’s take a look at the rules in the Player’s Handbook.
The DM ranks the combatants in order from the one with the highest Dexterity check total to the one with the lowest. This is the order (called the initiative order) in which they act during each round. The initiative order remains the same from round to round.
If a tie occurs, the DM decides the order among tied DM-controlled creatures, and the players decide the order among their tied characters…Player's Handbook (p.189)
So, “when combat starts,” initiative is rolled to determine what order the characters and enemies go in during combat. This seems simple enough, but the timing is somewhat ambiguous. Can someone make a quick attack before combat “begins” to get an additional attack before initiative is rolled? What about when you’re about to shoot a crossbow at unaware enemies?
The designers have clarified that initiative should be rolled as soon as any hostile action is taken but before it is completed. (For example, in this Dragon Talk segment.) So if the Barbarian wants to attack the bad guy before they finish talking, they have to roll initiative first. If the bad guy wins, that represents their superior reaction speed allowing them to respond to the Barbarian’s hostile intent before the Barbarian’s attack. In the situation where you’re attacking unaware enemies, we will need to bring in the surprise rules to give you the whole picture, but before you make that crossbow shot, initiative will still need to be rolled. Depending on the scenario however, it is still possible to prepare for combat in other ways like casting spells such as bless and spirit guardians, as long as it wouldn’t provoke an immediate response from any enemies.
This is also healthy for the game, as it makes sure participants aren’t actively being rewarded for interrupting the flow of the game. Players blurting out “I attack” hoping to score a free hit before combat begins does not make for a good time.
One final note before we move on; initiative is an ability check. This means most spells or features that interact with ability checks, like guidance or the Bard’s Jack of All Trades, can be used with initiative. However, it is one with no DC and which you can’t “pass” or “fail”, and thus things like silvery barbs or the Pact of Talisman cannot alter the ability check.
Surprise
Now that the basics have been established, let’s add in surprise.
Text Breakdown
If you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can’t take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren’t.Player's Handbook (p.189)
Let’s carefully break this down sentence by sentence because this is a very contentious piece of text. “The DM determines who might be surprised,” is often misinterpreted as meaning it is down to DM opinion on who is surprised or not, but that is not actually the case. It just means that it is the DM’s job to determine who is surprised and not, as explained in the subsequent sentences. This is presumably because only they will have access to the monsters’ Stealth and Perception bonuses.
Now, for the way the DM determines which creatures are surprised. “If neither side tries to be stealthy, they automatically notice each other.” Thus far, this is pretty self explanatory. If no one is trying to Hide, no one will be surprised. “Otherwise, the DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side.” So if at least one side is trying to be stealthy, the DM compares2 the Dexterity (Stealth) of hiding creatures against the Wisdom (Perception) of the enemies, but for what purpose? The final sentence explains: “Any character or monster that doesn’t notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.” This tells us what is actually required to be surprised: a creature is surprised if they don’t notice any threats at the start of the encounter.
Really, these rules are only confusing because they contain irrelevant text and bury the lede by only mentioning the actual conditions for surprise in the last sentence. An easier way of explaining the rules might be “A creature is surprised if it does not notice any threats at the start of combat. To determine if a creature detects any hidden creatures before combat begins, the DM compares the creature’s passive Wisdom (Perception) score to any hiding creatures’ Dexterity (Stealth) checks.”
Note that if a group is trying to surprise an enemy, everyone in the group must roll higher Stealth than that enemy’s passive Perception. If a creature is able to see any threats, the creature isn’t surprised, but it is possible to surprise only a portion of a group if you exceed the passive Perception of some members but not the passive Perception of others.
Surprise is also only relevant when initiative is initially rolled. For example, If some third group of enemies sneaks up on two groups fighting, neither side can be surprised since they have already detected enemies and it is no longer the start of combat.
Assuming the DM allows the party to stay hidden within reason while still being able to see (see the Hiding section for details), it should almost always be possible to surprise enemies as long as the party isn’t caught off guard themselves. So long as the party moves at a slow travel pace and beats the enemies’ passive Perception, they should be able to surprise the enemies, this is explained on page 182 of the Player’s Handbook: “While traveling at a slow pace, the characters can move stealthily. As long as they’re not in the open, they can try to surprise or sneak by other creatures they encounter.” Dungeons are not out in the open, and it’s clear this isn’t just intended for overland travel. This section of the rules begins with the following text:
The example of surprise given seems to show that this is the intent as well:
A strange scenario might arise if a creature immune to surprise (like a player character with the Alert feat) happens to go first and is not surprised despite not seeing any enemies. The character can still take actions, such as the Ready action; this can be explained by the character getting some kind of “gut feeling” that combat is about to begin.
Sticking closely to RAW might lead to some practical issues during play: you end up having to keep track of multiple Stealth rolls and passive Perception scores against one another, which can lead to a large number of hidden creatures on either side, regardless of whether surprise is achieved or not. This can lead to frustrating experiences, especially for players, when enemies spring up unexpectedly during combat and make it feel like the players had no agency. To combat this, you might instead elect to normally not have any creature start combat hidden, which greatly simplifies the start of combat, allows for more interactivity on both sides of things, and also addresses the aforementioned awkward scenario with Alert.
2 It is ambiguous what occurs on a tie, see Hiding for a more complete explanation.
Implications
Surprise is extremely powerful. It essentially gives the party an extra round in a game where combat often lasts 2 to 4 rounds. Combine this with good bonuses to initiative, and you have basically acted out an entire combat before the enemy has been allowed to do anything.
As a comparison to a widely known feature, Action Surge is often regarded as a strong ability; surprise is essentially an improved Action Surge (because it also includes bonus actions and movement) for the whole party.
Besides the additional time it takes to move at a slow pace in order to be able to move stealthily, there is usually no cost to attempting to surprise enemies, meaning competent parties will attempt to do so as often as possible.
Pass Without Trace
Pass without trace is possibly the strongest spell in the game of its level due to its interaction with surprise. It grants a +10 bonus to Dexterity (Stealth) checks for the whole party. Many enemies have a passive Perception between 10 and 15, allowing characters with even very poor bonuses to Stealth to surprise their enemies. If the whole party invests into Stealth, which we recommend, there won’t even be the possibility of failure in a majority of encounters. With a one hour duration, it’s even possible to maintain concentration between encounters and surprise enemies multiple times from a single casting. It’s often worth having some character act as a dedicated pass without trace caster.
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Above is a box plot comparing monster passive Perception to their CR. (Sourced by Esker from the Monster Manual, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes. Dragons have been separated since they have unusually high passive Perceptions and a disproportionate number of variations.) As can be seen, passive Perception remains quite low until high levels; it takes until CR 11 for the median passive Perception to reach 16. Meanwhile, the minimum roll of just a level 5 character with Stealth proficiency, a +2 Dexterity Modifier and pass without trace is 16.
Conclusion
With how complicated and unclear the rules surrounding hiding and surprise can be, it can be difficult to run the game completely Rules as Written. Hopefully, you now understand how Hiding and its related mechanics work, and are now more capable of deciding how to best run it at your table and use it with your characters. If you’re the DM of the game you should make it clear how exactly you’re going to run hiding and obscured areas like darkness.
The designers have made a point (in some interviews, and in one of the UAs, I believe the first skill feats one) about how they try (and sometimes even succeed, but sometimes don’t) to make rules that don’t create _exclusions_, that abilities and feats and the like don’t exist to create something that the possessor can do that nobody else can, but instead to make something _automatic_ or _easy_ for the possessor that might otherwise require something extra (that the DM would adjudicate). In this light, it seems like the normal intent of Mask of the Wild would be to remove the DM adjudication part of hiding in light obscurement, not to disallow hiding in light obscurement normally, since the only statement they make on the latter normally is to defer to DM fiat.
Our closest actual knowledge of developer intent on this topic is the hiding rules text from the final playtest before the game’s release, in which light obscurement was very explicitly ruled out as a means of hiding unless you had a special feature.
Also what you describe withe exclusive and inclusive features works for many parts of the game, but not for being allowed to attempt to hide, there’s no graduation as you describe, you either can hide in rain or you can’t, there’s not really a maybe there that would require a check.
However, it is absolutely compliant with RAW for a DM to allow you to hide in light obscurement; it’s never explicitly allowed or disallowed. What we decided to write into the article is the closest match to intent we could find via game features existing as well as (sorely required) rules that were scrapped the last second (presumably for layout reasons) – but do note that the article says lighly obscured areas are “normally” not relevant to hiding, not that they may never be relevant.
While we’re on the topic of obscure rules, wow might a group Stealth Check (SRD) interact with Surprise?
“Note that if a group is trying to surprise an enemy, everyone in the group must roll higher Stealth than that enemy’s passive Perception.”
I remember this was discussed in the comments of the “Surprise Rules” video by Treantmonk and Pack Tactics. I was unclear whether: (a) group stealth checks are impossible, (b) you determine for each unique Passive Perception whether the group passes it, or (c) it would interact another way entirely.
What is your take?
Group Stealth Checks for Hiding or Surprise can’t exist, as a group check requires the party to succeed but checks for hiding don’t succeed or fail. This is mentioned in our ability check guide (https://tabletopbuilds.com/ability-checks/), but while it is annoying for the one unstealthy guy to ruin surprise all the time, we think it’s generally better if surprise isn’t buffed further since it is already really strong.
That being said, Group Stealth checks for other purposes (such as avoiding combat entirely by sneaking past a guard) are completely fine to use, and often good, just don’t use them for mechanical surprise/hiding
Does the Passive Perception box plot account for Keen Senses? Advantage ups the Passive Perception by 5 and in most cases, it makes sense for the creature to be able to apply it.
No, but it shouldn’t have a major effect on the graph. Only one creature in the set (Pseudodragon) has the actual “Keen Senses” feature, but assuming you meant all the “Keen” features that give creatures advantage on a particular sense, there are only 69 creatures with it, and only 33 of them are above CR 1.
Most likely, it wouldn’t affect the median anywhere.
Crawford’s invisibility ruling is laughable, and I am going to complain about it for three paragraphs.
So the PHB definition of a Condition (Appendix A) holds that “a condition lasts either until it is countered… or for a duration specified by the effect that imposed the condition,” and that “a creature either has a condition or doesn’t,” as if all Conditions were absolute.
However, this contradicts other rules. We already know that “a creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition… when trying to see something in [a heavily obscured] area,” so it appears as though the Blinded Condition is “effectively” not absolute, but relative to where you’re looking. And from Xanathar’s Guide: a Gloomstalker Ranger is “invisible [in darkness] to any creature that relies on darkvision to see you in that darkness,” so it appears as though the Invisibility Condition is not absolute, but relative to who’s looking at you. Unless, of course, the Gloomstalker is “invisible” but not Invisible, in which case we have the question: what are the in-game effects of being “invisible”? Good game design.
So then Crawford starts babbling about a “shimmer,” mentioned nowhere in the text of the rules, that apparently obscures Invisible creatures even while you can see them with Truesight or See Invisibility. Of course this makes no sense; of course this is bad game design; of course everyone should ignore this.
okay bye now
Regarding the ‘Battleships’ section:
Being invisible (via spell, obscurement, or otherwise) does not give you a free Hide action, this is true. However, consider the following: a baker half-way around the world leaves his shop, he does not take the Hide action – do you know where he went? The obvious answer is no, but why? Because taking the Hide action is not actually the determinant of whether you have been perceived or not – a Wisdom (Perception) check is.
Now consider a person is walking down a road, say about 400ft ahead. It is a fine day, the birds are out and there is little other traffic than your horse-drawn cart. The person has not taken the Hide action. Do you perceive the person? The answer is again obvious, yes – but why? It is because your passive Wisdom (Perception) is greater than the DC presented. The DC for seeing a person in these kind of conditions is going to be effectively 0, so we aren’t even thinking about it – but that is how mechanically it works.
Take the previous situation again, but now the person has Invisibility cast on them; do you perceive them? Ah, now we have some thinking to do. According to your ‘Battleships’ section you would know exactly where they are until the take the Hide action. However, that is not true. Your Wisdom (Perception) has to beat the DC to perceive them. What is the DC for a person you cannot see about 400ft away with typical outdoor noises? That would be up to the DM since the books do not offer charts (unlike previous editions, *cough*). However, I might expect a number in the low 20s unless the person does something obviously loud. An active check with a good roll may find them, particularly for something like an Owl who has advantage on Perception checks with hearing. If the person gets significantly closer I would drop the DC down. If the environment gets louder, I would raise it.
It is worth noting that pg 196 of the PHB ‘Unseen Attackers’ states the following:
“If you are hidden — both unseen and unheard —…”
It is not that you are hidden because you took the Hide action, but because you have not been seen or heard. Again, you don’t know where the baker is, Hide action or no. Ok, so what DOES the Hide action do? It replaces (or sets a floor, depending on the DM) the DC with that set by a Dex (Stealth) roll. If you are in a quiet environment attempting to skirt around some crates 20ft from an enemy, you really don’t want to be relying on the environmental DC for not being heard, so you pit you Dex (Stealth) roll against them. Next to a rushing waterfall while they are yelling at each other, though? In combat this may be useful to have them lose track of your location without taking an Action to do so.
Again, it is worth noting that for most situations where sight is applicable at all the DC is going to be neglible (unless set by the Hide action, and not in ‘clear’ sight which would drop it). Due to the presence of passive Perception this means that it is rarely something the DM need consider, so it is not made onerous to mechanically have this in the system. When it does come up, it is useful and not too difficult to set a DC (again, a table for this would be great, though). So, what was the DC to perceive that baker? Impossible (this is an actual option).
I think the OP specifically mentioned a creature who “goes invisible” as opposed to “is invisible” in terms of knowing its position. Here’s my current understanding:
I’m standing at the bottom of the page looking up along a long hallway. I draw a vertical line down the page representing the wall on the left side of the hallway. Half way down I stop and draw a C shape outwards — an alcove — and then continue the wall down to a point next to my position. I can see everything in this hallway but cannot see into the alcove from my position.
Now, a person is standing in the middle of the hallway in broad daylight. The view is not obscured and I can see him. This person may not take the Hide action. If he suddenly runs into the alcove and waits to ambush me there, it is ineffective as I know his position and will not be surprised when I approach.
In the next example, the person is standing in the middle of the hallway in broad daylight and I am watching him. He now “goes invisible” right before my eyes. But at this moment, I still know where he is — he is not automatically Hidden. I can fire a shot at him at disadvantage. However, someone who is invisible “can always attempt to hide”. So, if after “going invisible” the person tiptoed as quietly as possible into the alcove — he is now making an attempt to Hide, which may or may not succeed. If successful, I no longer know where he is and he is now Hidden and could potentially surprise me as I approach the alcove.
In the last example, the person was already invisible when I took my first look down the hallway and I cannot see him. I *think* this means that the person is currently hidden from me by virtue of being unseen and unheard and so if he took a shot at me he would gain the benefit of being an unseen attacker — at which point I *think* he is no longer hidden. If, instead of attacking me, he attempts to do anything else, including moving into the alcove, I *think* he has to pass some sort of check to remain Hidden, and if that fails he would simply be Invisible, but not Hidden — I could attack him at disadvantage at that point.
Great article! Surprise is hard to run generally and the rules are a mess, but one spell I really enjoy and I always take if I can and wish my players would consider is “Jim’s glowing coin” from the amazing “Acquisition Incorpotated”, it clearly states creatures are distracted if they fail their saving throw. So that helps create the conditions for remaining unseen while approaching creatures, it doesn’t guarantee anything. Think of it as a spell you cast on the DM, they’re much more comfortable with it taking 2 spell slots and a little bit of teamwork(both spells on different spell lists) to spoil their encounters than just 1(pass without trace), lots of other creative uses for this spell outside of combat.
“Jim’s Glowing Coin” also makes the creatures(as well as players potentially) distracted for the duration of the spell, so if you have players who can make use of hiding during combat like goblins or rogues, this spell makes it easier to do so during combat, generally this means access to full cover or heavy obscurement, but this is all a function of how your DM runs her table.
Excellent article.
By the book, a fog cloud between two creatures would have no effect. The epic fail (repeated from previous editions and the initial printing and the errata) is the inability to make the distinction between absence of light and opaque sources of obscurement. With the same language used for both, there is no language that can disambiguate them effectively. But since the DM determines… At my table, the absence of light does not block the ability to see outside that area, but opaque sources of obscurity block the ability to see through the area. So, yes, magical darkness works like fog cloud.
I beg to differ about initiative not having a DC. My understanding is it is a contest with the DC being the opponent(s) roll.
The ambiguity, and lack of clear preconditions to hide (see Pack Tactics video on this – it was in the playtest), mean you have wildly different experiences at each table, with some hiding in bright light and others never letting you hide at all.
The term “rules as written” doesn’t really apply to hiding, since they large consist of “the DM decides…” This makes class features and feats affecting hiding indeterminate in power level without reference to a specific DM.
Excellent article.
By the book, a fog cloud between two creatures would have no effect. The epic fail (repeated from previous editions and the initial printing and the errata) is the inability to make the distinction between absence of light and opaque sources of obscurement. With the same language used for both, there is no language that can disambiguate them effectively. But since the DM determines… At my table, the absence of light does not block the ability to see outside that area, but opaque sources of obscurity block the ability to see through the area. So, yes, magical darkness works like fog cloud.
I beg to differ about initiative not having a DC. My understanding is it is a contest with the DC being the opponent(s) roll.
The ambiguity, and lack of clear preconditions to hide (see Pack Tactics video on this – it was in the playtest), mean you have wildly different experiences at each table, with some hiding in bright light and others never letting you hide at all.
The term “rules as written” doesn’t really apply to hiding, since they largely consist of “the DM decides…” This makes class features and feats affecting hiding indeterminate in power level without reference to a specific DM.
Do you have any basis for the DC being the enemies roll? No rules describe it as a DC and it would work differently from any other DC in the game, considering there are multiple of them. What if there are two groups of enemies and you roll in the middle? Did you both succeed and fail?
Just the text of a contest and the text of Initiative.
“Both participants in a contest make ability checks appropriate to their efforts. They apply all appropriate bonuses and penalties, but instead of comparing the total to a DC, they compare the totals of their two checks.”
“When combat starts, every participant makes a Dexterity check to determine their place in the initiative order.”
Looks like a contest to me. It follows the rules of a contest, and yes, in any initiative, you succeeded against those you beat, and therefore go before them, but failed against those that beat you, and therefore go after them. Pretty cut and dry.
If you consider the rules on the Dungeon Master’s Screen valid, you cannot be heard if trying to be quiet more than ~35′ away (on average). This means you don’t have to scout at corpse distance to avoid ruining Surprise, but your defender(s) may be a dash away and may be surprised, which could potentially be worse. You can also use Guidance on their Stealth checks, since you only need concentration until they make the check. This does not prevent you from then also using it on someone’s initiative, but only for one, as that requires concentration up until the initiative check.