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<blockquote data-quote="Ath'kethin" data-source="post: 7034969" data-attributes="member: 6798775">Want to make this even more fun? Give one of the targets the Alert feat, which means they can't be surprised.In my campaign, the party was walking down a dark hallway holding a torch. Ahead of them in the hallway, beyond the torchlight's radius, stood three enemies, armed with shortbows, standing motionless in ambush. Now, a torch sheds bright light in a 20 foot radius and dim light in a 20 foot radius past that.&nbsp; A shortbow has a close range of 80 feet.The party was on high alert, and the barbarian has the alert feat, so by the rules nobody was surprised. I had them roll initiative, but they couldn't really take any actions since they didn't actually know there were enemies ahead. For all these reasons, hey were pissed when arrows flew out of the darkness and struck them.&nbsp; After a heated discussion, we decided to treat the enemies hiding in the darkness ahead as invisible - meaning they had advantage on their attacks and the PCs had disadvantage on attacks against them. But the encounter did a great job of illustrating how tricky the surprise rules in this edition can be to navigate.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ath'kethin, post: 7034969, member: 6798775"] Want to make this even more fun? Give one of the targets the Alert feat, which means they can't be surprised. In my campaign, the party was walking down a dark hallway holding a torch. Ahead of them in the hallway, beyond the torchlight's radius, stood three enemies, armed with shortbows, standing motionless in ambush. Now, a torch sheds bright light in a 20 foot radius and dim light in a 20 foot radius past that. A shortbow has a close range of 80 feet. The party was on high alert, and the barbarian has the alert feat, so by the rules nobody was surprised. I had them roll initiative, but they couldn't really take any actions since they didn't actually know there were enemies ahead. For all these reasons, hey were [I]pissed[/I] when arrows flew out of the darkness and struck them. After a heated discussion, we decided to treat the enemies hiding in the darkness ahead as invisible - meaning they had advantage on their attacks and the PCs had disadvantage on attacks against them. But the encounter did a great job of illustrating how tricky the surprise rules in this edition can be to navigate. [/QUOTE]

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