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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7529407" data-attributes="member: 71699">I'm not trying to make a case for "never". Such cases are not pragmatic for human-moderated RPG. What my house rule is intended to lay out is what is "usually sufficient". Players can rely upon their character's ability to do or not do it, simpliciter.Exactly! So my house rule is intended to tell players what they can always rely on. It should be rare - maybe never in our experience - that being unseen is not sufficient to hide.I certainly agree that sometimes a character can hide when "not clearly seen" - sustaining the literal truthiness of that statement. Examples include the racial traits "Naturally Stealthy" and "Mask of the Wild", the class feature "Hide in Plain Sight", and the feat "Skulker". For characters that don't have those traits, they should know that they usually cannot try to hide if they are seen to any extent.Our positions could be nearer than our debate belies. Say I am playing a character with Skulker and am in a dimly-lit environment. I can expect that usually I can take a Hide action, while Billy, not having Skulker or anything like it, cannot. Having taken that action, I am now unseen so far as creatures whose passive Wisdom (perception) is lower than my Dexterity (stealth) check result. A case where hiding indeed bestows unseen on a character. For me this sort of case falls under "exception-not-the-rule". If my permit to hide is that creatures around me are distracted... then as soon as they look my way I am not unseen. In such a case, I was unseen not because of what I did, but because of what they did. Hiding did not then bestow unseen.I want to make sense of this for my players. I want them to understand that if they start out unseen, they can hide. If they have something - a feat, a spell, whatever - that forms an exception: great! They can't rely on being hidden making them unseen: the two are not invariably connected.</blockquote>

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