But if the PC on watch is surprised, would you make them wait until their turn in initiative before they can shout a warning?
I would say yes. Remember that a round of turns all happens within the same 6-second window, so any actions before their turn in initiative just happen faster than they can react.
How about this? Suppose no watch is set and all are asleep. The monsters are NOT attempting to be stealthy. Do PCs wake up AND automatically notice threats before combat begins?
Still no. Before combat begins, the sleeping creatures are unaware of their surroundings (per the Unconscious condition). I'd rule you need a noise as loud as a shout at least to alert the sleeping members.
The thing about “I shout to wake the party up” is that a single round of combat hypothetically represents a period of about 6 seconds. Now, I don’t know about all of you, but the first 6 seconds after I wake up, my brain is still on screensaver. If a party who is wide awake and proceeding down a path with weapons at the ready can still have members suffer the surprise condition from enemies suddenly striking from cover, there’s no reason a party who has just woken from sleep by someone shouting an alarm can’t.
I would operate under the assumption that it would be more akin to hearing a person screaming "Fire!" in the home. You're more likely to snap awake when adventuring than when someone just barges in and wakes you up at home.
Regardless of the exact circumstance, it takes the brain several seconds to engage- aka one round. In point of fact, the Alert condition specifically states that you cannot be surprised unless you are unconscious, which seems to reinforce the idea that if initiative is rolled and you’re asleep, then you will have the surprised condition.
Even so, the scenario we were given was that the person on watch noticed and had already begun alerting the party before anything was cast. Which would likely mean they were awake at the time of casting/encounter.
The exact timeline of events is up to the DM, and regardless given the other circumstances a party can be surprised under, I wouldn’t say a cry of alarm substantially alters the situation.
But if the PC on watch is surprised, would you make them wait until their turn in initiative before they can shout a warning?
I would say yes. Remember that a round of turns all happens within the same 6-second window, so any actions before their turn in initiative just happen faster than they can react.
How about this? Suppose no watch is set and all are asleep. The monsters are NOT attempting to be stealthy. Do PCs wake up AND automatically notice threats before combat begins?
Still no. Before combat begins, the sleeping creatures are unaware of their surroundings (per the Unconscious condition). I'd rule you need a noise as loud as a shout at least to alert the sleeping members.
The thing about “I shout to wake the party up” is that a single round of combat hypothetically represents a period of about 6 seconds. Now, I don’t know about all of you, but the first 6 seconds after I wake up, my brain is still on screensaver. If a party who is wide awake and proceeding down a path with weapons at the ready can still have members suffer the surprise condition from enemies suddenly striking from cover, there’s no reason a party who has just woken from sleep by someone shouting an alarm can’t.
I would operate under the assumption that it would be more akin to hearing a person screaming "Fire!" in the home. You're more likely to snap awake when adventuring than when someone just barges in and wakes you up at home.
Regardless of the exact circumstance, it takes the brain several seconds to engage- aka one round. In point of fact, the Alert condition specifically states that you cannot be surprised unless you are unconscious, which seems to reinforce the idea that if initiative is rolled and you’re asleep, then you will have the surprised condition.
Even so, the scenario we were given was that the person on watch noticed and had already begun alerting the party before anything was cast. Which would likely mean they were awake at the time of casting/encounter.
The exact timeline of events is up to the DM, and regardless given the other circumstances a party can be surprised under, I wouldn’t say a cry of alarm substantially alters the situation.
If a cry of alarm doesn't alter the situation, what exactly was the point of keeping watch at all? If something doesn't affect a situation, it shouldn't be given as an option at all.
If a cry of alarm doesn't alter the situation, what exactly was the point of keeping watch at all? If something doesn't affect a situation, it shouldn't be given as an option at all.
The benefit of keeping watch/alerting the others depends upon how far away the enemies are when combat initiates; if you don't bother setting a watch and you're all asleep, then there can be no alarm, and combat will most likely initiate with all of you surprised, and only waking up in response to being repeatedly stabbed.
By setting a watch, regardless of whether the watcher(s) are surprised or not they might still manage to shout a warning, so after the surprise round the rest of your party can be conscious (or at least an earlier chance of being so) as opposed to blissfully remaining asleep.
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To me it'd be entirely up to DM if a surprised watcher can yell to wake up sleeping party members or be caught offguard as the ambush spring before having time to do anything, including shouting. Its typical scenario to take out a sentinel before it can alert others afterall.
Kind of like the Dev say in Dragon Talk: Sage Advice''The whole system assumes that the instant narrative transitions to violence, everything suddenly pauses''
Thanks guys for chiming in on this slight side-topic of how to generally run an encounter where the party is camped in the wilderness and asleep for the night. This particular encounter is seemingly very common -- many pre-made adventures suggest "rolling for random encounters" at certain intervals of time, such as once during daytime travel and once during the night. If this roll yields an encounter at night you pretty much get this scenario, perhaps altered slightly in the details here and there by the DM. The point is, this should be a pretty common scenario and yet I have never found much discussion on how people run it, and from what I have seen DM's seem to run the mechanics of this encounter quite a bit differently than each other, which is what's happening here as well.
Regardless of the exact circumstance, it takes the brain several seconds to engage- aka one round.
I personally think that the concept that "it takes an action to wake up" or "it takes a round to wake up" and so on is mechanically too harsh. There isn't much guidance from the text regarding the mechanics of sleeping. Xanathar's touches on this very briefly and doesn't specifically mention any timeframe involved in the transition from being asleep to being awake, but mostly this just seems like a DM call. There are many who impose this type of additional realism, but again, I wouldn't require this due to how big of a mechanical penalty this is during many combats.
if you don't bother setting a watch and you're all asleep, then there can be no alarm, and combat will most likely initiate with all of you surprised, and only waking up in response to being repeatedly stabbed.
I did expect various interpretation on this one also, as we've gotten. Again, I think that this is too harsh. In my opinion, surprise is only meant to be a possibility when the monsters are attempting to be stealthy -- and along the same lines, I think that creatures should wake up much easier and earlier if the enemy is not being stealthy.
If a group of ogres and giants are just crashing their way through the underbrush, possibly stumbling across the camp by accident, I think it's a bit unfair to let them lumber their way over and attack a sleeping PC before anyone wakes up. On the other hand, if it's a group of goblins or human mercenaries who are intentionally sneaking up on the camp, then the party should remain vulnerable for much longer.
I think that we could sometimes be using other mechanics to create smaller consequences -- maybe instead of combat starting with enemies 100 feet away they are 20 feet away. Maybe a PC who has just woken up should just get disadvantage on immediate perception checks or perhaps just disadvantage on the initiative roll, and so on.
if you don't bother setting a watch and you're all asleep, then there can be no alarm, and combat will most likely initiate with all of you surprised, and only waking up in response to being repeatedly stabbed.
I did expect various interpretation on this one also, as we've gotten. Again, I think that this is too harsh. In my opinion, surprise is only meant to be a possibility when the monsters are attempting to be stealthy -- and along the same lines, I think that creatures should wake up much easier and earlier if the enemy is not being stealthy.
Sorry, I thought it was a given I meant for stealthy enemies, 'tis a surprise thread after all! Though even for enemies blundering into camp I'd probably still call for some kind of check to see if sleeping player characters wake quickly or not, so they end up suffering "effective surprise" rather than actual surprise (unconscious vs. conscious but surprised); I'm very much a firm believer that players who don't set a proper watch or take any other precautions are just begging to be killed in their sleep, or at least wake up to being murdered. 😈
I should also clarify there's a lot I'm only mentioning without really say exactly how I'd run it. For example, I would probably allow Perception checks even for sleeping, but they'd be at disadvantage. The difference with a shouted warning from a watcher would most likely be to either counter that (less likely to be surprised), or to trigger additional checks sooner (more likely to wake quickly) depending upon the exact circumstances, as I might also not run a check for the first round at all if things are bad enough and severity is appropriate.
And as I've already said I'm generally not a believer in players being unable to take turns for too long, but how I handle things like that depends a lot on the circumstances so it's tough to give a set of guidelines I follow (since I don't, I usually just make it up as I go 😉). This is why I mentioned being unarmoured, as I'd personally usually rather the the players were in the fight but at some other disadvantage to represent being ambushed; it's important to remember that a lot of the rules in 5e are a toolset, they give DMs tools to use to suit their intended narrative, it's up to each DM whether to enforce them all the time, only some of the time, or not at all etc.
But there will also be situations in which a character is simply asleep and hasn't woken up yet; again, I'd usually try to limit this to one or two rounds at a maximum, either by making the checks easier or waiving them entirely. For example, if the party's Bard is the first to wake up and they respond with a thunderwave (the Bardic equivalent of "5 more minutes") then I'm probably not going to bother with checks. But if the players are in different rooms, and the amount of noise isn't that high yet I might ask for plain or disadvantaged checks etc. The OP didn't give quite enough detail for us to really dig into the "correct" way to run the whole encounter, and there is a lot of parts that a DM can consider, but on the other hand they also have to do all of this in the moment so snap judgements, getting it wrong sometimes, and just fudging everything as you go is way more common than our hypothetical methods!
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Thanks guys for chiming in on this slight side-topic of how to generally run an encounter where the party is camped in the wilderness and asleep for the night. This particular encounter is seemingly very common -- many pre-made adventures suggest "rolling for random encounters" at certain intervals of time, such as once during daytime travel and once during the night. If this roll yields an encounter at night you pretty much get this scenario, perhaps altered slightly in the details here and there by the DM. The point is, this should be a pretty common scenario and yet I have never found much discussion on how people run it, and from what I have seen DM's seem to run the mechanics of this encounter quite a bit differently than each other, which is what's happening here as well.
Regardless of the exact circumstance, it takes the brain several seconds to engage- aka one round.
I personally think that the concept that "it takes an action to wake up" or "it takes a round to wake up" and so on is mechanically too harsh. There isn't much guidance from the text regarding the mechanics of sleeping. Xanathar's touches on this very briefly and doesn't specifically mention any timeframe involved in the transition from being asleep to being awake, but mostly this just seems like a DM call. There are many who impose this type of additional realism, but again, I wouldn't require this due to how big of a mechanical penalty this is during many combats.
if you don't bother setting a watch and you're all asleep, then there can be no alarm, and combat will most likely initiate with all of you surprised, and only waking up in response to being repeatedly stabbed.
I did expect various interpretation on this one also, as we've gotten. Again, I think that this is too harsh. In my opinion, surprise is only meant to be a possibility when the monsters are attempting to be stealthy -- and along the same lines, I think that creatures should wake up much easier and earlier if the enemy is not being stealthy.
If a group of ogres and giants are just crashing their way through the underbrush, possibly stumbling across the camp by accident, I think it's a bit unfair to let them lumber their way over and attack a sleeping PC before anyone wakes up. On the other hand, if it's a group of goblins or human mercenaries who are intentionally sneaking up on the camp, then the party should remain vulnerable for much longer.
I think that we could sometimes be using other mechanics to create smaller consequences -- maybe instead of combat starting with enemies 100 feet away they are 20 feet away. Maybe a PC who has just woken up should just get disadvantage on immediate perception checks or perhaps just disadvantage on the initiative roll, and so on.
I think the point of having a watch is that usually the person on watch will not be surprised. The person is listening, watching, paying attention, hopefully wide awake. The point of a watch is to alert the party if something comes along. If the watch hears a loud noise in the forest, or sees something suspicious, they can quietly wake the party so that they can be prepared to deal with whatever is coming.
A surprise ambush in the dark is, in my experience, more often the exception than the rule. Someone trying to sneak up on the party has to know where they are. They need to know the party location and ideally know the location of any guards. They then need to make stealth checks opposed by the passive perception of the guard on watch. If the approach goes unnoticed then the guard on watch and the rest of the party will likely be surprised. However, it requires a specific type of creature that wants to surprise the sleeping party and is sufficiently skilled to make it happen. Not every orc is that good at stealth.
In addition, the noises of the night might well alert the person on watch that something is happening even if they don't explicitly notice a creature. Insects and other night noises tend to change when a creature moves by and such changes may be perceptible to the person on watch so they may end up not surprised even if the attackers all remain unseen (DM ruling on how they want to run it and it may depend on the class of the character on watch or their abilities when operating in nature - DM might require a perception, survival or nature check depending on the circumstances).
Anyway, I have found the "surprised party" scenario to be relatively infrequent.
So, on reviewing the limited description we have here I'd say the DM was slightly out of RAW by having the first cast happen outside of initiative, but unless they make a habit of it this isn't something to make an issue of and overall this falls under Rule 0. We only have a short description of the order of events, and the situation itself is one where it's reasonable for the DM to adjudicate whether or not characters who were asleep right as things started happening are surprised or not. One combat instance where the party is caught fairly flat-footed and doesn't suffer any deaths or other major setbacks isn't really a problem. Without a better play-by-play it's hard to call the timing involved, which is also a judgement call area for the DM.
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The exact timeline of events is up to the DM, and regardless given the other circumstances a party can be surprised under, I wouldn’t say a cry of alarm substantially alters the situation.
If a cry of alarm doesn't alter the situation, what exactly was the point of keeping watch at all? If something doesn't affect a situation, it shouldn't be given as an option at all.
The benefit of keeping watch/alerting the others depends upon how far away the enemies are when combat initiates; if you don't bother setting a watch and you're all asleep, then there can be no alarm, and combat will most likely initiate with all of you surprised, and only waking up in response to being repeatedly stabbed.
By setting a watch, regardless of whether the watcher(s) are surprised or not they might still manage to shout a warning, so after the surprise round the rest of your party can be conscious (or at least an earlier chance of being so) as opposed to blissfully remaining asleep.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
To me it'd be entirely up to DM if a surprised watcher can yell to wake up sleeping party members or be caught offguard as the ambush spring before having time to do anything, including shouting. Its typical scenario to take out a sentinel before it can alert others afterall.
Kind of like the Dev say in Dragon Talk: Sage Advice ''The whole system assumes that the instant narrative transitions to violence, everything suddenly pauses''
Thanks guys for chiming in on this slight side-topic of how to generally run an encounter where the party is camped in the wilderness and asleep for the night. This particular encounter is seemingly very common -- many pre-made adventures suggest "rolling for random encounters" at certain intervals of time, such as once during daytime travel and once during the night. If this roll yields an encounter at night you pretty much get this scenario, perhaps altered slightly in the details here and there by the DM. The point is, this should be a pretty common scenario and yet I have never found much discussion on how people run it, and from what I have seen DM's seem to run the mechanics of this encounter quite a bit differently than each other, which is what's happening here as well.
I personally think that the concept that "it takes an action to wake up" or "it takes a round to wake up" and so on is mechanically too harsh. There isn't much guidance from the text regarding the mechanics of sleeping. Xanathar's touches on this very briefly and doesn't specifically mention any timeframe involved in the transition from being asleep to being awake, but mostly this just seems like a DM call. There are many who impose this type of additional realism, but again, I wouldn't require this due to how big of a mechanical penalty this is during many combats.
I did expect various interpretation on this one also, as we've gotten. Again, I think that this is too harsh. In my opinion, surprise is only meant to be a possibility when the monsters are attempting to be stealthy -- and along the same lines, I think that creatures should wake up much easier and earlier if the enemy is not being stealthy.
If a group of ogres and giants are just crashing their way through the underbrush, possibly stumbling across the camp by accident, I think it's a bit unfair to let them lumber their way over and attack a sleeping PC before anyone wakes up. On the other hand, if it's a group of goblins or human mercenaries who are intentionally sneaking up on the camp, then the party should remain vulnerable for much longer.
I think that we could sometimes be using other mechanics to create smaller consequences -- maybe instead of combat starting with enemies 100 feet away they are 20 feet away. Maybe a PC who has just woken up should just get disadvantage on immediate perception checks or perhaps just disadvantage on the initiative roll, and so on.
Sorry, I thought it was a given I meant for stealthy enemies, 'tis a surprise thread after all! Though even for enemies blundering into camp I'd probably still call for some kind of check to see if sleeping player characters wake quickly or not, so they end up suffering "effective surprise" rather than actual surprise (unconscious vs. conscious but surprised); I'm very much a firm believer that players who don't set a proper watch or take any other precautions are just begging to be killed in their sleep, or at least wake up to being murdered. 😈
I should also clarify there's a lot I'm only mentioning without really say exactly how I'd run it. For example, I would probably allow Perception checks even for sleeping, but they'd be at disadvantage. The difference with a shouted warning from a watcher would most likely be to either counter that (less likely to be surprised), or to trigger additional checks sooner (more likely to wake quickly) depending upon the exact circumstances, as I might also not run a check for the first round at all if things are bad enough and severity is appropriate.
And as I've already said I'm generally not a believer in players being unable to take turns for too long, but how I handle things like that depends a lot on the circumstances so it's tough to give a set of guidelines I follow (since I don't, I usually just make it up as I go 😉). This is why I mentioned being unarmoured, as I'd personally usually rather the the players were in the fight but at some other disadvantage to represent being ambushed; it's important to remember that a lot of the rules in 5e are a toolset, they give DMs tools to use to suit their intended narrative, it's up to each DM whether to enforce them all the time, only some of the time, or not at all etc.
But there will also be situations in which a character is simply asleep and hasn't woken up yet; again, I'd usually try to limit this to one or two rounds at a maximum, either by making the checks easier or waiving them entirely. For example, if the party's Bard is the first to wake up and they respond with a thunderwave (the Bardic equivalent of "5 more minutes") then I'm probably not going to bother with checks. But if the players are in different rooms, and the amount of noise isn't that high yet I might ask for plain or disadvantaged checks etc. The OP didn't give quite enough detail for us to really dig into the "correct" way to run the whole encounter, and there is a lot of parts that a DM can consider, but on the other hand they also have to do all of this in the moment so snap judgements, getting it wrong sometimes, and just fudging everything as you go is way more common than our hypothetical methods!
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
I think the point of having a watch is that usually the person on watch will not be surprised. The person is listening, watching, paying attention, hopefully wide awake. The point of a watch is to alert the party if something comes along. If the watch hears a loud noise in the forest, or sees something suspicious, they can quietly wake the party so that they can be prepared to deal with whatever is coming.
A surprise ambush in the dark is, in my experience, more often the exception than the rule. Someone trying to sneak up on the party has to know where they are. They need to know the party location and ideally know the location of any guards. They then need to make stealth checks opposed by the passive perception of the guard on watch. If the approach goes unnoticed then the guard on watch and the rest of the party will likely be surprised. However, it requires a specific type of creature that wants to surprise the sleeping party and is sufficiently skilled to make it happen. Not every orc is that good at stealth.
In addition, the noises of the night might well alert the person on watch that something is happening even if they don't explicitly notice a creature. Insects and other night noises tend to change when a creature moves by and such changes may be perceptible to the person on watch so they may end up not surprised even if the attackers all remain unseen (DM ruling on how they want to run it and it may depend on the class of the character on watch or their abilities when operating in nature - DM might require a perception, survival or nature check depending on the circumstances).
Anyway, I have found the "surprised party" scenario to be relatively infrequent.
So, on reviewing the limited description we have here I'd say the DM was slightly out of RAW by having the first cast happen outside of initiative, but unless they make a habit of it this isn't something to make an issue of and overall this falls under Rule 0. We only have a short description of the order of events, and the situation itself is one where it's reasonable for the DM to adjudicate whether or not characters who were asleep right as things started happening are surprised or not. One combat instance where the party is caught fairly flat-footed and doesn't suffer any deaths or other major setbacks isn't really a problem. Without a better play-by-play it's hard to call the timing involved, which is also a judgement call area for the DM.