Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
That's not all your houserule is doing, and RAW already allows that being unseen allows hiding. After all "cannot be seen" meets tge writen criteria of "can't be clearly seen."I'm not trying to make a case for "never". Such cases are not pragmatic for human-moderated RPG. What my house rule is intended to lay out is what is "usually sufficient". Players can rely upon their character's ability to do or not do it, simpliciter.
Exactly! So my house rule is intended to tell players what they can always rely on. It should be rare - maybe never in our experience - that being unseen is not sufficient to hide.
Besides, thus started with a correction as to what's RAW, which you asserted you had to be unseen to hide. If you said that was RAW then whike proposing your houserule, I'm unckear how your houserule adds to that in this case.
According to RAW, you can always hide when not "clearly seen." What constitutes not clearly seen is variable, but not the ability to hide when it obtains.I certainly agree that sometimes a character can hide when "not clearly seen" - sustaining the literal truthiness of that statement. Examples include the racial traits "Naturally Stealthy" and "Mask of the Wild", the class feature "Hide in Plain Sight", and the feat "Skulker". For characters that don't have those traits, they should know that they usually cannot try to hide if they are seen to any extent.
That last is splitting hairs too fine. Many times a condition of unseen can be removed by a change in circumstance. If you are hiding behind the couch and I walk around it you're no longer unseen. Pointing out that circumstances can change to remove unseen does not mean that you were never unseen.Our positions could be nearer than our debate belies. Say I am playing a character with Skulker and am in a dimly-lit environment. I can expect that usually I can take a Hide action, while Billy, not having Skulker or anything like it, cannot. Having taken that action, I am now unseen so far as creatures whose passive Wisdom (perception) is lower than my Dexterity (stealth) check result. A case where hiding indeed bestows unseen on a character. For me this sort of case falls under "exception-not-the-rule". If my permit to hide is that creatures around me are distracted... then as soon as they look my way I am not unseen. In such a case, I was unseen not because of what I did, but because of what they did. Hiding did not then bestow unseen.
Backing up to your first point here, there exist condition outside of unseen that can allow hiding. Being in a crowd, for instance. Possibly being behind 3/4 cover could be sufficient. It is incorrect to say that unseen is a necessary requirement to hide as a general rule. You can make it so, but I find doing so to be limiting.
For what it's worth, there's almost never a question of when hiding is possible in my games.
RAW does this your second sentence already. Your last is still incorrect -- if you are hidden you are unseen. If you are unseen, you're not necessarily hidden. If A (hidden) then B (unseen) doesn't imply if B then A, or B if and only if A. You keep arguing the latter and it doesn't follow.I want to make sense of this for my players. I want them to understand that if they start out unseen, they can hide. If they have something - a feat, a spell, whatever - that forms an exception: great! They can't rely on being hidden making them unseen: the two are not invariably connected.