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Message: <blockquote data-quote="thuter" data-source="post: 8876068" data-attributes="member: 6975034">I do not mean this in any vague way. I mean via the conditions mentioned: behind something, obscured, invisible, or otherwise out of sight.I do not know where you got this impression... This was in the case of a roaring waterfall in the middle of the night and other examples you mentioned (no sight, no hearing), in which case you would still need to take an action to make a stealth check to pass passive perception, but the passive perception of those people would suffer tremendously because of the aforementioned circumstances. I don't run passive stealth, nor would I want to. But I thought you were claiming people would obviously be hidden in these aforementioned circumstances, and passive stealth lets you give it to them without spending an action. This has nothing to do with a marketplace, where people's ears work and you are in no way invisible, and per RAW you need to take the Hide action.Because the "obscured" in the mentioned section is an example of "being unseen". This would mean the obscurement they give as an example needs to be good enough to become being unseen. There are two forms of obscurement: Lightly and Heavily. This is in the rules. One of these makes you basically invisible to observers, the other one does not, but gives them a penalty to perceive you. It logically follows that being lightly obscured is not the same as being unseen. And the reason why I am allowed to make this distinction, is because they also mention the cover rules ("being behind something"). You cannot say: "It says whenever I am behind something, I am unseen," because it depends on what you are standing behind. This is the reason for my lamppost example. Standing behind a lamppost does not make you unseen, and I don't think anyone would try to make that case based on the line "unseen (behind something, obscured, invisible, or otherwise out of sight)." This is a very similar problem to the whole "obscured" debacle, but here it is clear that "behind something" means behind total cover, not just "behind my shield" or "behind the gnome", it means the object blocks all line of sight to you. Because you need to be unseen to hide, and half cover for example does not make you unseen.Now as to how I get to why heavily obscured is needed and lightly obscured does not suffice, even though they both have the word "obscured" in them as used in the example: Heavily obscured means the target is not able to see you, which is necessary for hiding according to AG141:Lightly obscured does not block line of sight, heavily obscured does. So it seems pretty clear to me that you cannot normally hide when you are lightly obscured because the creature will see you while you are hiding from it. This is the general rule or core mechanic.I am not asking anything of you, you are the one that started this thread, I simply try to explain.Not in 4E, where you need total cover or total concealment, and very comparable exceptions are provided via feats as well.Neither am I <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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