D&D 5E Questions on stealth...

[Guest 6801328]

In other words, in Banana's interpretation stealth isn't actually possible. Not only is stealth not possible, but something that is practically automatic in the real world..."hiding" when you can't actually be seen...requires you to roll your Stealth skill.

Here's what I'm envisioning:

"Ok, I'll Hide behind the stone wall."

"Huh? It's 8 feet high. I stand behind it."

"Yeah, but now you need to roll your Stealth skill."

"Crap...I rolled a 4."

"Ok, you're standing back there and you sneeze."

"You said there's a thunderstorm..."

"You sneezed really loud."

Show us on the doll where the mean rogue touched you?

 

[Dausuul]

Stealth requires that you be unseen. Typically, this means invisible, or behind total cover, or in a space that is totally concealed. A blinded enemy can't see you, either.

WotC has been sparing with errata this edition, but this is one of the few things they did change. Stealth now requires that you not be seen clearly. Thus, you no longer need heavy obscurement*. The definition of "seen clearly" is left to the DM.

[size=-2]*DEFCON1 argues that heavy obscurement allows for the possibility that someone might see you, and thus nothing has actually changed. I disagree. The obscurement rules are explicit that anyone trying to look into heavy obscurement is effectively blinded. If you are heavily obscured, you cannot be seen at all. Therefore, the errata permit hiding without heavy obscurement. However, this is more a semantic question than anything else.[/size]

 

[DEFCON 1]

*DEFCON1 argues that heavy obscurement allows for the possibility that someone might see you, and thus nothing has actually changed. I disagree. The obscurement rules are explicit that anyone trying to look into heavy obscurement is effectively blinded. If you are heavily obscured, you cannot be seen at all. Therefore, the errata permit hiding without heavy obscurement. However, this is more a semantic question than anything else.

Agreed. In an effort to make stealth and hiding rules that could be interpreted by as many different types of DMs as possible, they made them very loose. Thus due to the semantic arguments Dausuul mentions that we could all have back and forth (which we've all done ad nauseum a year and a half ago)... there's no "right" answer here. Which some DMs I'm sure appreciate, and some DMs hate with the fire of a dozen suns. But whatcha gonna do?

 

[Uller]

As always...reading some of these stealth threads, it's like some folks never played hide n' seek as a kid or never snuck up on someone to startle them as a prank. Being stealthy isn't hard. It isn't some supernatural ability and you can easily do it even in broad daylight and even if your target has line of sight to you. All it takes is a little bit of awareness of your surroundings and understanding the state of mind of your target. When I was a kid we used to play a game similar to hide and seek except the hiders had to get to a tree or post before being spotted. The person that was 'it' had a certain amount of time to find everyone. It required you not just hide, but move and observe not only the person who was it, but the other players as well to take advantage of what was happening around you.

Here's ET hiding in plain sight:



In this scene the mom didn't spot ET because it did not occur to her that it would be possible for there to be a real live alien hiding among the stuffed animals. ET took advantage of this. He stayed still and beat her passive perception check.

Very often being stealthy just means keeping your eye on your target and moving when it isn't observing you and getting behind a bit of concealment or in a shadow when it is.

Last night I was reading a bit before bed. One of my children was playing quietly on the floor. An older child came into the room quietly, waited for the younger one to be distracted with a toy and moved quickly behind her and ROARRED and tickled her making her scream and laugh. The older one had her back to me. So I quietly stood up, waited for her to be laughing then did the same to her. Is this not what the stealth rules are meant to cover? If you are interpreting the rules in a way that makes the features of many classes useless (not to mention, makes it impossible to do something that normal every day people do routinely), you might be being a wee bit too literal.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In other words, in Banana's interpretation stealth isn't actually possible. Not only is stealth not possible, but something that is practically automatic in the real world..."hiding" when you can't actually be seen...requires you to roll your Stealth skill.

That's a remarkably disingenuous reading of my interpretation.

"Ok, I'll Hide behind the stone wall."

"Huh? It's 8 feet high. I stand behind it."

"Yeah, but now you need to roll your Stealth skill."

"Crap...I rolled a 4."

"Ok, you're standing back there and you sneeze."

"You said there's a thunderstorm..."

"You sneezed really loud."

My ruling merely asserts that there is a difference between "cannot see you clearly" and "doesn't know you are there," and that the Stealth skill is for moving from the former to the latter. The assumption is that even if you can't see something clearly, you know where it is, because humans are not purely visual creatures and for the purposes of abstraction it's assumed that PC's and NPC's are paying close attention to their surroundings.

Yes, running around the corner of a wall by itself isn't enough to make an enemy lose track of you. They can't see you - you have total cover. But it's not like you've stopped breathing heavily from carrying 100+ lbs of equipment or like your armor isn't making metallic clanks or like they didn't hear where your footfalls stopped. They know enough to know if you'd be caught in a fireball placed at the edge of the wall.

If you run around the corner of the wall and use the Hide action, though, that Stealth check is you quieting your breathing, trying to smooth out your armor's movement, and picking the right terrain to put your feet. If your Stealth check is successful, they don't know where you went (just that you disappeared around the side of the wall), and so they won't know if the fireball placed at the edge of the wall would catch you or not.

So yeah, running around the corner of a wall and then "sneezing loudly" (or stepping on a branch or stumbling and making an involuntary cry, or not being able to quiet your breathing, or whatever makes sense in context) is a thing that might happen if you flub a Stealth check.

It's even supported in the PHB:

...if you make noise (such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase), you give away your position...Signs of [an Invisible creature's] passage might still be noticed, however, and it still has to stay quiet...In combat, most creatures stay alert for signs of danger all around, so if you come out of hiding and approach a creature, it usually sees you.

"Knocking over a vase" and "sneezing loudly" seem to fall into the same general camp of "failed a Stealth check and gave away your position."

As always...reading some of these stealth threads, it's like some folks never played hide n' seek as a kid or never snuck up on someone to startle them as a prank. Being stealthy isn't hard.

You're under-selling how hard it is to be sneaky (it's like ET was hiding from someone who was familiar with aliens like him and in fact has occasionally been in fights with them in a dangerous world of high adventure) but even if you weren't, there's other reasons to prevent Stealth from being an "I Win" button.

Like, this isn't the Arkham games where if Batman sits around for 30 seconds everyone just forgets he was ever there and for some reason nobody uses flashlights. This also isn't something like WoW where you just go invisible when you enter "stealth mode." In the story of the sneaky rogue, they must use the environment and their context to their advantage, choosing the right time and the right place and the right kind of distraction and every act is risky.

Stealth - like anything else - should be an Interesting Decision, not a common and universally available default tactic.

 

[Garresh]

That's a remarkably disingenuous reading of my interpretation.


My ruling merely asserts that there is a difference between "cannot see you clearly" and "doesn't know you are there," and that the Stealth skill is for moving from the former to the latter. The assumption is that even if you can't see something clearly, you know where it is, because humans are not purely visual creatures and for the purposes of abstraction it's assumed that PC's and NPC's are paying close attention to their surroundings.

Yes, running around the corner of a wall by itself isn't enough to make an enemy lose track of you. They can't see you - you have total cover. But it's not like you've stopped breathing heavily from carrying 100+ lbs of equipment or like your armor isn't making metallic clanks or like they didn't hear where your footfalls stopped. They know enough to know if you'd be caught in a fireball placed at the edge of the wall.

If you run around the corner of the wall and use the Hide action, though, that Stealth check is you quieting your breathing, trying to smooth out your armor's movement, and picking the right terrain to put your feet. If your Stealth check is successful, they don't know where you went (just that you disappeared around the side of the wall), and so they won't know if the fireball placed at the edge of the wall would catch you or not.

So yeah, running around the corner of a wall and then "sneezing loudly" (or stepping on a branch or stumbling and making an involuntary cry, or not being able to quiet your breathing, or whatever makes sense in context) is a thing that might happen if you flub a Stealth check.

It's even supported in the PHB:


"Knocking over a vase" and "sneezing loudly" seem to fall into the same general camp of "failed a Stealth check and gave away your position."


You're under-selling how hard it is to be sneaky (it's like ET was hiding from someone who was familiar with aliens like him and in fact has occasionally been in fights with them in a dangerous world of high adventure) but even if you weren't, there's other reasons to prevent Stealth from being an "I Win" button.

Like, this isn't the Arkham games where if Batman sits around for 30 seconds everyone just forgets he was ever there and for some reason nobody uses flashlights. This also isn't something like WoW where you just go invisible when you enter "stealth mode." In the story of the sneaky rogue, they must use the environment and their context to their advantage, choosing the right time and the right place and the right kind of distraction and every act is risky.

Stealth - like anything else - should be an Interesting Decision, not a common and universally available default tactic.

He's really not underselling it at all. Being sneaky is easy given that you use your environment correctly. Back when I was working various jobs in college, I'd often see how long I could hang around someone(who knew me) before they noticed me. Maybe there were coworkers hanging outside a theater we needed to clean waiting for it to get out. And I'd just sneak up behind them and longer. Other times I'd hide using a little 1foot stylistic outcropping in the wall, or sneak past them into the theater while they weren't aware.

Even in bright retail environments it was the same situation. People are on the job, either consumed in their work, bored and spacing out, or simply not focusing on 360 degrees of vision. If stealth was so hard, why is Hide and Seek a game that children play?

And you're right, it shouldn't be universally applicable, because there are no other features that are like that.* But the difference should be a line between suboptimal and optimal. A rogue should really almost always be able to hide. But hiding in an empty room behind a single stone pillar is functionally useless anyways. The thing is most class features have degrees of failure or usefulness, not outright uselessness except in predetermined circumstances. A wizard can still fireball a fire resistant enemy, or use weaker ice cantrips or just cast buffs as a last resort. He's still using his core feature(spells). Likewise for any spell caster. A rogue by Raw and by the more strict interpretations loses a class feature. And that sucks. :/


*Please ignore base attacks, dashing every round as a rogue, cantrips, damage spells, crowd control spells, healing, identify spells, dispel magic, detect (any of them), smite, stunning strike, eldritch blast, shove(athletics), grapple(athletics), magic missile, hex, and hunter's mark. =P

 

[Guest 6801328]

That's a remarkably disingenuous reading of my interpretation.

I was being only very slightly hyperbolic...that is literally how I read your interpretation: that you basically cannot use stealth in the way that most people think of it being used in a fantasy setting.

But, yes, reading your update I'm relieved that you see the difference between "cannot see you clearly" and "doesn't know you are there." Still, given that you only might let somebody remain hidden if they peek over the edge of a roof at people below who have no idea he is there suggests to me we have two very, very different standards of what should be allowable.

 

[5Shilling]

I'm not going to get too involved in the discussion but I have an anecdote that I think might be relevant.

As a teenager I was in the army cadets here in the UK, and eventually got promoted to cadet sergeant. Several times a year we would go away to camp on an army base and take part in various field exercises.

One year we did a night time intelligence gathering exercise. We had to sneak up on a campfire and overhear some information without being found. There were patrols out looking for us and they had torches. We were allowed to use camouflage - I think I only used a little, mostly facepaint to take away the shine from my skin.

One moment has always stuck in my mind. I was crawling along in a wooded area when a patrol appeared headed right for me. I flattened into the undergrowth and froze - but my hand was still sticking out. I knew that if I moved it I would almost certainly be spotted as they were now very close - one of the things we learned about camouflage is that movement attracts attention.

To hide the gleam of my eyes and the recognisable shape of my face (the human brain is incredibly good a spotting faces) I kept my head down and didn't even look at the patrol as they came right up to me, shining their torches around... and carried on past. One of them even trod on my hand without noticing (boy was I glad the ground was soft).

The point being that in the right circumstances, someone that knows what they're doing can stay hidden from people looking for them even within 5 feet on them. You can get trodden on and if you are lucky still stay hidden.

(oh and in the end I made it to the camp-fire but didn't get back to the starting point in time to report the information. Still happy with my effort though).

 

[Springheel]

I'm not going to get too involved in the discussion but I have an anecdote that I think might be relevant.

I flattened into the undergrowth and froze - but my hand was still sticking out. I knew that if I moved it I would almost certainly be spotted as they were now very close - one of the things we learned about camouflage is that movement attracts attention.

Yes, nothing draws the eye like movement. As far as I know this isn't reflected in the rules anywhere (except for the Ranger's camouflage ability). Any DMs actually house-rule this? Would you give a character advantage on their stealth check if they stayed perfectly still? Or is the idea that DMs are supposed to be a little more free-form, and just assume the hiding player is staying still when necessary and only moving when the opponents are looking the other way?

 

[Uller]

You're under-selling how hard it is to be sneaky

No. I'm not. Everytime we have one of these threads where people insist that stealth ends as soon as you can be seen we have people coming out of the woodwork with examples from real life showing the opposite. We're talking about a game where characters routinely kill gigantic monsters with swords, wounds are healed with the power of believing real hard and arcane bolts are summoned to unerringly strike their target. But the rogue tip toeing past a guard is too much.

The problem isn't stealth being an I win button. The problem is the surprise rules. Characters that are good at stealth also tend to win initiative. Which means they tend to get two full rounds of actions before their foes can act. In a game where most fights last only 3 or 4 rounds that leaves DMs feeling like stealth made it too easy.

We fixed this in our group by changing the surprise rules. When you are surprised and your init comes up you become unsurprised and are moved to the back of the queue. You still get to act this round, just at the end of it. So the rogues and monks have a greater incentive to strike then move away during the surprise round rather than stand there and get two rounds worth of attacks. It does wonders for nerfing ambushes without taking away a key feature of so many classes.