D&D 5E is stealth an action?

[spectacle]

Why is that absurd? I'm with the other people who replied. If someone is standing in front of you making no attempt to hide, they can be seen. Otherwise the world would be a weird place with people randomly vanishing. Eyesight could not be trusted.

This doesn't need to be a rule. The authors of the rulebook felt there were certain things common sense enough not to have to publish in the book. One of them is that people can see normally if nothing is changing the situation.

What if that someone is invisible and sitting on a stone bench in the corner quietly reading a letter laying on the table in front of them? They are not making any attempt to hide, they are sitting right in the open and just happen to be naturally invisible. But someone else in the room would have to extremely attentive to notice the faint sounds that indicate that someone is sitting there.

It is completely absurd to assume that anyone and anything not taking the hide action is automatically detected by everyone else. Most of the time they will be but not always. How do you set the DC to detect them? Use the guidelines in the rules to figure out if it's a easy, normal or hard task depending on the environment and the kind of clues that exist.

And BTW, eyesight really cannot be trusted. Your mind plays a lot of tricks with what you think you see, and your memory will further mess with what you think you saw even a short time ago.

 

[Noctem]

What if that someone is invisible and sitting on a stone bench in the corner quietly reading a letter laying on the table in front of them? They are not making any attempt to hide, they are sitting right in the open and just happen to be naturally invisible. But someone else in the room would have to extremely attentive to notice the faint sounds that indicate that someone is sitting there.

It is completely absurd to assume that anyone and anything not taking the hide action is automatically detected by everyone else. Most of the time they will be but not always. How do you set the DC to detect them? Use the guidelines in the rules to figure out if it's a easy, normal or hard task depending on the environment and the kind of clues that exist.

And BTW, eyesight really cannot be trusted. Your mind plays a lot of tricks with what you think you see, and your memory will further mess with what you think you saw even a short time ago.

It might be absurd to you but that is how the game works. The only way for that invisible character to gain the benefits of being hidden, being unseen and unheard and for others to not know where you are, is to roll stealth and beat the passive perception of observers including observers who later enter the room. Simply being invisible only grants you the bonuses listed in the conditions section of the PHB at the back. Mainly that you are unseen. You can still be heard, you can still be tracked, you still leave prints and marks of your passage behind and so on. And to go even further, let's say you were invisible and in a magical effect that removed sound you STILL wouldn't be hidden and people STILL would know that you're in the room because you're not hidden. By the rules of this game, the only way to gain hidden is to roll stealth outside of DM fiat. Passive perception is essentially everyone's personal radar, it is used as the DC to beat for hiding and the DC to detect traps and so on.

 

[spectacle]

Nobody has been able to point out any rule that says you are detected unless you take the hide action, that is merely an assumption people are making. They have tried to support this assumption with absurd examples of characters "vanishing while in plain sight", and I've countered by an equally absurd example of an invisible and silent character supposedly being detected instantly.

So show me the rule saying that anyone not taking the hide action is detected, or accept that your assumptions are just your ruling and not "how the game works"
The stealth rules in 5E really are a mess, they pretty much need DM fiat to work at all, and no two DMs are likely to run things the same.

 

[Nytmare]

What if that someone is invisible and sitting on a stone bench in the corner quietly reading a letter laying on the table in front of them? They are not making any attempt to hide, they are sitting right in the open and just happen to be naturally invisible. But someone else in the room would have to extremely attentive to notice the faint sounds that indicate that someone is sitting there.

It is completely absurd to assume that anyone and anything not taking the hide action is automatically detected by everyone else. Most of the time they will be but not always. How do you set the DC to detect them? Use the guidelines in the rules to figure out if it's a easy, normal or hard task depending on the environment and the kind of clues that exist.

The OP asked "what do the rules say about a scenario like this?" and people are trying to answer him.

You can invent as many corner cases as you want to try to prove that the abstract rules don't perfectly represent how things would realistically work in a realistic world. Especially if you're trying to shoehorn in non combat activities into a combat round. I don't think anyone is going to be surprised if you can find a set of circumstances that creates some kind of paradox. Thankfully the rules have a hard wired "Go as your DM" rule built in to them for where things get fuzzy like this.

The combat round is not a laboratory and you shouldn't try to use it to scientifically prove how the real world does and does not work.

 

[CapnZapp]

There are essentially no rules regarding stealth, except "your DM is in charge, what she says is the rule".

 

[S'mon]

Nobody has been able to point out any rule that says you are detected unless you take the hide action, that is merely an assumption people are making. They have tried to support this assumption with absurd examples of characters "vanishing while in plain sight", and I've countered by an equally absurd example of an invisible and silent character supposedly being detected instantly.

So show me the rule saying that anyone not taking the hide action is detected, or accept that your assumptions are just your ruling and not "how the game works"
The stealth rules in 5E really are a mess, they pretty much need DM fiat to work at all, and no two DMs are likely to run things the same.

Partly it's people bringing in baggage from 3e/4e. Partly though I think it's a deliberate ambiguity in 5e - they want people to be able to run it like pre-3e, using common sense and GM adjudication, but they also don't want to alienate 3e/4e fans. So you get stuff like this which is potentially ambiguous - it is possible to apply an absurd literalist approach to the Hiding rules, apply them out of combat, and say that invisible creatures are automatically detected unless deliberately Hiding.

To me it seems clear that the intent re the Hiding & 'Can Always Hide While Invisible' rules is that you can be in combat with people who know you are there and take a Hide action to have them lose track of
you, which would not be possible if you were visible - you'd have to move out of line of sight.
As you say, there is no indication that opponents are always aware of you unless you take the
Hide action. Most people would take it that goes without saying.

 

[Noctem]

Nobody has been able to point out any rule that says you are detected unless you take the hide action, that is merely an assumption people are making. They have tried to support this assumption with absurd examples of characters "vanishing while in plain sight", and I've countered by an equally absurd example of an invisible and silent character supposedly being detected instantly.

So show me the rule saying that anyone not taking the hide action is detected, or accept that your assumptions are just your ruling and not "how the game works"
The stealth rules in 5E really are a mess, they pretty much need DM fiat to work at all, and no two DMs are likely to run things the same.

Well let me put it this way. The only way in the entire game to gain the benefit "enemies don't know where you are and have to guess" is to be hidden from another creature. I know this because I've written the guide for stealth and hiding and I have actually gone through the entire PHB. Similarly, the only way in the entire game to be considered stunned is to actually have the condition stunned on your character.

Now let me ask you this: Do you really need a rule that says that unless you are under the condition stunned you are not stunned? The lack of evidence, if there really is in fact a lack of evidence, does not mean you're right by default. However, because the game has to specifically say that hidden grants you the benefit of being unseen + unheard + people have to guess where you are, it does indicate that if you're not hidden you don't gain these benefits unless there's other things to consider (like being invisible). So if you're in a room with someone else, you know they are there unless they are actively trying to hide (IE used an action to roll stealth vs your passive perception and succeeded in beating it).

Invisibility is powerful, but it is a means to an end only. It doesn't grant you the same benefits as being hidden. Nothing else in the game does, even if you're both unseen and unheard. DM's may make rulings of course based on context.

But to get back to the OP, the DM was right.

 

[Nytmare]

Nobody has been able to point out any rule that says you are detected unless you take the hide action, that is merely an assumption people are making.

Other free actions that are obviously available to you because the rules don't say you can't do them when you don't take a Hide action:

Ascend to godhood
Go grocery shopping
Merv Griffin
Frog golf
Time Machine Hitler Kill (TM)​

 

[Noctem]

There are essentially no rules regarding stealth, except "your DM is in charge, what she says is the rule".

agree to disagree on that one.

 

[spectacle]

Other free actions that are obviously available to you because the rules don't say you can't do them when you don't take a Hide action:

Ascend to godhood
Go grocery shopping
Merv Griffin
Frog golf
Time Machine Hitler Kill (TM)​

These absurd examples only serve to reinforce my position that treating the rules, specifically stealth and hiding as absolutes aren't going to work