D&D General The Problem with Talking About D&D

[Hussar]

That bit about the Stealth rules amuses me. WotC has never once made good Stealth rules (the 4e ones are particularly....profoundly bad), so in 5e, these professional game designers who are paid in real money just said "man, Stealth is hard. Bethesda strategy! The modding community will fix it for us!"

See, this right here is a particularly good example of what Collville is talking about.

4e stealth rules are, IMO, the best stealth rules that have ever existed in 5e. Hands down. To the point where I interpret 5e stealth through that lens. All you have to do is add a "Hidden"status effect to the 5e rules and you have the 4e stealth rules. Something that is obscured, but, not actively hiding, can't be seen, but can still be targetted - typically with disadvantage. Something that is Hidden (as in actively hiding and beating all passive Perception checks (or active ones if someone takes the action) cannot be detected at all and you can only guess at a location.

Easiest to rule at the table and works fantastically well with 5e stealth rules.

But, here's the point I was trying in a roundabout fashion to make. To me, these are simple, clear, easy to adjudicate rules that work extremely well. To @James Gasik, looking at exactly the same rules, he thinks they are "Profoundly bad". Now, there is no way either of us is going to convince the other, most likely. Which means that any player who moved from my table to his or vice versa, would be playing under significantly different rules, even though we both have 5e books sitting on the table.

So, how can you design for both of our tables? And, how can @James Gasik and I have a rational conversation about stealth when we're not even playing using the same rules?

 

[James Gasik]

See, this right here is a particularly good example of what Collville is talking about.

4e stealth rules are, IMO, the best stealth rules that have ever existed in 5e. Hands down. To the point where I interpret 5e stealth through that lens. All you have to do is add a "Hidden"status effect to the 5e rules and you have the 4e stealth rules. Something that is obscured, but, not actively hiding, can't be seen, but can still be targetted - typically with disadvantage. Something that is Hidden (as in actively hiding and beating all passive Perception checks (or active ones if someone takes the action) cannot be detected at all and you can only guess at a location.

Easiest to rule at the table and works fantastically well with 5e stealth rules.

But, here's the point I was trying in a roundabout fashion to make. To me, these are simple, clear, easy to adjudicate rules that work extremely well. To @James Gasik, looking at exactly the same rules, he thinks they are "Profoundly bad". Now, there is no way either of us is going to convince the other, most likely. Which means that any player who moved from my table to his or vice versa, would be playing under significantly different rules, even though we both have 5e books sitting on the table.

So, how can you design for both of our tables? And, how can @James Gasik and I have a rational conversation about stealth when we're not even playing using the same rules?

Back when WotC had forums, there was a long stickied post about the Stealth rules called something like "The Rules of Hidden" just to explain how they worked. And I read it, and I tried to explain it to people.

Because there was a rework of the Stealth rules from what was originally published when 4e launched. And the new rules were still hard to follow without this post. The problem was, the original rules were still in the books, and the utility powers for Stealth still referred to the original rules.

I remember when a player came into an Encounters game with his Ninja and tried using a utility power that would let him move and then Stealth, and the DM was like "wait, that's not how Stealth works" and there was a big debate about it because it turned out, people who played the game were, for the most part, not people who frequented the forums. So you had one group going off of the original rules, one group that went off the new rules but hadn't read the clarifications, and the final group that knew the rules had changed and had read the clarifications needed to grok them.

Once you understood the rules, they were workable, but it still took way too much verbiage to portray what should be a simple concept.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I never understood the problem to be honest. It was pretty straight forward. When you took the stealth action, you were Hidden (presuming you beat perception, or whatever 4e called it, it's been a while). If you were Hidden you could not be detected - the enemy had no idea where you were. Simply being unseen did not make you Hidden. Hidden was a specific condition above and beyond simply not being seen.

I dunno. I just never had a problem with it. Granted, it's been a lot of years since I actually looked at the 4e stealth rules, so, maybe I'm just fashioning my own rules in my head from half remembered rules. Which is entirely possible and often the BIGGEST problem with talking about D&D.

 

[James Gasik]

Different expectations, different problems, different solutions.

#1 least useful and most common response I get when talking about problems I'm having with a game. "Well I've played for years and that has never come up."

 

[Vaalingrade]

To be fair, the final 4e Stealth rules were swing number 4 (IIRC) on the errata.

 

[Hussar]

To be fair, the final 4e Stealth rules were swing number 4 (IIRC) on the errata.

Sorry? "Swing number 4"? I don't understand what that means.

Different expectations, different problems, different solutions.

#1 least useful and most common response I get when talking about problems I'm having with a game. "Well I've played for years and that has never come up."

Well, I'm not entirely sure. Yes, if that's the first response you get? Sure, that's totally unhelpful. But I've seen people absolutely INSIST that some problem exists in the game, that it is a systemic problem and that it must be fixed to make the game playable to the complete denial of any other experiences. At that point, "Well, I've never seen that come up" isn't a terribly unreasonable response. And, often it's paired with the question of how are you getting that problem? What are you doing differently at your table that you see this problem and I'm not. It's not totally unuseful.

One only has to look at recent threads regarding the lethality of combat in 5e to see some pretty clear examples of that.

 

[James Gasik]

I would say that if someone is having a problem and you haven't seen it, a deeper inquiry is needed. Because I don't immediately think they are lying, so it comes down to one of the following:

1) they have misunderstood the rules. This happens. You miss a sentence tucked away somewhere unexpected. See: players who thought "use an object" was the action for activating magic items without checking the DMG.

2) they have been misled. This happens as well, reading books extensively and exhaustively takes away time from playing or running the game. Example: they were introduced to a "house rule" that no one told them was a house rule.

3) they have encountered one of the (many) edge cases that WotC left up to DM judgement, and are one of those people who doesn't "immediately grok" the solution. See: me! Often I have people go "no, you fool, it's obvious, you do X!" and I'm like "how is that obvious, the passage I'm reading doesn't even say do X!".

This is usually where I get the dismissive comments as people can't believe someone could be tripped up by such a thing. They'll cite "it's natural language, it doesn't have to be spelled out" and I, having cut my teeth on rules systems that do spell things out, quietly go mad, wondering if everyone else has different copies of the rulebooks than I do.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Sorry? "Swing number 4"? I don't understand what that means.

The Stealth rules in the books weren't the good ones. There was errata that came up on the website almost as soon as the books came out, then a change in the GSL, then a final change published in Dragon+ (might have missed one or two) that got it to its final form.

So the original Stealth rules might be what some people are remembering when they say they were bad, not the final form that stuck.

 

[pemerton]

I just compared the 4e stealth rules in the PHB to the revised rules in the PHB 2.

The revised rules are undoubtedly clearer.

The original rules have a few main differences. First, they allow a Stealth check to be made with ordinary cover or concealment rather than requiring superior cover or total concealment. Second, they rely more on opposed checks rather than passive checks - as well as swinginess, this also causes issues with action economy (eg do opponents get to make their checks for free?). Third, they have two "grades" of hidden - as well as the hidden status that @Hussar has mentioned, which you get if Stealth beats Perception, there's also a lesser status that is obtained if you have total concealment or superior cover, and the perceivers beat your Stealth check but don't beat it by 10 or more. Under that status, people know you're around and in what direction, but don't know exactly where you are.

Back in 2008, I thought the "two grades" of hidden idea was interesting, but I don't think they came up in our play prior to the update being released. The revised rules - while being a bit of a nerf - are easier to use.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In a way, this reminds me of the hidden factors in video games that I think many would considering "cheating". If they can do it, why can't DMs!?

To name a few:

• Shadow of Mordor grants additional health to dueling Uruks to increase the length of the fight for the sake of spectacle.
• Assassin's Creed and Doom have more health associated with the last tick of the health bar, to make you feel like you barely survived.
• Ratchet and Clank scaled enemy damage and hid enemies based on time played and total deaths of the player.
• Enemies in some LEGO games have a hit or miss chance. If a projectile misses, it's offset and has no collision. This is done to make fights more hectic.

Are you under the impression people don't sometimes have an issue with some of these sort of things, too? If so, let me disabuse you.