D&D 5E How does Surprise work in 5e?

[Azrothan]

This isn't an encounter I'm preparing. I brought this up as an example to counter some of the other examples, and to show how limiting the conditions where Surprise applies to only those situations where every possible threat has gone unnoticed can lead to equally absurd results.

The DM is the one that prepares the encounters and what everyone (apart from the players) is doing and how they fight. If some creature just happens to surprise someone - that's fine. But if they usually fight by attempting to surprise - they know what it takes to get it done.
So if the dragon wanted to surprise the party, it would have struck before the party encountered the kobold or after the they had dealt with the kobold. If the dragon was just sneaking about for other reasons and just happened to attack them at that moment, thus failing to surprise - how is that an equally absurd result?

I can't even imagine having a rogue PC in an adventure where basically every encounter begins with surprised enemies. It starts off as completely unintentional "abuse" (rogues are a sneaky bunch) - but I'm sure the party will try to ensure the rogue isn't spotted at any cost once they understand what's happening and how insanely good surprise is (or start sneaking with everyone for more chances to get that high roll).

But I'm not contributing anything new to this thread, I'm stuck on repeat.
If you want surprise to be something that, most of the time, requires some effort to achieve. Use the intrepretation that a threat means "one side".
If you want to use the interpretation that a threat means "one individual", I can't stop you.
If you want to make your own definition of a threat that covers something that neither of these do, consider having one group of enemies on the initiative as "a threat". Though I strongly suggest you keep the PCs as one threat to avoid the sneak/invisibility abuse, but that falls into house ruling territory.

I think the start of the encounter means the first event in the first round.

The first step of combat is for the DM to detemine surprise (p189).

 

[pemerton]

If A wants surprise then B will have to sit out the first round

But what does "sit out" mean in mechanical terms? In pre-5e it looks like Readying or Delaying, which is itself an action in combat, hence meaning that it is no longer the start of the encounter.

I don't have a good handle on how to interpret "sit out the first round" in terms of 5e mechanics.

This is my interpretation also, but to come almost full circle, in the video, Chris Perkins did grant A surprise and denied their party thier actions against B, after B had one initiative.

This was discussed someway upthread.

Part of the issue is that ascertaining surprise, and narrating it, leans heavily on the fiction, whereas initiative rules are mostly metagame devices.

One way of fudging it, as a GM, is to narrate A emerging from cover - generating the surprise - then have B attack (because B won initiative) and then have A attack on its turn. The narration for A begins with fiction - after all, everything is happening largely simultaneously in the fiction, and the initiative rules are just a device for mechanically ordering actin resolution - but then shifts to mechanics when it takes its attack second in the round, after B.

Whether this is the best way to handle the issue in 5e, I can't say.

No need. It is already perfectly clear from context.

I don't think it's "perfectly clear", when one group of posters is reading it as a universal quantification and another group is reading it as an existential quantification, and both readings are perfectly permissible interpretations of the natural-language sentence.

 

[pemerton]

So if the dragon wanted to surprise the party, it would have struck before the party encountered the kobold or after the they had dealt with the kobold.

The puzzle, for me, is making sense of this in the fiction. Why is it less of a surprise for a dragon to suddenly pop up from behind its treasure-mound and breathe fire on you because there happens to be a single kobold inanely capering around in front of you?

If anything, the presence of the kobold might make it easier for the dragon to surprise the PCs because they are distracted by the kobold.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Surprise is different in 5e. In the playtest there was a readiness score and sneaking, now both are thrown together into one surprise roll.
Which means "catching someone in a moment where he is not prepared for combat".
Someone in a fight is always prepared for combat.

The assassin ability should only be useful against a creature not prepared for combat.
Otherwise it is a normal attack from hiding, usually with intiative, since the other creature does not know that the assassin is there.
I would have loved to have readiness as an option in the DMG, but surprise as is works well enough.

I am playing around with reintroducing readiness in some form for someone on guard duty, but otherwise I believe, a simple sneak vs. perceotion is ok. With advantage and disadvantage depending on situation.

I also may just let the hiding person attack at the highest intiative modifier if he attacks a person who is ready for combat. We will see.

 

[fjw70]

But what does "sit out" mean in mechanical terms? In pre-5e it looks like Readying or Delaying, which is itself an action in combat, hence meaning that it is no longer the start of the encounter.

I don't have a good handle on how to interpret "sit out the first round" in terms of 5e mechanics.

To me it means the monsters in the open don't join the combat until the second round (or later if they want). Something like this.

The PCs are talking to a group out in the open (B). Their allies (A) are hidden nearby. The PCs don't detect A and A attacks with surprise. In the first round the PCs and A roll initiative but only A can attack. At the beginning of round 2 B joins the combat and rolls initiative. B simply doesn't become part of the combat until round 2.

If B wants to join the combat in the first round then A doesn't get surprise (but the PCs cannot act against A until A reveals themselves).

That's my take.

I don't think it's "perfectly clear", when one group of posters is reading it as a universal quantification and another group is reading it as an existential quantification, and both readings are perfectly permissible interpretations of the natural-language sentence.

You are welcome to your opinion but only one interpretation of that phrase makes sense. The other interpretation allows the PCs to slowly walk up to a monster and still get surprise if the rogue sneaks up on the monster and begins combat undetected. Not allowing the monster to act in the first round in this situation makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Hriston]

In 5e parlance, not previously noticed is "unseen".

Actually, hidden is unseen and unheard.

If you rule that a not previously noticed foe who gets the jump on its victim gets Advantage (for being unseen) and also the considerable tactical benefit of acting first, you have a very robust "surprise system", which works whatever the number of involved parties and the way you split them, that rewards ambushes but don't make them "I win" buttons, that doesn't over reward the DEX build, that avoids the cheese of people acting twice in a row in the stop motion action economy, and works as written when there are two parties involved.

Where does it say that Surprise only applies to situations involving two parties? Everything else you describe here falls outside of Surprise (an unseen attacker, for example, may have been noticed, because heard, and just not seen) and so is not Surprise.

 

[Hriston]

Because a lot of people seem to be forgetting that you can already get a bonus for being an unseen attacker:
Yes, one of your goblins managed to go undetected - but the other 4 were spotted. That goblin will still get a benefit for not having been spotted (unseen attacker), although not the Surprise the 5 of them were hoping to get when they hid in the bushes.
This is why it helps the issue to mention it, so that people don't get stuck in the mindset that surprise is the only bonus to be gained/lost by trying to be sneaky.

I haven't read anyone's post on this thread where they deny the advantage of being unseen. The reason I haven't referenced that rule in any of my posts, until now, is that the OP was about how to apply Surprise. I assume everyone has access to the rules.

It was an eye opener for me for when I first started thinking about this whole issue, as I had to call in a house rule directly in the first encounter because the players refused the logic that one goblin would make them all freeze in place while his detected friends were going to get a free round.

If your narrative description of Surprise is that everyone gets frozen in place, then I wouldn't blame the players for questioning what is going on. Either give the players an imaginative description that explains how being attacked by the hidden goblin sets the characters back on their heels, or simply inform them that the characters are mechanically surprised as per the rules.

 

[pemerton]

only one interpretation of that phrase makes sense. The other interpretation allows the PCs to slowly walk up to a monster and still get surprise if the rogue sneaks up on the monster and begins combat undetected. Not allowing the monster to act in the first round in this situation makes absolutely no sense.

But none of this is a comment on clarity. It's a comment on the merits of a particular interpretation. And those merits are disputed - for instance, as I've suggested multiple times upthread, it may be that the rogue in question is not a threat.

If the monsters really are startled by the threat of the rogue's sudden attack, though, then to me it makes perfect sense for them to hesitate. Their morale is temporarily broken. It's not as if it was never a viable tactic in real world warfare to gain an advantage over an enemy by having part of one's force attack from hiding. Doesn't Conan also use this tactic in the climax of Hour of the Dragon?

 

[Hriston]

... initiative is an abstraction and all the action is taking place simultaneously: let the archers attack, and then have the visible bandits go, and then roll initiative after that first round. And in the wyvern case, have the GM declare the cultist attacks, then announce the wyverns' presence also ("You also see wyverns that you hadn't noticed swooping in!") - hence the PCs are surprised.

I agree with this understanding of initiative. I think it most closely aligns with what is said on p. 69 of the PBR, where the round is described as an organizational structure that has reality only within the game itself and not within the world it describes:

"The game organizes the chaos of combat into a cycle of rounds and turns. A round represents about 6 seconds in the game world. During a round, each participant in a battle takes a turn. The order of turns is determined at the beginning of a combat encounter, when everyone rolls initiative."

So, if we take the words beginning and start to mean the same thing, then the start of the encounter would be roughly the period of metagame time in which initiative is being rolled. I would extend this back to include all of steps 1-3, basically the period in which the DM is setting things up. Nothing has actually happened yet in-game. So how does the DM determine surprise before anyone has had a chance to act, assuming that it is the actions that unnoticed threats will be taking that will actually cause surprise? If it is monsters surprising characters the answer is simple: because the DM knows what the monsters are going to do on their first round of action to surprise the characters. He knows they are going to be surprised. In the case of characters surprising monsters, however, I suspect it is very much the same thing. The DM can assume that the characters, once positioning themselves to cause surprise, will follow through on surprising the monsters based on the assumption that they'd be fools to squander the opportunity to act with surprise. Hence the DM determines surprise at the beginning of a combat encounter. This does not preclude the possibility of another outcome, however. At this point, there may not even be any combat.

I think the start of the encounter means the first event in the first round.

I agree with this as well, but only from an in-game perspective. The encounter begins at the gaming table. Step 4 is just the first place where we enter through a window into the game world. At this point the actions (resolved in initiative order) and surprise that were determined at the true beginning of the encounter actually take place within the game.

So if there are three groups - the PCs, ambushers A and collaborators B - then if B wins initiative, and acts, by the rules as written I do not think that A can then act and surprise the PCs, because it is no longer the start of the encounter.

I think this is where all of the above comes into play. The actions that cause surprise don't need to happen before surprise is determined, indeed they cannot, so the surprised party is denied their actions, allowing the other party to act first and "cause" the surprise. The order of actions taken by A or B in that context is irrelevant, if I'm not mistaken.

 

[Azrothan]

The puzzle, for me, is making sense of this in the fiction. Why is it less of a surprise for a dragon to suddenly pop up from behind its treasure-mound and breathe fire on you because there happens to be a single kobold inanely capering around in front of you?

If anything, the presence of the kobold might make it easier for the dragon to surprise the PCs because they are distracted by the kobold.

If the kobold is there to distract the adventurers, roll for deception and see if they fall for it?
Does it make sense for you "in the fiction" that the dragon would surprise the party if it appeared in the first round, but not when making the same appearance in the second round?
Because that's the same sense needed to make the surprise rule not happen in the first round just because the kobold is getting attacked.
Even though events don't follow the rule for surprise doesn't mean the players/pcs jaws don't drop when they suddenly face a dragon in the second round of a combat or the moment they decide to engage the kobold.

If your narrative description of Surprise is that everyone gets frozen in place, then I wouldn't blame the players for questioning what is going on.

It's certainly not the way my players described their frustration over the fact that enemies they had spotted would get to act as well...
I fail to see how not seeing posts about people denying the advantage to being unseen has anything to do with people forgetting about that rule in this context.

I can't see how any further discussion will move this topic forward.
I hope someone out there had use of my comments.
Hope you all have a year filled with D&D goodness!