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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rod Staffwand" data-source="post: 7318020" data-attributes="member: 6776279">Yes, you can attempt to hide without specifically taking the hide action. The hide action allows you to make a stealth check to attempt to hide, but it does not preclude gaining hidden status from another action or situation.Hiding means concealing your presence or (if failing that) your position. Any action or activity that you take that achieves either of those may warrant a hiding check contested by your opponent's perception when it becomes relevant. The exact criteria required is left up to the DM to keep the myriad of potential interactions from forcing complex rules bloat to deal with it.For invisibility, as in your first scenario, I would absolutely give the witches a hide check even without using the hide action. In this situation, the casting of invisibility serves as the necessary action. The creature does something and gets a similar result. "Quick, let's hide with our invisibility spells!" is functionally the same as "Quick, let's hide behind the drapes!"But say the PCs surprise the witches and, on the first round of combat, they each decide to cast invisibility. Should they get a free hide roll or should they be required to use the hide action? In this case, their presence and positions are already known to the PCs. They are not hidden, but they are unseen.Since the PCs know their positions they can make attacks against them with disadvantage. If the witches want to obscure their positions (forcing the PCs to guess them in order to successfully attack), they need to actively achieve it by using the hide action. This represents sneaking, preventing kicking up dust or leaving footprints and so on.If something happens which I think might cause the PCs to loose track of an invisible (but not hidden) witch, I might allow it a chance to hide without necessarily taking the hide action to do so. Maybe the witch moves far enough away or casts misty step, of maybe the whole area is hit with a fireball. On the other hand, maybe the ground is covered in dried leaves making moving silently practically impossible.</blockquote>

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