D&D (2024) New stealth rules.

[mellored]

The advantage then being that they might have to dash to catch up with you, and so couldn't get a melee attack. They could shoot you after moving, but then if you dash again you might be able to slip away. I really think a lot get's fixed if you change the rule to have the invisible condition go away at the end of a turn in which you move (assuming you didn't hide again during that turn, which would reset it).

So I like end of turn. Being able to jump out of hiding and get advantage on melee is fun.

And I think the extra action cost to maintain it works well too. It should take effort to maintain.

But I'm less of a fan of rolling every turn, even if it does make sense. So probably keep the same DC as before.

 

[OB1]

To address this:

The Invisible condition does not concern itself with noise at all. I think this makes sense. The Invisibility spell, granting magical invisibility (ie: One Ring-style invisibility), gives you the Invisible condition without any other strings attached. You can make as much noise as you want, and you're not losing the Invisible condition it grants.

The Hide action does care about noise. It also grants the Invisible condition, but it's not the Invisible condition which determines if you can be heard; it's the conditions attached to the Hide action which do. To Hide, and retain the Invisible condition, you have to not make noise.

As such, you are as quiet as your Stealth check managed to make you, at a baseline. If you yell out a warning to a friend about to step into a trap, that was your choice, and not part of the baseline noise of your Hide action. But if you want to know how noisy you are being in general, just look at the Stealth check you made.

Exactly! And, like yelling to a friend, if you move from your hidden position you may also make enough noise to qualify. You didn't make the Dex check when you were moving, you made it when you were standing still behind or in cover. Movement is a change to what's happening in the scene. My new rule proposal simplifies this by saying that when you move on your turn, by the end of your turn, the enemies you were previously hidden from have determined where you are (unless you hide again). Outside of initiative order, the DM asks for a Dex (Stealth) check to sneak by the guards, but this doesn't grant the invisible condition, it just determines whether or not the players succeeded at their declared action.

 

[mellored]

How about..

You have invisibility until the end of your next turn

Still breaks early if you attack or make noise.

 

[Kinematics]

Taking a little side trip...


Star Wars: Millennium Falcon on the Death Star

Han, Luke, and the rest used Hide after the Falcon was captured by the Death Star. Using smuggling compartments likely gave them advantage, since those are designed to hide things.

The stormtroopers that boarded to Search the ship failed their Perception checks, and didn't find them.

Being hidden (Invisible) gave them advantage when they jumped the stormtroopers, with both initiative and the attack.

They then had a couple stormtrooper suits. Han and Luke changed into them. In this case, I'd want to call it a Disguise action rather than a Hide action, but it still gives them the Invisible condition.

They can be seen, but they don't lose the Invisible condition. Basically, they are not seen as a threat or outsider or prisoner or whatever else would classify them as an "enemy" to the stormtroopers, so they can move freely as long as they don't do anything to cause someone to re-evaluate their Perception of the intruders.

They lose the Invisible condition when they shoot the guards in the prison center. But, even ignoring that, if we proceed as if that hadn't happened, they lose it when Han fails a Deception check against the officer checking in on the prison room. That failure would have counted as an enemy finding them, ending the Invisible condition. They weren't "seen" (though that's more due to the setting which allows for a communicator system), and the supervisor wasn't actively Searching for them, but it still counts as "finding" them.

--

All fine as an illustration of the use of the Invisible condition for different types of Hiding. However I think it also helps me define "find":

Find: Identifying a creature as an enemy or target.

In particular, why does being seen act as finding a hidden person so often? Well, in combat, a person you don't know wearing armor and carrying a weapon pretty much instantly classifies them as an enemy, so seeing someone is sufficient for "finding". For a guard patrolling a warehouse, pretty much any person who isn't another guard isn't supposed to be there, so automatically gets classified as an enemy. At a party, the waiter is supposed to be there, and gets overlooked until someone notices the dagger he's got tucked in his belt, at which point he is clearly dangerous, and thus an enemy.

Or in the case of Han trying to bluff his way through the attention of some prison supervisor, failing the Deception check lost him the illusion of being a legitimate guard, and thus he was re-classified as an enemy.

For targets, bandits searching a house and finding children hiding in the closet doesn't classify them as enemies, but as targets — witnesses or hostages or prisoners or whatever. The bandits were doing a broad search to find anything useful to them, and the children could count as that. Identifying legitimate "targets" fulfills the concept of "finding" a hidden creature.

On the other side, though, if a guard is searching for an intruder and finds a cat, the druid wasn't "found". It wasn't the target being searched for, and wasn't identified as the druid in animal form. It could be that the Perception check made by the guard allowed him to see the cat, but just visual line-of-sight wasn't sufficient to "find" the target because the guard failed to properly identify her.

 

[Kinematics]

Exactly! And, like yelling to a friend, if you move from your hidden position you may also make enough noise to qualify. You didn't make the Dex check when you were moving, you made it when you were standing still behind or in cover. Movement is a change to what's happening in the scene. My new rule proposal simplifies this by saying that when you move on your turn, by the end of your turn, the enemies you were previously hidden from have determined where you are (unless you hide again). Outside of initiative order, the DM asks for a Dex (Stealth) check to sneak by the guards, but this doesn't grant the invisible condition, it just determines whether or not the players succeeded at their declared action.

If I were to correlate movement with noise, I'd say:

• If you Dash, you always make enough noise to lose the Invisible condition by the end of your turn, regardless of concealment.
• If you walk, you make enough noise to be noticed, and will lose the Invisible condition if you do not end your turn concealed.
• If you move at half speed, you do not make enough noise to be noticed, and will still have the Invisible condition even if you don't end the turn concealed. There's still a risk of being seen, though.

 

[Remathilis]

The diversion into noise/silence has got me thinking.

We are assuming the Hide action is the same as stealthing (sneaking around, being quiet) when it's completely possible hiding is just for exactly that: hiding. It's just for ducking behind a curtain, a wall, or another object and staying hidden until you give away your position (though noise or action).

My rationale: pass without trace still exists and afaik is unchanged. It seems silly to grant a +10 to stealth checks if its only purpose is to make a DC 15 test. Now I could be wrong, but if the only thing that stealth did was make Hide actions, it would say so.

It's also possible that the missing key is the hide action is used to initially hide, but the regular stealth skill is to sneak past a guard afterwards. Again, no skills are strictly defined in the PHB. I mean, we don't have the rules for picking pockets and locks, balancing on a beam, or diagnosing a disease either.

Anyway, here's to hoping.

 

[OB1]

Taking a little side trip...


Star Wars: Millennium Falcon on the Death Star

Han, Luke, and the rest used Hide after the Falcon was captured by the Death Star. Using smuggling compartments likely gave them advantage, since those are designed to hide things.

The stormtroopers that boarded to Search the ship failed their Perception checks, and didn't find them.

Being hidden (Invisible) gave them advantage when they jumped the stormtroopers, with both initiative and the attack.

They then had a couple stormtrooper suits. Han and Luke changed into them. In this case, I'd want to call it a Disguise action rather than a Hide action, but it still gives them the Invisible condition.

Freaking fantastic use of the scene! Love it!

I think you've got the Hide action right on when they go into the smuggling compartments, and also how they subdue them after with advantage.

Where I would differ with your breakdown, is that after that, the invisible condition no longer comes into play, since they are no longer Hiding. Instead, they've described that they are putting on uniforms to sneak up to the observation room. Now we are back to the regular rules of play, DM describes the scene, players say what they do, DM describes what happens, asking for a check if the results are uncertian.

So a DM might ask for a Cha (Stealth) check or a Cha (Deception) or even a Dex (Deception) aginst the DC they determine is appropriate for sneaking up to the room given all the little details of the scene, quite possibly with Advantage since they put on the guard uniforms. Or they may even determine that no roll is needed due to the uniforms, they just succeed!

The Invisible condition is provided for taking a very specific action (combat) and the floor DC of 15 I think is there to separate it from other types of hiding and sneaking. If you want the condition, you must Hide with your action, meet all the requirements, and get at least at DC15 Dex (Stealth) check to gain it.

That works for the majority of situations (like the one you described) where the intent is to use the Invisible condition to gain advantage on an attack against an enemy.

Where it (slightly) fails, RAW, is in another scenario.

Let's take an empty field on the edge of a forest, 100' across. You are by the forest, and start your first turn in combat by Hidiing (which you are successful at). You could now start moving across the field, 30' at a time over multiple turns, and by the rules, the Invisible Condition doesn't end. Now, of course, a DM could rule that the PC is 'somehow' seen, thus loosing the benefits of the condition, but if you rule that, now we're in a situation where when you are hidden and 10' away from an enemy, and want to come out and attack the enemy, the DM will have to determine which way they are facing to know whether you were seen before the attack.

And it just keeps getting weirder from there. But if movement always causes the Invisible Condition to go away at the end of the turn in which you move after hiding, we have a simple way to provide for the common use of hide (gain advantage on an attack when you stop hiding) while not allowing the absurd results or super nitpicking of where every enemy is looking. For all other uses of Stealth, the Hide action and the condition it provides is ignored in favor of the regular order of play.

 

[Pauln6]

Right, I wouldn't bog down play with an acrobatics check every 5 feet or a stealth check every 6 seconds even though RAW I could. I ask for Ability checks to abstract many small things going into what the players are trying to acomplish when they tell me what they are doing in response to the scene I've set, only asking for a roll if there is a meaningful chance of failure.

I might not ask the Paladin to do it twice, I'm still working that out with the new rule I suggested. It probably makes sense not to ask for it. That was sort of left over from how I would adjudicated the rule RAW. That because noise above a whisper breaks the invisible condition, I'd ask for an additional Stealth role anytime someone moves from their hiding spot, because the question of whether that would make noise above a whisper is uncertain (higher DC if enemies are close, lower if they are far away). The new rule gives an added benefit to ease play, so yeah, I probably wouldn't ask for a roll using the new proposed rule.

I think moving at half speed should not require a second check.

 

[Kinematics]

Let's take an empty field on the edge of a forest, 100' across. You are by the forest, and start your first turn in combat by Hidiing (which you are successful at). You could now start moving across the field, 30' at a time over multiple turns, and by the rules, the Invisible Condition doesn't end. Now, of course, a DM could rule that the PC is 'somehow' seen, thus loosing the benefits of the condition, but if you rule that, now we're in a situation where when you are hidden and 10' away from an enemy, and want to come out and attack the enemy, the DM will have to determine which way they are facing to know whether you were seen before the attack.

I would say that you are not merely "somehow seen", but that you have been "found" if you stand out in the middle of an empty field like that. You are dressed and armed as a combatant, and moving into a combat zone. The other side doesn't know you (assuming you hid before they initially saw you), so you must be an enemy.

Even if you were dressed as a farmer and not a fighter, the fact that you're moving through a combat area instead of staying out of it marks you as an enemy.

This doesn't merely suppress Invisible's benefits, it ends the condition.

And it just keeps getting weirder from there. But if movement always causes the Invisible Condition to go away at the end of the turn in which you move after hiding, we have a simple way to provide for the common use of hide (gain advantage on an attack when you stop hiding) while not allowing the absurd results or super nitpicking of where every enemy is looking. For all other uses of Stealth, the Hide action and the condition it provides is ignored in favor of the regular order of play.

While it's a common case in combat, I would not consider it universal, and thus I don't think that that end condition is appropriate.

Even with combat, if we assume that this is intended to be used such that you can leave hiding and approach and attack an enemy with advantage in melee, that only works if you still have the Invisible condition when you make the attack. If you lose the condition when you move, then it's worthless. If you make the attack, that already ends the condition, and the vast, vast majority of the time you're going to want to perform an attack action on each of your turns.

The only thing ending on the end of your turn if you move does is force you to make additional checks if you're trying to do something aside from direct combat. That feels like just slowing down gameplay just for the sake of slowing down gameplay.

Ending on being found covers pretty much any situation I can think of that might otherwise be adding these extra stealth checks. It just sweeps away all these extra rolls on every single thing you do. It simplifies things down to, "OK, you're hidden. Do the things you wanted to be hidden for, and try not to get spotted."

 

[OB1]

@Kinematics but how do you determine when you are found? What I'm trying to solve for is how to allow the invisible condition for it's basic purpose (Surprise, Adv on attack, avoiding opportunity attack) w/o an additional roll to resolve the uncertainty that is there if you move out of your hiding spot. The only time you are rolling again is if you move and you want to be hidden again (in which case you would need to satisfy the requirements).

So if in the middle of combat, you're trying to sneak around to get to the Altar of Doom to remove the Demon Crystal so that Oban the Destroyer can't be summoned, and it takes several turns to get to the altar, you would need to hide each turn, which seems reasonable to me because the circumstances of each attempt at hiding would be slightly different. This takes all of the subjectivity over if you are found or not out of the equation. Keep succeeding on the checks, and the enemy doesn't notice you headed for the Altar.

But again, and this is important, if the intent is to be stealthy while moving (slip past the guards, sneak up to a campsite, etc) you aren't Hiding. In those cases, you're making a Dex (Stealth) roll to determine the outcome of what you are trying to do. That could be one roll that covers several minutes of time, with the results being either you succeeded, or you failed.

On the other hand, if you hear guards coming down the hallway and take the Hide action, then wait for them to be within 30' of you, it's only one check. You can either let them move past you, or attack, in which case you'd have advantage on initiative and get advantage on that first attack you make when you come out of cover.

All of this is to say that I'm willing to extend the Invisible Condition granted by succeeding at the Hide action for an additional 6 seconds when it's your turn if you leave your hiding spot, but not past that. For regular infilitration during an exploration scene, which isn't broken down into individual rounds and turns, a single roll against a DC set by the DM resolves the situation.