D&D 5E Not liking these surprise rules

[Agamon]

This is the type of situation where I check surprise in 1e, but I guess in 5e you're not meant to check surprise outside of special situations (scouting and ambushes).

Not that special in my game. The players I run are quite careful and try to do what they can to make sure they fight on their terms. And when they aren't, predatory monsters are often trying to do the same to them.

It would be unusual for both sides trying to sneak up on each other though, can't think of that coming up often. I'd just say they surprise each other without rolling and then normal combat begins.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Pg 69 has the Surprise rules. Although the first line is "The DM decides" it then goes on to detail individual Stealth checks vs. passive Perception for the group(s) trying to be stealthy.

I get that. My point was that you only have to go through all that stealth vs perception stuff when people are going for an ambush. Not every time a fight breaks out to determine surprise. The OP seemed to think determining surprise was going to be a lot of work. My gist was that it won't matter most of the time.

 

[Cybit]

I took that into account. I'm considering a situation where both parties are trying to be sneaky, so 1 Dex roll for everyone, then take the worst Dex result from each side, and compare to everyone's passive Wis on the other side. So 8 rolls (assuming 4 vs 4) , find lowest on each side, and make 8 comparisons. Still very convoluted compared to simple side-based surprise.

This is the type of situation where I check surprise in 1e, but I guess in 5e you're not meant to check surprise outside of special situations (scouting and ambushes).

If the public playtest abilities were any indication (Hi Assassination!), there's probably good reasons why surprise is supposed to be rare.

 

[GX.Sigma]

During the playtest, there was a mechanic in the exploration rules to check for surprise each time the characters encountered monsters. Since we haven't seen the full exploration rules yet, it's not unreasonable to assume there'll be something in there for it.

 

[Particle_Man]

I'd say if the party is bothering to be stealthy (moving at the slower overland rate) then they get a group stealth roll. Otherwise no. The DM would determine whether the monsters are trying to be stealthy or not (and so would get a group stealth roll or not) and perception would be passive all around, which could make various target numbers for the group stealth rolls (allowing some people to be surprised by a group and others not).

Seems to work fine to me.