What you keep misunderstanding is that THE ONLY THING that Invisibility and Greater Invisibility do is give you this condition. There is 100% a connection between Hide and Invisibility because WotC decided to make them both do effectively the same thing by them both granting the Invisible condition.
No. I'm not misunderstanding that. They give you the Condition. I have repeatedly agreed with that. What I disagree with is that they redefine the Condition. You want the Invisibility Condition to make people actually invisible because the Invisibility Spell bestows the Condition. It doesn't work that way. If the Invisibility Spell (or Greater Invisibility Spell) bestows something outside of the Invisibility Condition and they do not specify it, that is an issue with those spells. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Condition or the Hide Action.
The Invisible Condition does not, in and of itself, make anything totally see through and no matter how much you want to argue that the Invisibility Spell means it must, that argument fails. How do I know this? Because, again, gelatinous cubes can have the Invisible Condition. It isn't that they actually turned completely see through, it is just that they can be hard to see and can easily be missed.
Does that mean that someone who casts the Invisibility Spell is merely transparent and can be seen once they have moved, or does that mean that the factors that affect a gelatinous cube's Invisible Condition are completely irrelevant to any conversation about the spell?
Further more, the idea the there is a 100% connection between Hide and Invisibility is clearly wrong.
You can maintain a Concentrations Spell after taking the Hide Action without losing the Invisible Condition. You cannot do that with Invisibility.
You can also cast some spells after taking the Hide Action without loosing the Invisible Condition. You cannot do that with Invisibility.
Regardless of Concentration, the Invisible Condition from an Invisibility spell cannot persist for over an hour.
You must be out of an enemy's line of sight and either Heavily Obscured, behind 3/4 Cover, or Total Cover to use the Hide Action. You need gum arabic and an eyelash to use the Invisibility spell.
You must make a Skill Check to successfully take the Hide Action. No roll is required for Invisibility.
All of these are explicit differences between the two. I left off the fact that you lose the Invisibility Condition if you are 'found' after you use the Hide action from that list because, while it is also an explicit difference, it illustrates that there may be implicit differences (since it is unclear if it has defined what 'find' means or simply provided one of the most common methods)
I am not attributing something else from Invisibility to the Hide action, because there is nothing else in Invisibility BUT the Invisible condition.
As shown above, that is clearly incorrect. The spell also provides situations which can cause the Invisible Condition to be lost, and they are not identical to the situations under which the Invisible Condition granted by the Hide Action can be lost. In the common interpretation of the Hide Action, walking out in the open fulfills one of its situations (i.e. being 'found') that the Invisibility spell lacks.
It is a problem with the Invisible condition, because in 5e it absolutely worked the way everyone would expect it to. But then in 5.5e, they made it so that Hide gave you Invisible and thus broke how magical invisibility worked. The rules have to all work together to be cohesive, so saying that Invisibility has nothing to do with this discussion is incredibly disingenuous.
Unless your contention, again, is that there is no way to become transparent in the game.
Nope. You are falling into the common fallacy of duality. Either the situation is A or is it B.
My contention is that Hide and the Invisible Condition are perfectly fine. Characters can also turn transparent. Any argument that people cannot turn transparent is predicated on an error in the Invisibility spell.
Feel free to start a new thread on that fact, because we aren't talking about the Invisibility spell here. We are talking about the Hide Action, which is different.
Unless I'm mistaken, the people (person?) arguing that Hide is perfectly fine and intuitive as is (while also allowing someone to stand out in the open after a successful roll and not be "found") seem to have left the thread some time ago. As far as I can tell, the argument has devolved into "what makes hide—and to what degree is it—unintuitive" with people arguing from different angles, but all ultimately making the same point: that hide needs some work.
A few people are saying that the text works perfectly well without needed interpretation, but leads to unintuitive conclusions that need to be corrected by the DM, while others are saying the text itself isn't tenable without some heavy lifting from the DM to make it work in an intuitive manner.
You are trying to argue that the rules exist outside of the narrative context in which they're used. These are not just abstract keywords. We know what it means to hide, therefore we know what is required to see somebody that is hiding. And we have mechanics to apply in uncertain cases.
(Is that a house ruling? Only in the sense that every ruling made at the table is a house ruling, even the most basic ones. RAW does not incorporate the narrative context, because it cannot.)
All conditions do is describe the game-mechanical effects of a state. In the case of Invisible, that state is "not being seen". How you can be seen is outside of the condition's scope.
Are the rules around this stuff well put together? No. But they function as long as you take the context into account.
(In particular, invisibility magic not specifying that you cannot be seen by normal sight is an omission, but we are still aware of the context, so it's not actually a problem.)
So you finally agree with me. These rules only work if you use the context of 5e to houserule the interpretation. That reading these rules as-is do not make narrative or mechanical sense.
This is, perhaps, at an extremely meta level, but no, I don't agree with you. I'm probably closer to diametrically opposed to you.
You need to have the narrative context to apply any rule in play. This isn't house-ruling as in "changing the rules". It's just knowing what it means to "hide", to be "found", etc., because these are things that can only be understood in the narrative context.
Yes like the see invisibility spell, blind sight etc.
Like ordinary vision. Unless an effect specifies otherwise, creatures can be seen, and invisibility doesn't specify otherwise.
See, now you're ruling that this must be so because the rules doesn't say it can't, but the inverse is also true. So it comes down to whether you read it a functional or not (and you've already decided where you stand)
Yes like the see invisibility spell, blind sight etc.
Like ordinary vision. Unless an effect specifies otherwise, creatures can be seen, and invisibility doesn't specify otherwise.
Nah. Then the see invisibility spell would do nothing at all. In fact the see invisibility spell clarifies that invisibility actually makes the invisible, because the effect is to see people with the invisible condition as if they were visible. The invisibility condition therefore makes you not visible. People seem to want hiding to work a certain way so they want to read invisibility to mean that, when it clearly does not.
Nah. Then the see invisibility spell would do nothing at all.
Exactly. RAW, the invisibility spell doesn't do anything. It's clearly not RAI, but the entire point of this discussion is that RAW is a dysfunctional mess and that we don't actually know what RAI is for stealth.
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Any time you define a term, you are negating the natural meaning of that term, unless you explicitly incorporate the natural meaning.
No. I'm not misunderstanding that. They give you the Condition. I have repeatedly agreed with that. What I disagree with is that they redefine the Condition. You want the Invisibility Condition to make people actually invisible because the Invisibility Spell bestows the Condition. It doesn't work that way. If the Invisibility Spell (or Greater Invisibility Spell) bestows something outside of the Invisibility Condition and they do not specify it, that is an issue with those spells. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Condition or the Hide Action.
The Invisible Condition does not, in and of itself, make anything totally see through and no matter how much you want to argue that the Invisibility Spell means it must, that argument fails. How do I know this? Because, again, gelatinous cubes can have the Invisible Condition. It isn't that they actually turned completely see through, it is just that they can be hard to see and can easily be missed.
Does that mean that someone who casts the Invisibility Spell is merely transparent and can be seen once they have moved, or does that mean that the factors that affect a gelatinous cube's Invisible Condition are completely irrelevant to any conversation about the spell?
Further more, the idea the there is a 100% connection between Hide and Invisibility is clearly wrong.
All of these are explicit differences between the two. I left off the fact that you lose the Invisibility Condition if you are 'found' after you use the Hide action from that list because, while it is also an explicit difference, it illustrates that there may be implicit differences (since it is unclear if it has defined what 'find' means or simply provided one of the most common methods)
As shown above, that is clearly incorrect. The spell also provides situations which can cause the Invisible Condition to be lost, and they are not identical to the situations under which the Invisible Condition granted by the Hide Action can be lost. In the common interpretation of the Hide Action, walking out in the open fulfills one of its situations (i.e. being 'found') that the Invisibility spell lacks.
Nope. You are falling into the common fallacy of duality. Either the situation is A or is it B.
My contention is that Hide and the Invisible Condition are perfectly fine. Characters can also turn transparent. Any argument that people cannot turn transparent is predicated on an error in the Invisibility spell.
Feel free to start a new thread on that fact, because we aren't talking about the Invisibility spell here. We are talking about the Hide Action, which is different.
Unless I'm mistaken, the people (person?) arguing that Hide is perfectly fine and intuitive as is (while also allowing someone to stand out in the open after a successful roll and not be "found") seem to have left the thread some time ago. As far as I can tell, the argument has devolved into "what makes hide—and to what degree is it—unintuitive" with people arguing from different angles, but all ultimately making the same point: that hide needs some work.
A few people are saying that the text works perfectly well without needed interpretation, but leads to unintuitive conclusions that need to be corrected by the DM, while others are saying the text itself isn't tenable without some heavy lifting from the DM to make it work in an intuitive manner.
If you aren't affect by any effect that requires you to be see how you are being seeing?
You aren't affected by any effect that requires you to be seen unless you can be seen. Which is kind of... tautological and meaningless?
No, isn't, in another words, if somenthing doesn't negate the concealment you can't be seeing
This is, perhaps, at an extremely meta level, but no, I don't agree with you. I'm probably closer to diametrically opposed to you.
You need to have the narrative context to apply any rule in play. This isn't house-ruling as in "changing the rules". It's just knowing what it means to "hide", to be "found", etc., because these are things that can only be understood in the narrative context.
Yes like the see invisibility spell, blind sight etc.
Like ordinary vision. Unless an effect specifies otherwise, creatures can be seen, and invisibility doesn't specify otherwise.
See, now you're ruling that this must be so because the rules doesn't say it can't, but the inverse is also true. So it comes down to whether you read it a functional or not (and you've already decided where you stand)
Nah. Then the see invisibility spell would do nothing at all. In fact the see invisibility spell clarifies that invisibility actually makes the invisible, because the effect is to see people with the invisible condition as if they were visible. The invisibility condition therefore makes you not visible. People seem to want hiding to work a certain way so they want to read invisibility to mean that, when it clearly does not.
Exactly. RAW, the invisibility spell doesn't do anything. It's clearly not RAI, but the entire point of this discussion is that RAW is a dysfunctional mess and that we don't actually know what RAI is for stealth.