But it's still going to be much easier than when he attacked you the first time and you did not even know he was there.
Why didn’t you know he was there? You’re aware of your surroundings and alert for danger during combat, so you’d have seen him go behind the pillar and not come out from behind it. You know where he is, you just don’t see him, which makes defending against attacks from him difficult because you can’t see his telegraphs. Again, this is someone anyone who has played a first person shooter has experienced, and probably used to their advantage.
Once more, I'm not forbidding anything, I'm just ensuring that the narrative makes a bit of sense, and that, just as in real life, clever and inventive choices are rewarded, compared to simple repetition.
What I’m objecting to at this point is not your ruling, but your insistence that the alternative doesn’t make a bit of narrative sense. It makes plenty of sense if you have a different set of assumptions, as I explained above.
And I'm sorry but that does not make any sense top me, which is probably a reason for which no one has ever put that kind of situation in any source of the genre. But of course YCMV.
It’s very simple. If you don’t assume that being “hidden” from someone means they have no idea where they are, but merely that they can’t currently see or hear you, then creatures don’t have to be idiots to get hit with advantage multiple times by an enemy hiding in the same spot.
And that is exactly what being hidden does.
No, it isn’t. Being hidden gives the attacker advantage on attack rolls and imposes disadvantage on attack rolls against them.
I don't read that in that ability: "You can attempt to hide even when you are obscured only by a creature that is at least one size larger than you." It's just giving away more opportunity to hide,
Right, but to what end? It gives no defensive advantage since your opponents can just walk around your ally, see you there, and attack you. And given your ruling it seems to give no offensive advantage either since you’re seen when you peek out from behind your ally to attack. So, it seems there’s no point. You’re just using a bonus action and rolling a Dex check to accomplish nothing at all.
but once an opponent has seen the halfling disappear behind a companion once, and the halfling disappears again while there is no other concealement possible, there is a good chance that he will watch for the halfling exactly at the same place.
Sure, he can watch for the halfling exactly at the same place. Then the halfling can lean out from the other side. Or he can crouch and pop out at a lower angle. Or he can stay where he is and arc a shot over his ally’s head, or between their legs.
What gives you the impression that it's meant to hide in the same spot more than once ?
Nothing about it suggests you wouldn’t be able to do so.
The rules make it really simple: "When a creature can't see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it." That's really all they say on the subject.
So, from this, a DM would be perfectly right in saying that as soon as the rogue pops out from behind the pillar (or the halfling from behind his friend), he can be seen and therefore does not have advantage.
Yes, the DM could rule that way, and it would be consistent with RAW. It would also make Naturally Stealthy useless, which makes me suspect it is not consistent with RAI.
Whereas when you fire from a dark area, where you can't be seen at all even while firing, you would have advantage (which, by the way, is where the second sentence "If you are hidden — both unseen and unheard — when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses." comes in effect to tell you that even if you were totally unseen, you still give away your position once the attack hits or misses (and therefore after you have rolled with advantage).
I agree with this assessment of how attacking whole obscured by darkness works. That’s not the use case under contention here,
But most of us are not that harsh on rogues popping out from "concealement",
Concealment isn’t a thing in 5e, it’s either cover or obscurement.
because we also apply the reading from the section on hiding that says "You can't hide from a creature that can see you clearly", which is a bit more forgiving. But because that is plain english, it's also much fuzzier, what does "clearly" mean.
That’s up to DM discretion.
And this is where, once more, we go back to the devs intentions about stealth: "This more than almost any other part of the game, is going to rely on the Dungeon Master."
I don’t dispute that.
What you see is all there is, and so far nothing has shown that there is not a mechanistic following of just the RAW behind some contributors implementations, with some slapped-on justification.
I can’t parse this. What are you saying?
