D&D (2024) New stealth rules.

[Argyle King]

Yes. And I’m just noting that your first post in a 2024 d&d discussion inserted 4e d&d into that discussion.

Pem isn't the only one to see 4E influence in the new rules.

 

[Iosue]

Pem isn't the only one to see 4E influence in the new rules.

Indeed. Bloodied is back, and conditions, at least, are making a move away from the “natural language” presentation of the 2014 rules.

Though I prefer the natural language presentation, I don’t see this as necessarily a bad thing. Like any new edition, 5e was in some ways a reaction to the previous one. Now with a bit of temporal distance from 4e’s baggage, they can afford to introduce more of its useful innovations.

 

[Seramus]

@DavyGreenwind was kind enough to give us a screen shot of the Hiding rules in the Exploration section.

 

[Argyle King]

Indeed. Bloodied is back, and conditions, at least, are making a move away from the “natural language” presentation of the 2014 rules.

Though I prefer the natural language presentation, I don’t see this as necessarily a bad thing. Like any new edition, 5e was in some ways a reaction to the previous one. Now with a bit of temporal distance from 4e’s baggage, they can afford to introduce more of its useful innovations.

I'm don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either.

Honestly, there was a time when I had a love/hate relationship with 4E, and certain things about it bugged me. There still are some aspects of it that bother me, but I learned that a lot of that was (imo) because the "official" advice for how to run the system was often not very good (and sometimes actively bad) advice.

Also, the PR campaign of "ze game will remain ze same" did the edition a disservice because the game didn't remain the same. So trying to approach DMing or playing 4E as though it was the same as 3E lead to a poor experience.

The good things from 4E were encounter design, terrain effects, and a much better way -than 5e- of handling feats and ability score increases.

The good-and-bad thing about 4E was highlighting keywords and specifically-defined conditions. They were good because the rules were written in a way that were easy to understand. (It's alien to me when I see people say 4E was "complicated.") However, they were also bad because the rigid definitions were, much like the current discussion about Invisible, not always very well thought out in terms of how different parts of the game interacted with each other.

Often, what "made sense" was trumped by how the game specifically said that something worked.

Were there houserules? Obviously, yes.
(At one point, I had an entire notebook covering that I designed monsters differently and used my own XP Budget tables.) In any home game, you can run things differently.

At the same time (and as I've already said in this thread,) RAI is not as obvious as you might think given that the 5e24 rules appear to be taking influence from an edition that was written around very specific terms and (for a lack of better words) "coding language."

 

[Kinematics]

Looking at the text of the Invisible condition again, I see that the "can somehow see you" phrase helps in the framing of hiding vs spells, where being hidden may or may not, at any given point in time, mean an enemy can actually see you. (IE: This is separate from using See Invisible to "somehow" see you).

Basically, if we accept that the Invisible condition is retained even when you're in the open (for example, hiding in a crowd), the ability to target you based on sight does not have to involve having found you. If you are hidden in a crowd, the guard may not have found you, and can't identify you in particular, but there are spells that target people in an area that you can see — and despite being "Invisible", you can still be physically seen, and thus affected by such a spell, even if only due to randomly picking people out of the crowd.

This lends weight to the consideration that the Invisible condition can still apply even when you can be physically seen. At the same time, hiding can also be done such that you can't be physically seen, in which case you can't be targeted.

Basically, having the Invisible condition granted through Hiding means you may or may not be physically seen at any given time, and this can change from moment to moment. The "can somehow see you" phrasing means you have to evaluate whether you can be physically (or via some alternate sense) seen for the purpose of certain actions.

However, that also applies to the third section, where you may or may not get advantage on attack rolls (or disadvantage attack rolls against you) based on whether you can somehow be seen.

So, going back to the guard at the gate scenario: If you walk up to him while having the Invisible condition, you are still physically visible, which means he can "somehow see you". That means you do not get the benefits on attack rolls or being targeted by spells, though you retain the advantage on initiative. On the other hand, if you snuck up behind him (or walked past him and then turned around and attacked from behind), he would not see you, and you regain those roll advantages and targeting restrictions.

Being Invisible in that scenario is the "don't notice me" type of invisibility, which meshes with the "awareness" aspect that I detailed in my post about "find".

It also means that the See Invisible spell doesn't matter with respect to the Invisibility granted by Hiding. You'd still need line of sight to see someone, and if you have line of sight, the Invisible (Hidden) target can "somehow be seen", so adding See Invisible on top of that doesn't change anything. See Invisible just makes it so that you can somehow be seen regardless of secondary effects which may prevent that, such as the transparency effect of the Invisibility spell, but not things like total cover.

It's taken a bit to really fit everything together, but it's really making sense now, as written.

 

[Iosue]

@DavyGreenwind was kind enough to give us a screen shot of the Hiding rules in the Exploration section.

View attachment 375266

Yup. Much more streamlined, at least on the player-side. There will likely be advice on adjudicating Hiding in the DMG, but as far as I'm concerned, I'll just stick with the 2014 rules, which have served me well.

 

[FrogReaver]

@DavyGreenwind was kind enough to give us a screen shot of the Hiding rules in the Exploration section.

View attachment 375266

1. It says DM decides when you can try to hide
2. It says when you try to hide you use the hide action
3. The hide action itself has its own requirements for when it can be used. And all it does on success is apply the invisible condition.

Thus, I don’t think it particularly helps out the predicament, because no one has an issue for the requirements listed in the hide action to take the hide action. It’s what can happen after you’ve obtained the invisible condition that’s the problem.

 

[Seramus]

1. It says DM decides when you can try to hide

Interestingly, the phrasing doesn't specify "trying to hide" but "circumstances appropriate to hiding." So I can see different DMs coming to different conclusions on either end of the spectrum - such as the circumstances no longer being appropriate to hiding meaning you are no longer hidden.

But I do think it's unnecessarily vague, leaving open huge ambiguity.

 

[Seramus]

DP.

 

[FrogReaver]

Interestingly, the phrasing doesn't specify "trying to hide" but "circumstances appropriate to hiding." So I can see different DMs coming to different conclusions on either end of the spectrum - such as the circumstances no longer being appropriate to hiding meaning you are no longer hidden.

I’m not sure what you think that difference in wording does. Sounds exactly the same to me.