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Let's return to the scenario again where you've deceived an enemy into believing you're an ally. Let's say you meet the guy in the tavern, chat him up, and crit on a Deception. He now believes you mean him no harm. The next day, you encounter him again, walk up to him, and attack. You already...

Returning to the case where you're adjacent to an opponent who you've deceived into believing you're an ally, and you want to initiate surprise by suddenly attacking. To me, that sounds awfully close to how a rogue's "Sneak Attack" ability is described: "you know how to strike subtly and exploit...

The reason Assassins don't assassinate via surprise is they have the Assassinate and Death Strike abilities, which gives them a bonus IF their opponent is surprised. If the assassin's assassinate ability was meant to be surprise-based, it would assume your opponent was surprised. Instead, these...

You might think that if the designers meant for "a threat" to just mean an opponent or a foe, that they would have clarified that, maybe in the second edition or the errata. But, I think they did in fact clarify that - they just did it in the Sage Advice Compendium. The original wording in the...

Take care!

Here's a question we're wrestling with at the moment. Let's say you're unhidden in a lightly-obscured area, and another creature wants to try to target you with a spell attack that requires line of sight. Does that creature first have to do a Perception check to "see" you for the attack, even...

Nope, you're just not right - I've done no such thing. What you're doing instead is trying to justify your house rules as being RAW when they're not, and refusing to acknowledge official sources of where the designers of the game clarify what the intention of the words they wrote in the...

New FAQ! If the party finds a trap at the entrance to a room where creatures are lying in wait to surprise them with an ambush, does that mean the party is immune to the surprise since they've noticed "a threat"? No, when the PHB says that any creature or monster that doesn't notice a threat...

And yes, you're hidden if the DM says so, because the rules say so here : And if you watch the Sage Advice video on beginning combat and listen to the Sage Advice podcast on hiding, the head designer of 5e says that that's what they explicitly intended.

Each of us deals with cognitive dissonance in our own way. I guess you mock those you disagree with to deal with yours?

To give another reason why "threat" cannot be read so expansively and in isolation in the sentence "Any character or monster that doesn't notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter." : a trap is certainly "a threat", but disarming a trap as they approach an ambush doesn't...

How do you give a hidden threat a Stealth score? Hiding a threat (pretending to be an ally) is Insight vs Deception, not Stealth versus passive Perception, and the mechanism the PHB tells the DM they should use for determining surprise is Stealth versus passive Perception, p. 189: The Sage...

Since you state this so assertively, have you watched the he Sage Advice video on beginning combat and listened to the Sage Advice podcast on hiding? And have you also read through the answers to the two questions on surprise in the Sage Advice Compendium? If not, go invest the time in...

Jeremy Crawford (lead designer for 5e) in the Sage Advice video on beginning combat and in the Sage Advice podcast on hiding does draw special attention to that scenario (how an invisible person could be unhidden due to the "signs of their passage" such as knocking over bottles on a table...

Actually, you don't get to tell me the goal of my group's FAQ, because that's us. If you don't think the discussion is relevant or important, you're certainly free to use your time in other ways. Here's how this doc is presented to my players (copied from our Facebook group's post):

Based on the observation above from discussions here (since hidden creatures cannot always use the Unseen Attackers and Targets rule), I concede that there probably isn't even an operational definition to be had of Hidden, and we're changing ours to the following: Definition of being "Hidden"...

New FAQ based on my discussion with @Maxperson : Can I always use the Unseen Attackers and Targets rule if I'm hidden from my opponent? No, the Unseen Attackers and Targets rule is more strict than the criteria for hiding, requiring you to be both unseen and unheard. An example would be if...

No, this isn't a house rule - it's an interpretation of RAW based on the text of the rulebooks and what the designers have to say about it. You haven't added any argument from a source here - you've just decided to resolve your cognitive dissonance by arguing your case by simply reasserting it...

That's an interesting question ... my take on it is that as long as you don't use any movement from where you're hiding to do your attack, then the circumstances appropriate to hiding likely haven't changed and you can take advantage of the Unseen Attackers rule to to a ranged attack, but that...

No, that's not the definition of hidden, that's simply specifying what subset of all the circumstances possible for hiding are always required to use the Unseen Attackers and Target rule. For example, you could hide and then begin movement from hiding. As you're doing your movement, you come...