Can you please explain to me how does surprise enemies works:
the way i understand it is:
For example There is enemies in the room, i am invisible I sneak to room, and hit one of them,
This prokes Surprised condition, thus we all roll for initiative, and play by initiative, however enemies skip their 1st turn
but when it comes to my turn do i still have my action +bonus action? or the action i used tro attack them out of combat is counted as my action and is deducted from turn?
No attack should occur before initiative is rolled and you take a turn.
If you're invivible and sneaking up to a room full of enemies, the DM compares your Dexterity (Stealth) check with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature in the room. Anyone that doesn't notice you is surprised at the start of the encounter. Then initiative is rolled and everyone takes a turn in order but those surprised can't move or take an action on their first turn of the combat, or take a reaction until that turn ends.
When the turn any any other creature comes up, they can move and take their action, bonus action or reaction without restriction.
COMBAT STEP-BY-STEP
1. Determine surprise. The DM determines whether anyone involved in the combat encounter is surprised. 2. Establish positions. The DM decides where all the characters and monsters are located. Given the adventurers' marching order or their stated positions in the room or other location, the DM figures out where the adversaries are--how far away and in what direction. 3. Roll initiative. Everyone involved in the combat encounter rolls initiative, determining the order of combatants' turns. 4. Take turns. Each participant in the battle takes a turn in initiative order. 5. Begin the next round. When everyone involved in the combat has had a turn, the round ends. Repeat step 4 until the fighting stops.
For example There is enemies in the room, i am invisible I sneak to room, and hit one of them,
This prokes Surprised condition, thus we all roll for initiative, and play by initiative, however enemies skip their 1st turn
but when it comes to my turn do i still have my action +bonus action? or the action i used tro attack them out of combat is counted as my action and is deducted from turn?
The way that you are describing this sounds a lot like how things are implemented in Baldur's Gate 3. But the RAW for D&D 5E works a bit differently.
In 5E, the first step is that you must be Hidden. It's not enough to just be invisible -- the important part of your statement was that you "sneak to room". Whether or not you are able to sneak successfully depends on the Hiding mechanic. You must now roll a stealth check and your result is contested individually by the passive perception of each enemy in the room. Whichever enemies were able to detect you sneaking in are not surprised, the ones who failed to detect you are surprised.
Although some DMs will allow the attack out of combat, the game is designed to be run in a way such that initiative is rolled first and then all hostile actions occur within combat. In the situation described, it sort of works out to be the same thing anyway. Assuming all enemies were surprised, none of them can move or take an action during their first turn regardless of whether they are ahead or behind you in the initiative order. If any of them are not surprised, however, and they happen to roll higher than you in the initiative, they could actually attack you before you even have a chance to make this initial attack. If a DM wants to make such a result less likely, he could grant that initial attacker advantage on their initiative roll, but that's still not a guarantee.
In my opinion, if you are in a party and you all successfully snuck into the room together, but the attack was not coordinated -- one party member acted alone by making an attack, perhaps going against the plan -- then I feel like it would make sense for party members higher up in the initiative order than the attacker to basically "skip their turn" as well. (Aside: A surprised creature doesn't actually "skip their 1st turn" -- they simply cannot move or take an action during their first turn.) So, the party members would never initiate the fighting since that's not the declared scenario. But if an enemy manages to avoid surprise and wins initiative and preemptively becomes hostile then these party members could respond to that as normal on their first turn before the intended initial attacker's turn.
Hopefully that made some sense. Every scenario is a little different, but these are generally the surprise rules for 5e.
The 5e Surprise rules are notoriously bad. The fact that the condition can end before anything has actually happened is logically broken. If you are invisible and decide to shoot someone and they roll higher on initiative, they will no longer be surprised by the time you shoot them, even though nothing has happened. They stopped being surprised by you shooting them before you even shot them.
A lot of DMs will houserule this to being a Surprise Round (like in 3.5) so that they get their action/reaction back in the next round after the surprising thing actually happened.
If you are invisible and decide to shoot someone and they roll higher on initiative, they will no longer be surprised by the time you shoot them, even though nothing has happened. They stopped being surprised by you shooting them before you even shot them.
First, just remember again that simply being invisible is not enough. They'll never be surprised in that scenario since they know where you are, they just cannot see you.
But let's assume that "invisible" means "hidden" in the above statement. When you say, "even though nothing has happened" that's the scenario where you successfully Hid. In the case where you lost the stealth vs perception contest, that's modelling a situation where something DID happen before you shot them. The shooting wasn't the surprising thing in that case. You tripped over something or you knocked over a vase or something before taking your shot, so they are not surprised by your shot and might even be able to attack you before that shot happens. If they are surprised but have higher initiative so that they are able to respond to your shot with a Reaction, then that scenario is somewhere in-between.
I think the rules do make some sense when given a decent narrative to explain what's happening.
Even in worse case scenario surprise always has an impact. Even if the ambusher is going last in the initiative order and every surprised enemies had a turn, doing nothing, it will be the only creature having a turn to act this round before everyone can do so again in the 2nd round, including the ambusher.
In other words, ambushers always have an additional turn to act over surprised creature, regardless of initiative order.
And in the event that combat ends before initiative order could get to the ambusher's 2nd turn, then it will mean it effectively acted first if we dress the order.
Being surprised but winning initiative does make a difference due to reactions.
In the OPs example (assuming their stealth beat everyone passive perception), the their target was before the OPs character they would have their reaction to do something like cast shield or make an op attack as he attemps to leave (assuming invisibility was broken with the attack), he was behind the attacker on initiative he would still be surprised and unable to take reactions.
This seems reasonable a high dex check, means you are able to react quickly to an unexpected event, like a creature suddenly appearing out of thin air attacking you with their rapier.
Even in worse case scenario surprise always has an impact. Even if the ambusher is going last in the initiative order and every surprised enemies had a turn, doing nothing, it will be the only creature having a turn to act this round before everyone can do so again in the 2nd round, including the ambusher.
In other words, ambushers always have an additional turn to act over surprised creature, regardless of initiative order.
And in the event that combat ends before initiative order could get to the ambusher's 2nd turn, then it will mean it effectively acted first if we dress the order.
Except, if you did not initiate combat, they still would not have done anything. What prevents the "initiating" character from just not shooting on their turn and leaving. The other people don't know anyone was there, they are not even aware that combat was initiated. What prevents a particularly sneaky Rogue from just Initiative Fishing? If they can just keep trying with no penalty but additional stealth checks, why not just use a Surprise Round?
It's actually kind of cool that there are so many different combinations of results which give sort of a sliding scale for how much of an edge is gained at the beginning of combat, whose probabilities could even be influenced by advantage and disadvantage. You could even have a one-on-one encounter where both people are surprised. This can become more complicated if two parties partially surprise each other as you could have some members on both sides that are surprised and some members on both sides that are not surprised.
For one-on-one encounters you can have these combinations:
A
B (surprised)
A
B
----------
B (surprised)
A
B
----------
A
B
----------
B
A
----------
A (surprised)
B (surprised)
A
B
----------
B (surprised)
A (surprised)
B
A
B
----------
A (surprised)
B
A
B
----------
B
A (surprised)
B
A
B
----------
The main situation that the rules do not support but which can be seen in some games is this:
A (out of combat)
A
B (surprised)
A
B
where one side gets 3 turns before the other side has a chance to act.
Except, if you did not initiate combat, they still would not have done anything. What prevents the "initiating" character from just not shooting on their turn and leaving. The other people don't know anyone was there, they are not even aware that combat was initiated. What prevents a particularly sneaky Rogue from just Initiative Fishing? If they can just keep trying with no penalty but additional stealth checks, why not just use a Surprise Round?
Normally something initiate combat by causing surprise, In that case it's entering the room perhaps.
There may be odd scenario where it's not going as intended, but in general when am ambusher initiate combat, it's attacking.
Except, if you did not initiate combat, they still would not have done anything. What prevents the "initiating" character from just not shooting on their turn and leaving. The other people don't know anyone was there, they are not even aware that combat was initiated. What prevents a particularly sneaky Rogue from just Initiative Fishing? If they can just keep trying with no penalty but additional stealth checks, why not just use a Surprise Round?
There is no Surprise Round in 5e. Surprise works as explained above.
However, initiative fishing certainly might be possible in this exact scenario when following the letter of the rules. This is because your Stealth Check persists until you are discovered or until you stop Hiding. The rules do not give any other justification for having to make a new Stealth Check. Also, the Passive Perception of an enemy doesn't change unless the circumstance changes such that they gain Advantage or Disadvantage or unless there is some reason for them to begin making active Perception checks to search for someone in the area. So, a player could meta-game this situation if he is aware of his own stealth roll and the fact that the enemy seemingly didn't have a good enough passive perception to discover him.
Obviously, a DM would probably not allow this sort of meta-gaming, but there aren't very good rules-based justifications for disallowing initiative fishing in this scenario.
In practice, a DM likely will just require a new Stealth Check for a new encounter or some other change in the situation or after a prolonged period of sneaking, but this does break the above rule regarding Stealth Checks.
Another option is that the DM could just say that the fighting never stops while you remain Hidden and therefore the combat never ends:
5. Begin the next round. When everyone involved in the combat has had a turn, the round ends. Repeat step 4 until the fighting stops.
This is obviously not a great solution, but it does prevent the rerolling of initiative and in most cases the invisibility eventually wears off.
Perhaps in situations where nothing has changed by the time the "initiating character" get his chance to act, the DM can just hold that character to that action. Technically that's probably not justified by the rules, but it does make some sense.
I feel like I had one or two more equally dubious ideas for what a DM could do in this situation, but I can't remember them right now.
oh, now I am confused even more than i was before : D
as I understood i cant attack out of combat to make some1 surprise
For example i sneak to room, my party waits outside, my stealth is higher than everyone's passive perception , So they are counted as Surprised and we roll initiative?
And my party members roll initiative as well right?
In that case i only have my turn inside combat and no extra attack as i described in first post.
yeah I described BG 3 mechanics, because we started dnd after we played bg 3 ; D
The first step of any combat is this: the DM determines whether anyone in the combat is surprised (reread “Combat Step by Step” in the Player’s Handbook). This determination happens only once during a fight and only at the beginning. In other words, once a fight starts, you can’t be surprised again, although a hidden foe can still gain the normal benefits from being unseen (see “Unseen Attackers and Targets” in the Player’s Handbook).
To be surprised, you must be caught off guard, usually because you failed to notice foes being stealthy or you were startled by an enemy with a special ability, such as the gelatinous cube’s Transparent trait, that makes it exceptionally surprising. You can be surprised even if your companions aren’t, and you aren’t surprised if even one of your foes fails to catch you unawares.
If anyone is surprised, no actions are taken yet. First, initiative is rolled as normal. Then, the first round of combat starts, and the unsurprised combatants act in initiative order. A surprised creature can’t move or take an action or a reaction until its first turn ends (remember that being unable to take an action also means you can’t take a bonus action). In effect, a surprised creature skips its first turn in a fight. Once that turn ends, the creature is no longer surprised.
In short, activity in a combat is always ordered by initiative, whether or not someone is surprised, and after the first round of combat has passed, surprise is no longer a factor. You can still try to hide from your foes and gain the benefits conferred by being hidden, but you don’t deprive your foes of their turns when you do so.
I just remembered... in the new 2024 revision of D&D 5e the rules for surprise will be different. The following video is also interesting about the Jeremy Crawford's toughs regardind the current 2014 rules (watch from 22:10):
[...] you have a better chance of acting first or at least sooner in any battle that you're participating in, but it has this an especially nice interaction with how surprise now works, because the surprise rules in the new players handbook have been changed. Rather than there there being a potential for certain combatants to simply be unable to act during the first round of a fight, a possibility that frankly ended up really unbalancing the game in certain circumstances, because the old surprise rules could very easily trivialize an entire encounter [...] so in the new rules being surprised simply means you have disadvantage on your initiative role, meaning you're you are likely to go after the people who surprised you although it's not guaranteed [...]
Another thing that rings to me in this official ruling is the fact that ''To be surprised, you must be caught off guard'' means wether the ambusher doesn't do anything on it's first turn, the creature was surprised by something it didn't expected, whatever that is, despite still not necessarily having yet notice anyone, i put that on the count of suspicions if nothing else.
The idea is that they are surprised because they didn't notice any threats at the moment that the threatening creature declares that they are engaging in combat. Just sneaking into a room doesn't necessarily begin combat.
Combat intent is usually signaled to the DM for it to call for initiative. The OP specifically said ''I sneak to room, and hit one of them''
Now the OP scenario, he is invisible and hidden. If the room has no door, perhaps entering it goes unoticed and initiative takes place when the PC signal intent to attack.
But if there was a door to the room, or the PC wasn't invisible, occupants would immediately notice it's entrance and the DM may very well at this moment calls for initiative.
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Good day Friends,
Can you please explain to me how does surprise enemies works:
the way i understand it is:
For example There is enemies in the room, i am invisible I sneak to room, and hit one of them,
This prokes Surprised condition, thus we all roll for initiative, and play by initiative, however enemies skip their 1st turn
but when it comes to my turn do i still have my action +bonus action? or the action i used tro attack them out of combat is counted as my action and is deducted from turn?
No attack should occur before initiative is rolled and you take a turn.
If you're invivible and sneaking up to a room full of enemies, the DM compares your Dexterity (Stealth) check with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature in the room. Anyone that doesn't notice you is surprised at the start of the encounter. Then initiative is rolled and everyone takes a turn in order but those surprised can't move or take an action on their first turn of the combat, or take a reaction until that turn ends.
When the turn any any other creature comes up, they can move and take their action, bonus action or reaction without restriction.
The way that you are describing this sounds a lot like how things are implemented in Baldur's Gate 3. But the RAW for D&D 5E works a bit differently.
In 5E, the first step is that you must be Hidden. It's not enough to just be invisible -- the important part of your statement was that you "sneak to room". Whether or not you are able to sneak successfully depends on the Hiding mechanic. You must now roll a stealth check and your result is contested individually by the passive perception of each enemy in the room. Whichever enemies were able to detect you sneaking in are not surprised, the ones who failed to detect you are surprised.
Although some DMs will allow the attack out of combat, the game is designed to be run in a way such that initiative is rolled first and then all hostile actions occur within combat. In the situation described, it sort of works out to be the same thing anyway. Assuming all enemies were surprised, none of them can move or take an action during their first turn regardless of whether they are ahead or behind you in the initiative order. If any of them are not surprised, however, and they happen to roll higher than you in the initiative, they could actually attack you before you even have a chance to make this initial attack. If a DM wants to make such a result less likely, he could grant that initial attacker advantage on their initiative roll, but that's still not a guarantee.
In my opinion, if you are in a party and you all successfully snuck into the room together, but the attack was not coordinated -- one party member acted alone by making an attack, perhaps going against the plan -- then I feel like it would make sense for party members higher up in the initiative order than the attacker to basically "skip their turn" as well. (Aside: A surprised creature doesn't actually "skip their 1st turn" -- they simply cannot move or take an action during their first turn.) So, the party members would never initiate the fighting since that's not the declared scenario. But if an enemy manages to avoid surprise and wins initiative and preemptively becomes hostile then these party members could respond to that as normal on their first turn before the intended initial attacker's turn.
Hopefully that made some sense. Every scenario is a little different, but these are generally the surprise rules for 5e.
The 5e Surprise rules are notoriously bad. The fact that the condition can end before anything has actually happened is logically broken. If you are invisible and decide to shoot someone and they roll higher on initiative, they will no longer be surprised by the time you shoot them, even though nothing has happened. They stopped being surprised by you shooting them before you even shot them.
A lot of DMs will houserule this to being a Surprise Round (like in 3.5) so that they get their action/reaction back in the next round after the surprising thing actually happened.
First, just remember again that simply being invisible is not enough. They'll never be surprised in that scenario since they know where you are, they just cannot see you.
But let's assume that "invisible" means "hidden" in the above statement. When you say, "even though nothing has happened" that's the scenario where you successfully Hid. In the case where you lost the stealth vs perception contest, that's modelling a situation where something DID happen before you shot them. The shooting wasn't the surprising thing in that case. You tripped over something or you knocked over a vase or something before taking your shot, so they are not surprised by your shot and might even be able to attack you before that shot happens. If they are surprised but have higher initiative so that they are able to respond to your shot with a Reaction, then that scenario is somewhere in-between.
I think the rules do make some sense when given a decent narrative to explain what's happening.
Even in worse case scenario surprise always has an impact. Even if the ambusher is going last in the initiative order and every surprised enemies had a turn, doing nothing, it will be the only creature having a turn to act this round before everyone can do so again in the 2nd round, including the ambusher.
In other words, ambushers always have an additional turn to act over surprised creature, regardless of initiative order.
And in the event that combat ends before initiative order could get to the ambusher's 2nd turn, then it will mean it effectively acted first if we dress the order.
Being surprised but winning initiative does make a difference due to reactions.
In the OPs example (assuming their stealth beat everyone passive perception), the their target was before the OPs character they would have their reaction to do something like cast shield or make an op attack as he attemps to leave (assuming invisibility was broken with the attack), he was behind the attacker on initiative he would still be surprised and unable to take reactions.
This seems reasonable a high dex check, means you are able to react quickly to an unexpected event, like a creature suddenly appearing out of thin air attacking you with their rapier.
Except, if you did not initiate combat, they still would not have done anything. What prevents the "initiating" character from just not shooting on their turn and leaving. The other people don't know anyone was there, they are not even aware that combat was initiated. What prevents a particularly sneaky Rogue from just Initiative Fishing? If they can just keep trying with no penalty but additional stealth checks, why not just use a Surprise Round?
It's actually kind of cool that there are so many different combinations of results which give sort of a sliding scale for how much of an edge is gained at the beginning of combat, whose probabilities could even be influenced by advantage and disadvantage. You could even have a one-on-one encounter where both people are surprised. This can become more complicated if two parties partially surprise each other as you could have some members on both sides that are surprised and some members on both sides that are not surprised.
For one-on-one encounters you can have these combinations:
A
B (surprised)
A
B
----------
B (surprised)
A
B
----------
A
B
----------
B
A
----------
A (surprised)
B (surprised)
A
B
----------
B (surprised)
A (surprised)
B
A
B
----------
A (surprised)
B
A
B
----------
B
A (surprised)
B
A
B
----------
The main situation that the rules do not support but which can be seen in some games is this:
A (out of combat)
A
B (surprised)
A
B
where one side gets 3 turns before the other side has a chance to act.
Normally something initiate combat by causing surprise, In that case it's entering the room perhaps.
There may be odd scenario where it's not going as intended, but in general when am ambusher initiate combat, it's attacking.
There is no Surprise Round in 5e. Surprise works as explained above.
However, initiative fishing certainly might be possible in this exact scenario when following the letter of the rules. This is because your Stealth Check persists until you are discovered or until you stop Hiding. The rules do not give any other justification for having to make a new Stealth Check. Also, the Passive Perception of an enemy doesn't change unless the circumstance changes such that they gain Advantage or Disadvantage or unless there is some reason for them to begin making active Perception checks to search for someone in the area. So, a player could meta-game this situation if he is aware of his own stealth roll and the fact that the enemy seemingly didn't have a good enough passive perception to discover him.
Obviously, a DM would probably not allow this sort of meta-gaming, but there aren't very good rules-based justifications for disallowing initiative fishing in this scenario.
In practice, a DM likely will just require a new Stealth Check for a new encounter or some other change in the situation or after a prolonged period of sneaking, but this does break the above rule regarding Stealth Checks.
Another option is that the DM could just say that the fighting never stops while you remain Hidden and therefore the combat never ends:
This is obviously not a great solution, but it does prevent the rerolling of initiative and in most cases the invisibility eventually wears off.
Perhaps in situations where nothing has changed by the time the "initiating character" get his chance to act, the DM can just hold that character to that action. Technically that's probably not justified by the rules, but it does make some sense.
I feel like I had one or two more equally dubious ideas for what a DM could do in this situation, but I can't remember them right now.
oh, now I am confused even more than i was before : D
as I understood i cant attack out of combat to make some1 surprise
For example i sneak to room, my party waits outside, my stealth is higher than everyone's passive perception , So they are counted as Surprised and we roll initiative?
And my party members roll initiative as well right?
In that case i only have my turn inside combat and no extra attack as i described in first post.
yeah I described BG 3 mechanics, because we started dnd after we played bg 3 ; D
Yes everyone involved in the combat encounter rolls initiative, determining the order of combatants' turns.
@Davud134 in case this is useful for you, apart from the comments provided by other teammates, you can find additonal information in the Sage Advice Compendium.
As @Plaguescarred said, "everyone involved in the combat encounter rolls initiative".
---
Does surprise happen outside the initiative order as a special surprise round?
No, here’s how surprise works.
The first step of any combat is this: the DM determines whether anyone in the combat is surprised (reread “Combat Step by Step” in the Player’s Handbook). This determination happens only once during a fight and only at the beginning. In other words, once a fight starts, you can’t be surprised again, although a hidden foe can still gain the normal benefits from being unseen (see “Unseen Attackers and Targets” in the Player’s Handbook).
To be surprised, you must be caught off guard, usually because you failed to notice foes being stealthy or you were startled by an enemy with a special ability, such as the gelatinous cube’s Transparent trait, that makes it exceptionally surprising. You can be surprised even if your companions aren’t, and you aren’t surprised if even one of your foes fails to catch you unawares.
If anyone is surprised, no actions are taken yet. First, initiative is rolled as normal. Then, the first round of combat starts, and the unsurprised combatants act in initiative order. A surprised creature can’t move or take an action or a reaction until its first turn ends (remember that being unable to take an action also means you can’t take a bonus action). In effect, a surprised creature skips its first turn in a fight. Once that turn ends, the creature is no longer surprised.
In short, activity in a combat is always ordered by initiative, whether or not someone is surprised, and after the first round of combat has passed, surprise is no longer a factor. You can still try to hide from your foes and gain the benefits conferred by being hidden, but you don’t deprive your foes of their turns when you do so.
I just remembered... in the new 2024 revision of D&D 5e the rules for surprise will be different. The following video is also interesting about the Jeremy Crawford's toughs regardind the current 2014 rules (watch from 22:10):
Another thing that rings to me in this official ruling is the fact that ''To be surprised, you must be caught off guard'' means wether the ambusher doesn't do anything on it's first turn, the creature was surprised by something it didn't expected, whatever that is, despite still not necessarily having yet notice anyone, i put that on the count of suspicions if nothing else.
Yeah thats sounds a bit odd)))
IF i am just entering the room and successfully sneaked, = they will be surprised, but surprised from what?)))
I think in BG 3 this mechanics is kinda best))
The idea is that they are surprised because they didn't notice any threats at the moment that the threatening creature declares that they are engaging in combat. Just sneaking into a room doesn't necessarily begin combat.
Combat intent is usually signaled to the DM for it to call for initiative. The OP specifically said ''I sneak to room, and hit one of them''
Now the OP scenario, he is invisible and hidden. If the room has no door, perhaps entering it goes unoticed and initiative takes place when the PC signal intent to attack.
But if there was a door to the room, or the PC wasn't invisible, occupants would immediately notice it's entrance and the DM may very well at this moment calls for initiative.