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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aaron2" data-source="post: 1594147" data-attributes="member: 1436">I've discussed indoors. At night or in a dungeon, detection is often automatic at 60'. The Orc guard can't be seen until the darkvision-equipped party approaches within 60' and, since the orc isn't moving, the party has no effective way to detect him (short of magic). It's not unreasonable to expect the orc sentry to have cleared the terrain within 60' of his guard post, it would be illogical to assume otherwise. If the party is illuminated by light-source then hiding is irrelevant anyway. Outdoors, in full sunlight, your ability to Hide depends on terrain which greatly limits how close you can get. That pretty much leaves dense forests and moonlit nights. Since my party strives to avoid nighttime encounters (esp. in graveyards!) and uses animal companions/wildshaped druids to scout forested areas, close-in sneaking encounters just don't happen often. Finally, if the orc "guard" consisted of ten orcs, having the rogue creep up and sneak-attack -one- of the orcs was often a career-limiting decision. In those cases, the entire party attacks in mass which avoids any need for Spots and Listens. In short, IME, Hiding is more of a passive action (for ambushes mostly) while Moving Silently is active. Hiding is more a long range thing (for determining encounter distances) while Move Silently is more up close. It also depends on party composition. As I said before, a wildshaping druid elminates many of the typical ranger-esque scouting needs and a melee rogue, who relys on flank-induced sneak attacks, won't be traveling far from his fighter/barbarian companions. The party IMC, had a melee rogue, who was  later replaced by a monk (no Hiding here), a bard that cast invisibility and a wildshaping-crazy druid. What the game really needs is some sort of % chance of noticing. The term "casually observing" isn't clear. For example, a group of guards are playing cards in the guardhouse. The door to the room is open. Under the RAW, it is impossible to quickly walk across that opening of the door without being seen. Currently, I've handled that situation by making the rogue make a Bluff check to distract the guards and allowing him to walk by unnoticed; this wasn't a very satisfying solution. How do you handle that situation? I'm not so much against combining the skills for the sole purposes of skill point allocation, although I'd rather just give out extra skill points since that directly addresses the problem. What I'm against is combining the two actions (hiding and moving silently) into one action ("sneaking") because it confuses the various circumstantial modifiers (such as the +10 for improved cover) and places the burden on the observer to determine, by choice of skill to use, whether the sneaker failed to perform on one of the two tasks.  How does a character determine which sense skill to use. What if the character pick Spot because its +5 better than his Listen but the sneaker is behind improved cover (+10 bonus) or invisible? Likewise, what if he picks Listen but the sneaker is 100' away or Silenced? Does the DM tell the player "an invisible assassin is Sneaking up on you"? If the DM chooses, he would have to compare two sets of numbers before picking the best chance for the target; if so, he'd be doing just as much work as with the RAW where you have to compare four numbers anyway.For me, it adds more confusion that is solves in reduced die rolling.Aaron</blockquote>

Verification