D&D (2024) New stealth rules.

[Belen]

I think that is fairly easily guessed at.

A big problem with the 2014 rules was, since facing is not a thing and the hidden condition disappeared the moment you broke cover, it was technically impossible to benefit from being hidden. You would get line of sight to shoot a crossbow, therefore break cover, therefore no hidden condition and no advantage. Not the intent, but the RAW. So part of the changes were to allow things like looking up over the wall you hid behind to fire, or rushing out of a dark alley to stab someone.

It was called surprise. If they broke cover, then they got a surprise round where they get their advantage.

It was clear to me before and I play it that way all the time.

Even if I use the 2024 rules, it will work the same way. I will not use the 2024 surprise because it is also dumb.

 

[Pauln6]

This is why they should not have nerfed surprise.

I agree with you because it should be a surprise round where the hidden rogue gets a free round to attack with advantage because they surprised the person.

The surprise round allowed the group to dish out ludicrous amounts of damage before the enemies can act. It becomes game breaking at higher levels.

 

[Belen]

The surprise round allowed the group to dish out ludicrous amounts of damage before the enemies can act. It becomes game breaking at higher levels.

As it should.

If the characters are smart enough to generate a total party surprise, then great. They prepped and planned for it.

My stealthy players tend to break from the non-stealthy so they may take out the guards etc while the other players wait around the corner.

 

[mellored]

My stealthy players tend to break from the non-stealthy so they may take out the guards etc while the other players wait around the corner.

You still can.

But you have to do it in one action instead of 2.

 

[Epic Meepo]

It was called surprise. If they broke cover, then they got a surprise round where they get their advantage.

It was clear to me before and I play it that way all the time.

Even if I use the 2024 rules, it will work the same way. I will not use the 2024 surprise because it is also dumb.

I'm not asking to challenge your ruling, just to get clarification, because I'm genuinely curious: If a character successfully hides during combat and then comes out of hiding to make an attack, you would give them a surprise round in the middle of combat? Is that in place of their normal turn in initiative or in addition to it?

 

[Pauln6]

As it should.

If the characters are smart enough to generate a total party surprise, then great. They prepped and planned for it.

My stealthy players tend to break from the non-stealthy so they may take out the guards etc while the other players wait around the corner.

As it should.

If the characters are smart enough to generate a total party surprise, then great. They prepped and planned for it.

My stealthy players tend to break from the non-stealthy so they may take out the guards etc while the other players wait around the corner.

I think that's fine, although it should really be reflected in sneak attack rather than two rounds of everyone. But if DC15 is going to be the new baseline to become invisible, PCs are as likely to get ambushed and that could be an awful lot of damage from the monsters at high levels and probably the death of your scouts.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That may or may not be true, depending on whether those who have reacted to my posts on the topic did so because they agree with me, or for other reasons. (And to reiterate so that my position is clear, I agree that the text in the book indicates that becoming and/or remaining unheard was intended to be achievable with the Hide action, I just think the rules they wrote for that action fail to clearly effectuate that intent.)

So you do not believe it is in dispute what the intent was.

But regardless of how many participants in a thread hold a particular opinion, I'm going to classify as disputed any issue where, after discussion, there are one or more community members who dissagree as to what the rules say. You may prefer a higher threshold for classifying a disagreement as a dispute, and that's fine--it simply means we're each using the term differently.

Yeah, I hold a higher standard than "one person disagrees" to call a subject disputed. If I didn't, I would have to claim that the existence of the internet, the sun, and birds are "disputed". Because there is actually more than one person who disputes the existence of those things.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Problem is, we don't know RAI for stealth.

Easy enough for the two weapon fighting needing 2 hands. We also have Crawford confirming it.

There are several common sense rules for stealth.

Common sense excludes permanently invisible. But what about half cover and light obscurement?
At the end of your turn?

It's not clear which one is intended.

I think that may be intentional. Because light obscurement might be enough in one situation, but not enough in another. Sneaking around the edges of a camp while it rains is potentially fine, while slipping past a golem while there is only a light smoke might not.

I know we despise GM fiat, but there are simply too many different scenarios to cover all of them, and it was going to have a strange corner case either way.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It was called surprise. If they broke cover, then they got a surprise round where they get their advantage.

That does nothing mid-combat.

It was clear to me before and I play it that way all the time.

Even if I use the 2024 rules, it will work the same way. I will not use the 2024 surprise because it is also dumb.

Feel free to change it if you want. Surprise rounds weren't even RAW in 2014.

 

[Xetheral]

So you do not believe it is in dispute what the intent was.

At a high level, yes, I agree that the designers intended the 2024 rules to be able to resolve a character attempting to prevent enemies from locating them by sound. Partially that's because of the mention of "sneaking past a guard" in the stealth rules, and partially that's because I can't imagine the designers intentionally omitting something so fundamental.

But since the subject effectively isn't discussed in the 2024 PHB, I have no idea how they intended the new rules to be used to resolve such attempts. On the one hand, if they're keeping the 2014 assumption that creatures know the location of anyone they can see or hear, then active effort would typically be required to become or remain unheard. But the rules funnel attempts at "sneaking past a guard" to the Hide action, which only mentions keeping quiet as a requirement to keep the Invisible condition. This is in tension with the Invisibility spell, which also provides the Invisible condition but with no requirement to remain quiet. How then would a character with the Invisible condition from the Invisibility spell go about becoming unheard? Do they need to successfully take the Hide action like they would in the 2014 rules, redundantly obtaining the Invisible condition, but this time able to lose the extra copy of the condition if they make noise above a whisper? That seems to be the most functional approach, but it's clunky at best, and in any event it's is a non-obvious reading of the rules. I can't imagine someone new to D&D who reads the 2024 rules casting the Invisibility spell expecting to need to follow it up with an action that on its face merely provides a more-limited version of the Invisible condition. So maybe the Hide action wasn't intended to be how one resolves attempts to become/remain unheard? Or maybe merely hearing a creature isn't enough to locate them in the 2024 rules? Or maybe something else? I just don't know how it was intended to be run from the PHB text we've seen so far.

Yeah, I hold a higher standard than "one person disagrees" to call a subject disputed. If I didn't, I would have to claim that the existence of the internet, the sun, and birds are "disputed". Because there is actually more than one person who disputes the existence of those things.

My statement was explicitly limited to statements by community members regarding rules interpretations under discussion in a forum thread. In that context, I feel it is important to respect others' contributions by acknowledging differences of opinion when they persist. I am not making any broader claim about how to define what is and is not "disputed."