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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3814434" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, this has been boiling in the back of my mind for a while now, and I'm generally secretive about both my house rules and my ideas for future house rules, but since 3.5 looks like its going to die, this is what I've been thinking.The current hide rules are broken.  I could probably brainstorm up a dozen or more situations where they produce very unintuitive and/or abusable results.First of all, you don't need a hide skill to hide well.  Kids can hide great, even without lots of ranks in it.  What you need is cover or concealment.  In an absolutely black cave, everyone hides perfectly well for everyone else.So the first thing you need to do is come up with some rules for what the base difficulty of spotting someone is depending on the available cover or concealment.  If you hide in something that provides 100% cover, your hide skill doesn't have a large effect on the chance of going unseen.  On the opposite end up the spectrum, if you hide in a bare room the sneaky guy is almost as likely to be seen as the non-sneaky guy. So what is hide really?  Hide is the ability to go unnoticed, and the ability to go unnoticed is primarily the skill at appearing smaller than you are.  AHA!  Knowing this tells us what a hide check does.  It reduces our effective size.   The difficulty in spotting someone is therefore not linearly opposed to thier hide skill but rather equal to: base difficulty based on terrain + number of range increments + modifiers for effective size of the hidden object + circumstance modifiers (like being prone).A hide skill might look something like this:Hide DC 10: Your effective size is one size class smallerDC 15: Your effective size is two size classes smallerDC 25: Your effective size is three size classes smaller.  Fine creatures become invisible.DC 40: Your effective size is four size classes smaller.  Diminutive creatures become invisible.....Note that being small doesn't make hiding easier directly (no bonuses to hide), but it does make you harder to spot (as described below).Now, how do we know the number of range increments.  Ideally, we don't use a linear system.  When something is twice as far away, it's 1/4 its effective visual profile.  So ideally, we'd have some non-linear system for figuring out range increments.  But that might be hard to calculate (neat optional rule though) to the point of being impractical.  The important thing to note is that in most cases, a range increment is quite large and depends on the assumptions of available concealment.  On a completely empty wide stone floor, you really aren't any harder to see 100' way than you are 50' away.  On the other hand, if you are in a terrain that provides concealment being farther away is more important.Now, here's the elegant part.  Being small is essentially the same as being farther away.  So we don't need separate modifiers for range increments and size.  All we need is to cross reference size by terrain to get range are assumed range increments, and use size + terrain to figure out our base available concealment.  That is a fine creature might have 75% concealment in short grass, and corresponding base difficulty to spot, whereas a medium creature effectively has none.  But, if you can hide really well you can get your effective size down to fine and do those supernatural stealthy things that we want our high level sneaks to do.There are all sorts of great things about this approach.  First, it isn't abusable.  High level hide does not trump low levels of spot except when we would want it to, because its not a linear test.  You automatically can't hide well in the open at close distance, because no matter how small you make yourself you have no cover or concealment to take advantage of.   We don't need special rules or exceptions.  In fact, we now have good rules for what 'Hide in Plain Site' actually means - its the ability to manufacture concealment when by the rules otherwise there would be none.  This is powerful, but is easy to resolve and not nearly as prone to abuse or misunderstanding as it currently is.And we solve the problem of the 10' range increment to spot checks.But even better, we know no longer have to have everyone in the party have high levels of stealth in order to engage in a stealthy mission.  All we have to do is give the party good oppurtunities to make use of cover and concealment and they will naturally beat low level spot skills.  I mean, the reason that in real life small groups can go sneak around successfully is that high levels of sneakiness isn't necessary to hide.  All you really need is someplace to hide.Now, can people stop assuming that I haven't thought about this to some degree and that giving people more free skills is the only way to solve the problems that they are experiencing?  Maybe the suggested system isn't perfect, but its a heck of a lot better than what we have and as best as I can tell what is being suggested in 4e.</blockquote>

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