D&D (2024) Am I crazy, or did they just turn Stealth into full Ninja mode?

[Bill Zebub]

So the question then is how many orcs before they get advantage?

I think it's a realism vs. narrativist (rule of cool) sort of thing, and depends on which way you lean.

I'm definitely in the latter camp. It should actually be easier to sneak past 100 orcs than just one, because if one orc sees you there are lots of different cool stories that can still happen. If 100 orcs see you it's still possible to have a good story, but much more likely that you just die.

 

[Shiroiken]

What’s the difference in difficulty of sneaking past 100 orcs vs sneaking past 1? Using passive perception there is no difference. That should highlight the problem of passive perception nicely.

The primary difficulty would be avoiding line of sight. That's easy to do with only 1 orc, but 100 are much more likely to see you. This is the problem I have with the new version... you hide outside of the camp, then just walk past everyone while "invisible." Passive perception might have some flaws, but this isn't one of them.

 

[Stalker0]

The primary difficulty would be avoiding line of sight. That's easy to do with only 1 orc, but 100 are much more likely to see you. This is the problem I have with the new version... you hide outside of the camp, then just walk past everyone while "invisible." Passive perception might have some flaws, but this isn't one of them.

Well to be fair this is a "problem" with passive perception. But then again, you get into the opposite problem where if you just let all 100 orcs roll, then a stealth person basically has no chance of sneaking....which is not accurate either.

Its a situation where our model is crude for the sake of simplicity, and works "reasonably well" most of the time, but might require DM adjudication in the corner cases. If a DM wanted to impose a stealth penalty to sneak past 100 orcs, I think that is reasonable.

 

[James Gasik]

The primary difficulty would be avoiding line of sight. That's easy to do with only 1 orc, but 100 are much more likely to see you. This is the problem I have with the new version... you hide outside of the camp, then just walk past everyone while "invisible." Passive perception might have some flaws, but this isn't one of them.

Of course, in action movies, the hero sneaks into the heavily fortified base all the time. Which brings up another line of discussion: maybe we're demanding a little too much from a fantasy game about heroic people doing heroic things and it's ok for Rogues to be able to appear and disappear at will like Batman.

 

[Stalker0]

Of course, in action movies, the hero sneaks into the heavily fortified base all the time. Which brings up another line of discussion: maybe we're demanding a little too much from a fantasy game about heroic people doing heroic things and it's ok for Rogues to be able to appear and disappear at will like Batman.

One of the main problems with stealth is....its an incredibly "selflish" act timewise. And by that I mean stealth often turns into this 1 on 1 thing between the rogue and the DM. Now for a quick 5 minute thing, no big deal.

However, when you get into the situations where a rogue wants to "scout the camp" or "scout the dungeon", suddenly the rest of the party is twiddling their thumbs while the rogue and the DM have this private adventure. And you can't really blame the rogue. When the rest of the party has terrible stealth, you don't want to bring them along. And when that kind of scouting can be so incredibly useful, it makes sense to do it.

So part of the desire to regulate it frankly is to prevent those kind of moments from becoming the "rogue show".

 

[James Gasik]

One of the main problems with stealth is....its an incredibly "selflish" act timewise. And by that I mean stealth often turns into this 1 on 1 thing between the rogue and the DM. Now for a quick 5 minute thing, no big deal.

However, when you get into the situations where a rogue wants to "scout the camp" or "scout the dungeon", suddenly the rest of the party is twiddling their thumbs while the rogue and the DM have this private adventure. And you can't really blame the rogue. When the rest of the party has terrible stealth, you don't want to bring them along. And when that kind of scouting can be so incredibly useful, it makes sense to do it.

So part of the desire to regulate it frankly is to prevent those kind of moments from becoming the "rogue show".

I would argue that this traditionally is the Rogue's job though, to scout ahead and gather advance intel on upcoming battles. And it's not like Rogues are alone here; you have familiars, wild shaped druids, divination spells, etc..

I acknowledge "The Decker Problem" (for people who are familiar with Shadowrun), but making Stealth more obnoxious isn't the cure for this sort of thing, but a conversation with the players out of game and reaching some compromise to what degree they will be allowed to use their abilities in the game.

Really, with all the special sensory abilities enemies can have access to, I wouldn't want to try and advance recon even if Stealth allowed for "Elder Scrolls" style sneaking; the risks are entirely too great, especially since even with Darkvision, there's a lot of things you can miss noticing in dim light.

 

[billd91]

One of the main problems with stealth is....its an incredibly "selflish" act timewise. And by that I mean stealth often turns into this 1 on 1 thing between the rogue and the DM. Now for a quick 5 minute thing, no big deal.

However, when you get into the situations where a rogue wants to "scout the camp" or "scout the dungeon", suddenly the rest of the party is twiddling their thumbs while the rogue and the DM have this private adventure. And you can't really blame the rogue. When the rest of the party has terrible stealth, you don't want to bring them along. And when that kind of scouting can be so incredibly useful, it makes sense to do it.

So part of the desire to regulate it frankly is to prevent those kind of moments from becoming the "rogue show".

There are a number of different times this kind of thing can come up - not just stealth. Any time an individual PC interacts with an NPC, deals with their personal backstory or hooks, etc are acts of "selfishness" under these terms. Scouting and other stealthy events are just a more common case. And, honestly, I'd hope that the benefits of engaging in any of these is something the other players find worth doing, otherwise they may not be in the right group activity.

But at least 5e has a means of handling stealth options with a larger group than just the rogue - group checks. Except for the problem of OneD&D's DC 15 as the required check to hide now...

 

[Stalker0]

There are a number of different times this kind of thing can come up - not just stealth. Any time an individual PC interacts with an NPC, deals with their personal backstory or hooks, etc are acts of "selfishness" under these terms. Scouting and other stealthy events are just a more common case. And, honestly, I'd hope that the benefits of engaging in any of these is something the other players find worth doing, otherwise they may not be in the right group activity.

But at least 5e has a means of handling stealth options with a larger group than just the rogue - group checks. Except for the problem of OneD&D's DC 15 as the required check to hide now...

The difference is, PCs often go together to interact with NPCs. Sure they may not be throwing down the big diplomacy’s but they can still interact.

 

[Argyle King]

Please: I am listening... (looks at the 3.x and 4e stealth revisions).

points to virtually any of the non-D&D books I own

 

[Cadence]

If there are 100 orcs, it’s going to be very difficult to maintain the conditions necessary to hide from all of them at once, since their lines of sight likely cover a lot of ground.

And now I want the bard tag-team activity where one of them tells the orcs to see if they can count how many orcs there are in the room and the other sneaks by in a silly costume...