Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kitsune" data-source="post: 4374927" data-attributes="member: 4877">People are making too much of rules that are meant to be abstractions, I think.  If D&D was a world as clean as our grid mats, then of course people should have a good idea where a character was hiding at all times; it would be like trying to hide behind an ikea chair in an all-white, brightly-lit room.  Where did he go?  Gee, maybe behind the only piece of furniture in the room.But that's not D&D.  D&D's supposed to be adventurous and cinematic, where every place is lit by flickering torches, weird idols are littered all over the place, forests are full of thick trees, and there's generally a lot of shadowy corners and readily-available cover.  If you come into a room full of bloodthirsty cultists that's dimly-lit and the air is filled with the ring of metal and the screams of the wounded, are you really going to be tracking the location of the little guy in the corner as if he had a green arrow hanging over his head?The stealth rules are clear-cut.Anyone who doesn't make the perception check doesn't see you, doesn't hear you, and doesn't know where you are.  They know where you were, and would be perfectly justified in lobbing a fireball into the dark passage that you ducked into, but if you've moved out of that square, they have no excuse for having knowledge of your current location.If you don't have any cover or concealment from a person, they can see you, regardless of how great your roll is.  That only makes sense; you can't walk down an empty hallway and somehow not be in plain sight while doing so.If the person's distracted, you can be stealthy even without cover.  People are assumed to be looking all around themselves in a fight, which is fair, but when DMing I would be willing to accept a good argument as to why a certain person shouldn't be paying attention to the rogue.  Crazed cultist leader performing ceremony to unleash unspeakable evils on the world, not watching his back as well as he should be, oops a dagger wound up in his kidney...  I'd let a rogue try for stealth in that situation.If you have perfect cover but they beat your stealth check, they know your general location despite not being able to see you.  That's fair, and so is tossing a fireball your way if they think they can get you in the blast.So a sneaky person has to find cover to hide and remain in cover to remain hidden, and that sounds fair to me without people automatically knowing the sneaky person's square.  The rules already restrict the sneaker to sneaking from shadow to shadow every round if they want to stay sneaky.  The rules already instantly strip away the sneaking the moment someone gets a clear line of sight to the sneaker.  I see no reason to allow a player or NPC to have any knowledge of a sneaking person's location (assuming the sneaker moved away from the last place they were seen), or to target the sneaking person directly.</blockquote>

Verification