When will WOTC clarify the Stealth rules?

[JDillard]

Considering that there are designers, developers, guys who write articles, guys who review articles, guys who post articles on the internet, managers, mathematicians and probably a crazy guy tied up in the corner spouting nonsense... give them time.

It's a complicated issue. There's a lot of people involved to give their opinion on how it should work. Once they've figured it out on their end, they'll tell us their thoughts and decisions.

In the meantime, DM's can just do what they've always done... make a judgement call and get back to the roleplaying.

 

[Xorn]

In the meantime, DM's can just do what they've always done... make a judgement call and get back to the roleplaying.

Don't forget that you can also read Kobold Hall, Keep on the Shadowfell, the Monster Manual tactics sections, and all the adventures in Dungeon #155 (Heathen in particular) and use that as a baseline for your interpretation. (Which supports that Stealth only grants CA if the target is unaware of you, while Total Concealment/Cover grants CA because the target can't see you.)

 

[Nikosandros]

Considering that there are designers, developers, guys who write articles, guys who review articles, guys who post articles on the internet, managers, mathematicians and probably a crazy guy tied up in the corner spouting nonsense... give them time.

It's a complicated issue. There's a lot of people involved to give their opinion on how it should work. Once they've figured it out on their end, they'll tell us their thoughts and decisions.

Shouldn't they kinda have figured it out before publishing the game?

 

[Mistwell]

Don't forget that you can also read Kobold Hall, Keep on the Shadowfell, the Monster Manual tactics sections, and all the adventures in Dungeon #155 (Heathen in particular) and use that as a baseline for your interpretation. (Which supports that Stealth only grants CA if the target is unaware of you, while Total Concealment/Cover grants CA because the target can't see you.)

When you are not sure of the rules, you tend to play it safe and conservative until you're told otherwise. It's not at all surprising that the relatively small number of adventures uses the most conservative definition, given how confusing the rule is. I do not see the small number of published adventures as being good basis to judge all the things you can do with a skill.

 

[iwarrior-poet]

One would have hoped that all these designers, developers, and editors would have gotten it right the first time (especially with such an important game mechanic, at the dawn of a new edition), rather than handing us a vague and possibly broken component.

 

[JDillard]

Shouldn't they kinda have figured it out before publishing the game?

There's this game in the US that kids play, we call it "telephone". The basic idea of this game is that you take a large number of kids and they sit in a circle. One of them comes up with an innocuous sentence, then whispers it into the ear of the child next to them. This proceeds around the circle, each child whispering what they heard. Generally by the time this gets all the way around, the sentence heard only barely resembles the original statement.

This illustrates a point. The more people involved in a piece of communication, and the more hands it has to pass through, the more likely it is to get distorted. Hell, at least we all got readable, generally gramatically correct rulebooks.

A lot of stuff slipped through. There were, as I hear, a lot of versions of playtest stuff. I know the WotC guys I play with still make rules errors because they'd playtested lots and lots of versions of pretty much everything in the game and still have old, changed rules floating around in their heads.

As it is, we've got a very workable set of rules with a few inconsistencies throughout. None of the inconsistencies I've seen are game-breaking, just confusing. And, all things considered, has anyone played a tabletop RPG that didn't periodically require a DM judgment call because a rule was ambiguous or simply not there? This is nothing new.

It just makes me wonder when we see the "Why hasn't WotC answered this question yet?" posts. When the response is "they're working on it, give them time, the lack of answer isn't stopping you from playing the game" and you reply "well, then why didn't they not let the error happen in the first place"... it frustrates me a lot. There seems to be a lot of that going around. So the RAW aren't perfect. I'm still having a blast playing the game.

 

[Stormtower]

Per Mike Mearls, this is up to the DM. Personally, I wouldn't allow it.

See, WotC did clarify something for you.

I'm disappointed that this is being left up to individual DMs. As an RPGA DM, I wish to support a uniform play experience (when appropriate and possible) for players, regardless of which table they are playing at.

My own interpretation of the cover/stealth rules argument is that the rules are quite clear... an ally ONLY counts for cover when calculating ranged attacks. Creatures cannot hide behind each other unless there is some other mitigating factor present (such as a troll hiding IN A CLOUD OF FOG behind a goblin... but in that case, it's the fog cloud and not the goblin providing concealment, and not cover).

Any other interpretation of this rule is just rules-lawyering munchkinism. The rule is quite clear and no one at my tables will be stealthing by hiding behind other PCs.

 

[Nikosandros]

There's this game in the US that kids play, we call it "telephone". [...]

We have that game in Italy too... it's very funny, but one would hope that game design and development would be done in a more organized way...

 

[Kobu]

We'll have to wait for the first turn-based 4E video game to come out. The designers will be forced to explain how everything is really supposed to work and then we'll be able to reverse engineer the rules into something understandable. It's just that easy.

 

[JDillard]

We have that game in Italy too... it's very funny, but one would hope that game design and development would be done in a more organized way...

And they did. We can read the words in the book, right? Half the time with telephone it's not even a real sentence by the end.

Still, the underlying problem in telephone is an underlying problem in all human communication that passes through multiple hands with multiple revisions. Stuff is going to get lost, or get changed. Someone is going to read something and re-word it to "sound better" or work better (by itself at least), and in the process make something else ambiguous. Or someone is going to read through and because they've got it all figured out in their head, are going to miss that the way it's worded could potentially, given time and gamers dragging it through a fine-toothed comb of looking for loopholes, have multiple meanings.