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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8724715" data-attributes="member: 19857">I'm going to engage in just a bit of premise rejection here - in my experience the surprise rules are far less often used by the players trying to gain surprise on monsters, and far more often used by DMs whose monsters are trying to gain surprise on the PCs.  Because the PCs are often noisy groups whose actions echo down the hallways and alert people that they're there, who can then lurk in wait to see if they want to try to attack them or avoid them.  The number of times across all editions where I've used surprise rules because the players were intentionally trying to set up an ambush or even just move stealthily are dwarfed by the number of times I've had to use the surprise rules because the PCs had caused some kind of alert to be raised.So the question isn't just is it worth it for the players, it's also a question of whether that sort of encounter and the bonus it provides has value or not.  And contrary to what I say above - I'm not sure it does.  If you're running a survivalist type game where every resource is tracked and the players are supposed to be playing super cautiously (tapping every 10' with a pole, search for traps at every opportunity, etc.) then surprise rules make a lot of sense to use and are valuable to that style of play.  They encourage players to play cautiously, which is what you want.  OTOH if you're playing a game where you want to encourage the players to take more risks and be more "heroic", or if you want to gloss over the kind of minutia that a survivalist game revels in, then doing that sort of thing as a DM runs counter to the kind of game you want the players to play and the surprise rules are less important unless the PCs want to set up an ambush or you do.  In which case it might be more useful to have a set of "ambush rules" that are used just for that situation rather than the more general surprise rules, which are much more broad and count any sort of unexpected threat as potentially a surprise.</blockquote>

Verification