D&D 5E Rogue Stealth in Battle

[Blackbrrd]

Actually, this is no longer true. The errata and newer versions of the PHB and basic rules specifically address this.

The new text reads (emphasis added):
The DM decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding. When you try to hide, make a Dexterity (Stealth) check. Until you are discovered or you stop hiding, that check’s total is contested by the Wisdom (Perception) check of any creature that actively searches for signs of your presence.
You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly, and you give away your position if you make noise, such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase. An invisible creature can’t be seen, so it can always try to hide. Signs of its passage might still be noticed, however, and it still has to stay quiet.

That's a really good errata in my opinion. They only clarified what they ment by the initial text, but didn't state explicitly.

Personally, I am treating the last seen location as a unhideable location. This makes the PC's in my game usually move around a little and makes a whole lot more logical sense. The Rogue gets sneak attack just about always anyway due to attacking monsters with an ally adjacent, so it's not a huge nerf, and it works both ways. If the players asks if there is stuff like bushes, chairs, tables, rocks etc which they can use to hide behind, I am usually ok with there being some. The exception being places made ready for war, like a castle in war-mode, where all brush would have been cleared away etc.

 

[Hriston]

i recommend not using passive perception at all - it's a terribad mechanic, quite broken and harms the game more than it helps. Just roll (sometimes in secret, perhaps). It's far too easy for a specialised hider to hide otherwise. DMG somewhere states you can treat hiding as a contest - roll stealth vs roll perception.

It's always a contest. That's why a tie results in you not being hidden since the default assumption you are trying to change with your Stealth check is that you're unhidden. This is a separate issue from whether to use the passive score.

 

[Pickles III]

Once combat is underway, it is usually impossible to hide in my games. Your enemies know you are there somewhere, and are keeping an eye/ear out for you..

So you think they included the hide action (& gave rogues the ability to use it as a bonus action) as some sort of perverse joke?

i recommend not using passive perception at all - it's a terribad mechanic, quite broken and harms the game more than it helps. Just roll (sometimes in secret, perhaps). It's far too easy for a specialised hider to hide otherwise. DMG somewhere states you can treat hiding as a contest - roll stealth vs roll perception.

I recommend ignoring this advice & letting expert sneaks sneak. If you roll every contest as opposed rolls the dice take over from the abilities to too large an extent.

Every check is best represented as a roll against a static value unless it is explictly a contest or PCs on both sides.

 

[Uller]

These threads come up periodically and there always seems to be two camps: DMs who are averse to allowing the rogue to hide in combat and those that are pretty liberal about it. I think it's a matter of taste really and as long as your table is good with it, it's good...I like that about the 5e stealth rules because it leaves wiggle room for the particular tastes of the table...if I were playing in a game run by a DM that says "no, you can't hide because the barrel is too obvious" rather than imposing adv/dis or other modifiers and giving me a chance to try, I'd likely choose not to play a rogue...that's okay with me...there are lots of other classes that are fun that don't have to ask the DM for permission to use their core abilities on a regular basis.

But for me, I definitely fall into the more liberal camp. As a DM, I _want_ my players to be able to use their PCs' kewl abilities. A rogue using their cunning action to hide and gain advantage on their next attack (or avoid being targeted) is an important class feature, it isn't free (it costs them the chance to dash or disengage) and it isn't guaranteed to succeed (although for rogues with expertise it is often effectively guaranteed).

It's really not much different than the fighter's extra attacks, casters more powerful spells or the barbarian getting advantage and extra damage on pretty much every attack. We don't try to make those classes justify the use of those abilities...they just happen. The rogue's hiding ability is a bit more circumstantial but in general he should be able to pull it off once or twice a combat.

YMMV but at our table most combats take place in dark and confusing places with 10+ combatants. To me, the rogue is the character that is adept at taking advantage of the confusion and fear that is a regular feature of combat so the base assumption is the rogue can find some place to hide. It is extraordinary circumstances that would lead to the rogue being flat out unable to hide (the brightly lit featureless room and everyone is staring at the rogue and tracking his every move). Is it more difficult sometimes? Sure.

As someone alluded to up-thread, I really think Hiding/Stealth covers two very different circumstances. Out combat hiding and subterfuge in combat. The typical rogue is good at both so (to me) the stealth skill combined with hiding and cunning action encapsulates both. Out of combat hiding is attempting to convince your target that you are not in the area at all. He is completely unaware of you. It is for scouting, spying, escaping and evading. In combat stealth is not meant for that. When the halfling "hides" behind the big fighter, of course the enemy is still aware of him. It's just that the halfling has just caused the enemy to momentarily lose focus enough to allow him to gain advantage or make it impossible or more difficult to target him directly with an attack.

If you want to make it harder for the rogue to hide, give him disadvantage. If you want to make it even harder, give him disadvantage and give his target advantage. A typical 5th level rogue with 18 dex, +3 prof and expertise in stealth will have a +10 in stealth...that's pretty hefty and a guaranteed success against a 10 Passive perception. So give the target advantage which makes the target DC 15. With disadvantage to the rogue, it's now about a 65% chance of success.

At our table, when the rogue announces she is hiding, she doesn't make her check then. Instead, she makes the check when it matters such as when she emerges from hiding to target an enemy or on an enemy's turn. If the enemy is aware of her it gets to make a perception roll against her stealth roll. If the enemy is not aware of her at all then he gets only passive perception.

That accomplishes two things: 1) It allows me to allow her to use her cool ability without making it a practically guaranteed success all the time and 2) the more people she is trying to hide from the more difficult it is for her to hide from them all. Different targets might have advantage or grant her disadvantage. Whether or not the target was aware of/targeting her, the target's line of sight to her, what the target is currently doing all come into play. It's far better than just saying 'no'.

Typically she hides once or twice a battle. After that she usually has other more interesting things to do or the battle ends.

Again, YMMV.

 

[Psikerlord#]

So you think they included the hide action (& gave rogues the ability to use it as a bonus action) as some sort of perverse joke?



I recommend ignoring this advice & letting expert sneaks sneak. If you roll every contest as opposed rolls the dice take over from the abilities to too large an extent.

Every check is best represented as a roll against a static value unless it is explictly a contest or PCs on both sides.

I think they gave rogues a bonus action hide for those who like that sort of cartoon like hiding in mid-combat. I dont. Happily the stealth rules say the DM (really the table) decide when hiding is possible in their game.

As for randomness, never had a problem with it before in any earlier edition. "Passive" is just the old "take 10". It was bad then and is still bad now (with the exception perhaps of using it for "knowledge" checks, possibly).

 

[MG.0]

if I were playing in a game run by a DM that says "no, you can't hide because the barrel is too obvious" rather than imposing adv/dis or other modifiers and giving me a chance to try, I'd likely choose not to play a rogue...that's okay with me...there are lots of other classes that are fun that don't have to ask the DM for permission to use their core abilities on a regular basis.

But for me, I definitely fall into the more liberal camp. As a DM, I _want_ my players to be able to use their PCs' kewl abilities. A rogue using their cunning action to hide and gain advantage on their next attack (or avoid being targeted) is an important class feature, it isn't free (it costs them the chance to dash or disengage) and it isn't guaranteed to succeed (although for rogues with expertise it is often effectively guaranteed).

I mentioned the barrel thing.

Don't get me wrong, I allow hiding in combat, but there has to be some uncertainty in where the character really is. So a 3' high x 10' long wall, or a set of multiple barrels would be sufficient to give some uncertainty in the exact position of the hiding character.

A rogue behind a single barrel, however, means the enemy has the same amount of information as the rogue. In that situation, if the combat were 1-on-1, then the enemy would be at no more of a disadvantage than the rogue. In the heat of combat the rogue is already going to get sneak attack if an ally is close enough to harass the enemy. If no allies are close enough to harass the enemy, then I assume we are close to the 1-on-1 scenario; namely the enemy has enough presence of mind to watch out for the rogue to pop out of hiding to attack, given he knows EXACTLY where the rogue is.

Rogues don't have to ask my permission to use their abilitites, but their abilities are more sensitive to surroundings than some other classes. I only ask that it make sense.

 

[MG.0]

As for randomness, never had a problem with it before in any earlier edition. "Passive" is just the old "take 10". It was bad then and is still bad now (with the exception perhaps of using it for "knowledge" checks, possibly).

Coming directly to 5th from 1st/2nd edition, the whole 'passive' thing is still new to me and I haven't fully decided on how much I like it.

That said, I did some experimenting today. I wrote a computer program to simulate rolling contests vs rolling against a static DC. The differences are pretty minor and boil down to your bonus vs. your opponent's bonus (or the DC difference from 10 for a static DC). Unless your opponent's bonus is 5 or more higher than yours (or the DC is equal to or higher than 15+your bonus) you are slightly better off rolling against a static DC by a small percentage. At an extreme range of +-10, the difference my be as high as 15%, but normally it is much lower.

I think my only gripe with passive skills is that they are based on 10, making them almost as good as an average roll of an active attempt. I think 8 would have been a better base, but 10 was likely chosen for simplicity of math.

 

[Zorku]

The single sufficiently large barrel hiding location is probably suitable to 'hide' from combatants, but only for the purpose of sneak attacks. They're not going to be targeting you there anyway due to the lack of line of sight, so they either un-hide you by bypassing the barrel, or they just blast the area with something that doesn't need line of sight. The sneak attack situation doesn't necessarily mean that they had no idea an attack might come from that location, but rather that they had virtually no warning. In this way, hiding in combat despite the enemy knowing your location, is more about keeping out of their sight while you're still peeking at the scene enough to know where they are.

-Hit points aren't the direct measure of how much punishment your flesh can take, but rather an abstraction of how well and how long you can avoid a fatal blow-
It should eat up more of their hit point resource to turn a much more sudden attack on vital organs into the kind of grazing blow that you can continue to fight with. They have divvy out a lot more of their attention to unseen strikes, lest you drop them like a sack of bricks.

This makes plenty of sense if you're not allowing people to hide in the same location over and over too. When they pop out from that barrel to flick some knives they've suddenly told the enemy quite a bit about how they were positioned to peek at the scene, and you can reason out all kinds of things about the timing cues an opponent has about just how long it takes the sneak to get their hands ready, work out a trajectory, and pop up swiftly. The enemy might even be playing some mind games where they've worked out what timing that particular rogue thinks is sneaky enough to catch them in a weak moment. There's plenty of room in the abstraction that is combat to force sneak attacks to be done in a little more interesting way.


If you're going to rule no hiding in combat though, you should probably come up with some compensation for the sneak attack damage your rogues are no longer getting. By pure wargaming standards they'll be missing quite a bit of the damage they were designed to do.

 

[Uller]

In the heat of combat the rogue is already going to get sneak attack if an ally is close enough to harass the enemy. If no allies are close enough to harass the enemy, then I assume we are close to the 1-on-1 scenario;

Sure. In a 1-on-1 I'd not allow it or make it very hard to hide too. But that's my point. Those sorts of situations are rare for me and my group and the rogue (and monk) players understand that outside of normal combat things get more dicey.

For what it's worth, though I pulled off hiding in a real life situation very similar to what you describe. In a 3v3 game of paintball on a field of inflatable bunkers it was down to me and one other player on the other team. We were each behind our own bunker with about 15-20' between them. We exchanged fire, I managed to come close enough to hitting him that he ducked down. When he tried to pop up again, I shot more shots off his bunker to make him duck again. Repeated this one more time, then moved to the other side of my bunker as quietly as I could. When he popped up again and didn't see me so he came out just a bit further and I popped him in the head with a single shot.

1-on-1 in a well lit mostly open area with only one place for me to hide. He knew I was behind the bunker but lost track of me just enough for me to gain a significant advantage. Yes, there was another bunker in the way so it's a bit different but I used that bunker to my advantage. I see rogue characters as being pretty good at doing those sorts of things.

Here's something to consider: Remember that it is possible to attack enemies you can't see. You just gain disadvantage. An ogre gets a +6 to it's attack. A lower level rogue typically has an AC of 16 or so (Leather or studded leather armor and +4 dex). If the rogue is hiding in a place that merely provides concealment or only partial cover it's definitely worth it for the Ogre to attack him anyway and take a chance at making him really pay for not getting out of range of that great club... will make him think twice about hiding in a place that is obvious. A bunch of mook ranged attackers could work well too...just pepper the area with arrows.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Coming directly to 5th from 1st/2nd edition, the whole 'passive' thing is still new to me and I haven't fully decided on how much I like it.

That said, I did some experimenting today. I wrote a computer program to simulate rolling contests vs rolling against a static DC. The differences are pretty minor and boil down to your bonus vs. your opponent's bonus (or the DC difference from 10 for a static DC). Unless your opponent's bonus is 5 or more higher than yours (or the DC is equal to or higher than 15+your bonus) you are slightly better off rolling against a static DC by a small percentage. At an extreme range of +-10, the difference my be as high as 15%, but normally it is much lower.

I think my only gripe with passive skills is that they are based on 10, making them almost as good as an average roll of an active attempt. I think 8 would have been a better base, but 10 was likely chosen for simplicity of math.

My problem with passive (apart from the static passive vs static trap DC issue - urrrghh!!) is that in practice, if 10 is the passive number, an 18 dex rogue with expertise once he gets +3 prof (is that 5th?), has +10 on his check... which means he wont fail to hide against almost all monsters in the MM! That is waaaaay too easy in my book. At least if both parties roll, you will occasionally get a low roll from the thief, and a high roll on the perception, resulting in a failed hide attempt.

We tried passive and went back to rolling. The game functions better in my view.