Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="5ekyu" data-source="post: 7417502" data-attributes="member: 6919838">Scenario: Party is proceeding down a wooded path at night with torches. Heavy foliage lines the path, which is 30 feet wide. Noise off the side of the path up ahead draws their attention. PC#1 goes up to check it out, is asked to roll Perception and fails. Crossbow bolts are fired out of the dark, heavy foliage and strike PC#1. PC#2 asks if she saw the spot from where the bolts were shot. DM asks for Perception roll and there is a success. PC#2 fires her bow into that exact spot, rolling a natural 20. Unbeknownst to anyone in the party, after firing the crossbow bolts, the two enemies were able to stealth away from that spot (rolled higher on Stealth than any of the party member's Passive Perception).How do you, as DM, rule that Crit?Assumptions Raiders are heavily obscured (on the edge of it) and the Travellers are lightly obscured.Raiders are hidden at the start.Raiders get superior initiative on the travellers as the travellers work their way towards them (technically this means they also won init over all the travellers.) Surprise is not indicated and also not necessary for the example.Turn 1 - Radier 1 fires from hidden, reveals his position to the approaching target but is still heavily obscured. radier-1 then uses a bonus action hide ability (perhaps a rogue?) to also hide and move away quietly. (Stealth vs perception determines if he manages to hide - if not - his position is still known.)Raider-2 does the same.Traveller-1 (pincushion) At this point, no perception check is needed to know where they fired from. If any of the stealth checks were failed, the position of those who failed even after movement is also known - no check required. Either way, they do not know (and know they don't know) the location of the raiders who succeeded at the stealth. Pincushion can choose to fire on the old spot but does so knowing they may or may not be there. Either way, pincushion fires with disadvantage because they are shooting into an area with heavy obscurement and thus  - blinded  - unseen rules apply - not to see if they hit the spot but to see if they hit anything of import in that spot. if they fire into an empty spot - the final result will be a miss. if they fire into an occupied spot and score a crit (double 20's) its a hit and a crit.The big key takeaways are:You  need some special feature to let you shoot and then hide - usually they require bonus actions.In this case, the "unseen" comes from the area the raider is in, not the stealth, so even while they attack, the attacker remains "unseen" but their location is revealed "no longer hidden.". (Would be different if they were unseen by dint of the "hide action" say in light foliage. Would be different if the raiders could not see thru whatever is heavy obscuring them.)The default is you can perceive the location "not hidden* and if you hide then the other guy should know they can no longer hear where you are... that **should** be made clear to the player by the GM.</blockquote>

Verification