As a DM, I'm struggling to figure out how to present a challenge to a party with even rudimentary stealth. As far as I can tell, it's very easy to simply skip entire areas of encounters, MAYBE for the cost of a 2nd level spell (pass w/o trace).
Why? Well let's look at the rules for hiding and the invisible condition:
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, and you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
On a successful check, you have the Invisible condition while hidden. Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.
You stop being hidden immediately after any of the following occurs: you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component.
Surprise. If you’re Invisible when you roll Initiative, you have Advantage on the roll.
Concealed. You aren’t affected by any effect that requires its target to be seen unless the effect’s creator can somehow see you. Any equipment you are wearing or carrying is also concealed.
Attacks Affected. Attack rolls against you have Disadvantage, and your attack rolls have Advantage. If a creature can somehow see you, you don’t gain this benefit against that creature.
So, if you succeed on a DC15 stealth check behind cover, you are invisible. I've tried not to rule this as being equivalent to the spell (transparent), but my rulings start to become contradictory. So you have the Invisible condition while hidden. How do you stop being hidden? "...you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component."
So let's look at an easy example which came up at my table. The party is at the entrance to a room containing a table with a person on either side of the table. The party needs to get past the people. So, the party casts Pass without Trace, easily makes the DC15 stealth check, and become invisible. They then walk, including their Large Shield Guardian, 5 ft. behind one of the people at the table fully in view of the other person, but they are invisible so they get by.
Did they make a sound louder than a whisper? Well, they rolled above a DC15 on their stealth, so presumably they are quite stealthy as they move past. The party can dash, past creatures, dance in front of them...This stanza doesn't really apply in most cases because the stealth check itself implies you do what you are doing quietly.
Did the enemy find them? Well, the enemy had no reason to actively make a perception check so never made one, and their passives are often lower than the DC15 in the first place.
Did the party attack or cast a spell with a verbal component? No, they just walked past the encounter entirely.
Now, I'm concerned that the party could do this for entire chapters of published adventures w/o a problem, and all it really costs them is one second level spell. They can sneak into a hideout past all the enemies. They can infiltrate a castle and find their missing companion. They can sneak through a cave and never once be detected. And it's so easy to do, 75% chance to succeed for anyone who hasn't bumped their Dex or Stealth checks.
That's bad enough, but let's go to example 2.
The enemy has been tipped off that the party is coming, so they sit aiming their weapons towards the corner that the party has to round, preparing an ambush. Unfortunately, the party becomes invisible, walks around the corner and sees the ambush, but can fortunately just run past the ambushers. For extra measure, they do a little dance in front of the ambusher just to mock them. There go all ambushes against the party.
The fact that Pass without Trace functions as a group-cast invisibility spell at the same level that you get Invisibility, AND gets the rider that you can still cast non-verbal spells seems ridiculously unbalanced to me for a start.
But the DM has some tools for countering invisibility. Let's try using them:
If you have Blindsight, you can see within a specific range without relying on physical sight. Within that range, you can see anything that isn’t behind Total Cover even if you have the Blinded condition or are in Darkness. Moreover, in that range, you can see something that has the Invisible condition.
Let's take example 2 and make the enemies some mind flayers, but let's add an Intellect Devourer with Blindsight. The party walks around the corner, and the Intellect Devourer sees them. Surely their invisibility ends, right? NOPE!!!
Did the party make a sound louder than a whisper? No.
Did the enemy find them? No, because no creature made any perception check. You may be thinking "well just rule that if they step into the open where a creature sees them, like with blindsight, then rule that as them being found and forgo the check." But consider the rogue. The Rogue goes behind cover and uses the BA to hide. They then walk out of cover, and make an attack. If they are seen when they exit cover, then they don't get advantage on their attack, and so they don't get their sneak attack. In fact, that makes it impossible to get sneak attack via hiding, unless you continuously can't be seen even while attacking. You'd have to implement Facing rules with sight cones and the like to be able to sneak attack from stealth. Note, this was a problem in 2014 too.
Did the party attack or cast a spell with a verbal component? No, they just walked around the corner.
So what's the benefit of Blindsight then? Well, you are not concealed to the Intellect Devourer, and your attacks with them are not affected. But you remain invisible to the rest of the mind flayers. Maybe the intellect devourer can prompt active perception checks or encourage the mind flayers to target you while invisible with disadvantage attacks or AoEs. The same thing is true of Truesight. If seeing is not equal to finding (which it can't be if rogue stealth sneaks are to be preserved), they affect the creature with the sense, and only that creature.
What about light? Surely if the party consists of creatures w/o darkvision and they need a torch or lantern, it'll be easier to detect them. NOPE. Any equipment you are wearing or carrying is also concealed. So the torch is invisible, but it's shedding light, which may or may not be visible by enemy creatures. And if it is visible, it's light coming from nowhere; maybe you can approximate a space that it could be coming from, if the creature is smart enough to think "Aha, there must be an invisible halfling here."
How about some urban encounters. The party needs to cross a drow city and avoid all of the patrols, all of the civilians...everything. Well, they make their stealth check and cast their spell outside of the city, then walk in past the guards. They walk in the middle of the streets, and nobody can see them, and nobody makes active checks to find them. Maybe someone bumps into them in the street, but does that change anything? I'm about to run this kind of encounter, and I don't know how I can possibly challenge the party if they choose to skip the entire city with a 2nd level spell, cast however many times it takes.
The only thing I think these rules have done is undermine a DM's ability to reasonably rule. For its faults, 2014 was vague enough that the DM had to adjudicate situations independently. Spells like Pass without Trace didn't make you invisible, but rather helped conceal you with shadows and magical manipulation of the space and light around you. Now 2024 has turned stealth into the most exaggerated fantastical version of itself (anyone who uses Sneak in Skyrim, you know what I'm talking about).
After all of that, please, if anyone has a solution to these problems, let me know. If I've misunderstood the rules or have missed something, tell me. If you have your own rules to help make this...playable, I'd love to hear them.
First of all, if the party wants to dance behind a group of enemies, they need to make another stealth check. Second of all, you don't need to make a perception check to see somebody who's just standing there. If a person is hiding, that means they're being stealthy. They aren't dancing in front of guards. Finally, if you aren't convinced and want a solution, add a creaky anything. They walk the wrong place, creaky floorboard. They open a door, creaky door. They open a drawer, creaky drawer.
No. Being hidden is a game state that gives you the Invisible condition. If a creature finds you, you’re no longer hidden and lose that condition, as explained in the Hide action (see appendix C of the Player’s Handbook).
Or the example with the torch, or the party being in plain sight.
But this topic and your situations have indeed been debated a lot in the forums. You might want to check out other opinions there or join one of the recent threads to help with your ruling:
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, and you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
On a successful check, you have the Invisible condition while hidden. Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.
You stop being hidden immediately after any of the following occurs: you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component.
Yes, let's check these rules. I have underlined the important parts. TarodNet has already linked most of the information relevant for this but to just make the point more simply...
the main caveat to the invisibility granted by the hide action is you must remain hidden. To become hidden, you must be behind cover or be heavily obscured and not be in an enemy's line of sight, the moment any of these caveats are no longer true, you are no longer hidden and no longer benefit from the invisible condition from hiding. So you can't hide behind a box, jump out and walk past an Intellect Devourer, the moment you jump out from behind the box, you're no longer behind cover and thus no longer are considered hidden (meaning no invisible condition from hiding).
You do not need to remain behind cover or be heavily obscured to remain Hidden. There are four conditions that break Hide. If you do not violate any of those four conditions, you remain Hidden.
This has been litigated to death, see the posts TarodNet linked to. You essentially have 3 options:
1) Rule that if a hider is no longer obscured from the vision of an enemy that enemy finds them. Yet this means the rogue cannot hide then run out of hiding and stab someone with sneak attack, but is that such a bad price to pay for your game not being fundamentally broken?
2) Make separate rules for in-combat hiding and out-of-combat hiding. The "Hide" action is clearly meant to be used in combat, so you are free to use the 2014 rules for hiding outside of combat if you so wish.
3) Let your party be permanently invisible at all times outside of combat.
Everything there is to say, has been said already. We don't need more people stirring up a "let's all hate on WotC designers, so we can feel smuggly self-righteous about how we're so much smarter than them" session.
I think the key principle here is: everything that can be done with Invisibility can be done with Stealth.
This is not 'overpowered'. Invisibility costs a second level spell slot and Concentration. Stealth has preconditions for activating it and an opposed roll to see through it.
First, a quick bug report. If you go to the "Playing the Game" section of the Basic Rules on D&D Beyond, there are two places where you can hover your mouse over the word "Hide" to see a tooltip of the Hide Action rule -- these pop up as the old version of the rule before the recent errata. But if you click on those same links, they do take you to the correct location in the Rules Glossary with the updated version of the rule. It's possible that some people are still seeing the old version of the rule depending on how they are accessing it.
You do not need to remain behind cover or be heavily obscured to remain Hidden. There are four conditions that break Hide. If you do not violate any of those four conditions, you remain Hidden.
This simply is not true. As written, the four conditions that you mention do not constitute an exhaustive list:
You stop being hidden immediately after any of the following occurs: you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component.
The word "only" does not appear anywhere in that list -- these are not the only ways that you can stop being hidden. As Plaguescarred points out in a subsequent post, the DM is free to rule that you stop being hidden for all sorts of reasons.
One of the most basic reasons why you might stop being hidden is if you stop hiding. Hiding is an ongoing activity that requires ongoing effort. If you stop putting in this effort and begin to just walk around in the open, then you are no longer hiding and therefore you stop being hidden.
But consider the rogue. The Rogue goes behind cover and uses the BA to hide. They then walk out of cover, and make an attack. If they are seen when they exit cover, then they don't get advantage on their attack, and so they don't get their sneak attack. In fact, that makes it impossible to get sneak attack via hiding, unless you continuously can't be seen even while attacking. You'd have to implement Facing rules with sight cones and the like to be able to sneak attack from stealth. Note, this was a problem in 2014 too.
The Rogue is not meant to be able to do this. That's the whole reason for the second portion of the Sneak Attack feature which allows the Rogue to Sneak Attack when an ally is located within 5 feet of the enemy.
If an enemy is alert and not engaged in melee, a Rogue is not supposed to be able to walk around wherever he wants and stab that enemy right in the face from melee range while remaining "hidden". Instead, the 2024 rules now allow that Rogue to remain hidden in "only" three-quarters cover while attacking from range. The Rogue can do this as long as he is still out of the enemy's view (ignore the phrase "line of sight" there, it's bad wording that needs to be changed) which he can determine before attacking ("you can discern whether it can see you" -- i.e. ask the DM if it can see you).
As for melee, options are limited. If the enemy happens to be close enough while you remain hidden, then you could initiate a melee attack from 5-feet away and retain the bonus from being hidden for that attack. That would be an uncommon scenario.
Remember also that a DM can simply grant advantage whenever he deems that the situation calls for it:
The DM can also decide that circumstances grant Advantage or impose Disadvantage.
So, in the case of the Rogue -- suppose that a guard is not currently engaged in melee combat, but he is described as sleepy or distracted while facing a certain direction or with his head down or whatever. The Rogue's player expresses a desire to quietly sneak up behind this guard across 15 or 20 feet of open space to attack him from behind. The DM might ask for a Stealth roll and then might just grant Advantage to that Rogue's attack.
It's extremely important to note that the Advantage on that attack would NOT be due to the Rogue being Hidden and/or Invisible or due to any of the written rules for the Hide Action or even for Unseen Attackers. It would be due to the DM situationally granting Advantage because the particular circumstances were appropriate to do so.
If instead the Rogue makes this attempt, but the DM declares that the guard was actually faking his sleepiness and he is in fact very much awake and alert and aware, then the Rogue might have just been lured into a difficult situation and would certainly not be granted Advantage on his attack in that situation. This sort of flexibility is possible because the Hide action does not actually allow for this type of attack to be considered as an attack from a Hidden position and so the rules do not automatically apply that Advantage -- it's situational.
Would you have to make a Perception check to find them? Passive Perception might be high enough to spot a creature with a successful hide roll. At least that's how we use passive senses.
I'll tell my players they see a guard who seems very alert, or nervous, on edge. Peering into every bush and so on to indicate a high passive perception.
I think the key principle here is: everything that can be done with Invisibility can be done with Stealth.
That simply isn't true. Invisibility stops you being seen, it does nothing against sound and so a creature can simultaneously know where you are and not see you while with Stealth the creature does not know specifically where you are or if you are even there but would see you if you stopped hiding, such as walking into plain sight, you certainly can not walk up to it say "hello" and remain invisible, so no there is no such "key principle".
To make it more clear, when hiding you only have the invisibility condition because you're somewhere that is outside of the creatures' line of sight and actively moving/hiding to stay out of that LOS. If you tried moving from one obstructed area to another, it is fair for the DM to determine if you can do so or not and might call for new stealth rolls, might call for no roll or might just say that you can not do it while hidden. It is down to the player to describe how they try to remain hidden while moving and for the DM to judge how that works. With the invisibility spell, you make no such calls, you can walk through plain sight and as long as the creature has no sense that detects you, it can not see/sense you at all.
Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.
This either implies that you have to be found with a Wisdom (Perception) check, or it's one of the ways you can be found and the others are not listed. But suppose you are right and there is a set of actions the party can take which break their stealth. What are those actions? Can they round a corner into an ambush, then dash through the ambush without ever being detected because they are invisible (as my player did)? This set of actions is never discussed anywhere, and succeeding on the Stealth check in the first place seems to indicate that the set would be small or non-existent. Dancing invisibly and quietly in front of an ambusher's face is just a clear example of the rules' absurdity.
As for the creaky floorboards, aren't they avoiding those by rolling high enough on the Stealth check in the first place? If not, that seems like the DM just saying "you didn't fail according to the rules, but I say you failed anyway."
Hiding does not make the characters invisible. It gives them the Invisible condition, which is a set of mechanical advantages you get when other creatures cannot see you.
Is their decision to keep calling it "invisible" confusing? Very much so. It helps to think of it as "unseen".
Now, how do they lose the condition? In practice, a lot rests on "an enemy finds you". It is not possible for simple mechanics to adjudicate all possible cases of how an enemy may find you, so it's up to the DM to do so. In particular "being out in the open in a well-lit space with nothing to distract the observer" seems like an easy one. Skill checks are for situations where there is uncertainty, and this isn't one of those. (Note that if they had wanted to say "an enemy makes a perception check", they could have, and did not. They used the more open and vague phrase "finds you".)
At this point I believe checking the Sage Advice would be beneficial as it offers some clarity
The issue with 2024 is that invisible is a condition but the condition itself doesn’t really state how you are unseen. Basically it was a horrible design choice to have hiding and the invisibility spell attempt to use the same rules. It is supposed to function like 2014 and there isn’t supposed to be a major difference.
"Enemy finds you" isn't a vague GM-adjudicated rule. It's explicitly laid out in the previous line: "Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.".
In terms of Invisibility vs. Stealth, they both do exactly the same thing: give you the Invisible condition. The only difference is in terms of how it ends.
But suppose you are right and there is a set of actions the party can take which break their stealth. What are those actions? Can they round a corner into an ambush, then dash through the ambush without ever being detected because they are invisible (as my player did)? This set of actions is never discussed anywhere, and succeeding on the Stealth check in the first place seems to indicate that the set would be small or non-existent. Dancing invisibly and quietly in front of an ambusher's face is just a clear example of the rules' absurdity.
No, this is all just an example of obvious misinterpretation of the rules, I'll put it down again, it's really quiet clear.
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, and you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
On a successful check, you have the Invisible condition while hidden. Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.
You stop being hidden immediately after any of the following occurs: you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component.
Again, the rules state "while Hidden", Hidden means you are continuing to hide which means you are still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemy's line of sight. The moment you're not behind cover or enter an enemy's line of sight you're clearly no longer hiding or hidden.
The following list are just a list of things that definitely break the hidden condition rather than a definite list of things that can break the hidden condition. That is for the DM to decide but you don't suddenly become impervious to sight because you're hiding, you're only invisible in that you're behind cover and can not be seen because there is something else in the way. Could WotC worded this much better? Yes, Definitely yes. But you're not invisible, you're concealed. Personally I wish they had called it the "Unseen" condition and didn't lazily write the Invisible spell as "it gives you the invisible condition", it's very sloppy and doesn't clearly indicate that the Invisibility spell actually makes you actually invisible.
But suppose you are right and there is a set of actions the party can take which break their stealth. What are those actions? Can they round a corner into an ambush, then dash through the ambush without ever being detected because they are invisible (as my player did)? This set of actions is never discussed anywhere, and succeeding on the Stealth check in the first place seems to indicate that the set would be small or non-existent. Dancing invisibly and quietly in front of an ambusher's face is just a clear example of the rules' absurdity.
No, this is all just an example of obvious misinterpretation of the rules, I'll put it down again, it's really quiet clear.
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, and you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
On a successful check, you have the Invisible condition while hidden. Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.
You stop being hidden immediately after any of the following occurs: you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component.
Again, the rules state "while Hidden", Hidden means you are continuing to hide which means you are still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemy's line of sight. The moment you're not behind cover or enter an enemy's line of sight you're clearly no longer hiding or hidden.
The following list are just a list of things that definitely break the hidden condition rather than a definite list of things that can break the hidden condition. That is for the DM to decide but you don't suddenly become impervious to sight because you're hiding, you're only invisible in that you're behind cover and can not be seen because there is something else in the way. Could WotC worded this much better? Yes, Definitely yes. But you're not invisible, you're concealed. Personally I wish they had called it the "Unseen" condition and didn't lazily write the Invisible spell as "it gives you the invisible condition", it's very sloppy and doesn't clearly indicate that the Invisibility spell actually makes you actually invisible.
Important clarification.
the errata to the phb and the online version says “while hidden” the physical version of the book does not. Based on the text in the physical book the interpretation offered is 100% possible, hence the need for the errata.
The notion that "Hidden means you are... still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemies light of sight" has no basis in the rules. Those conditions explicitly only apply to make the initial Hide check. Likewise, we have a different set of explicit conditions for when you stop being Hidden.
If you're going to apply the interpretation that maintaining the conditions for becoming Hidden is necessary for remaining Hidden, then you've effectively deleted the Stealth skill from the game. There's no longer any situation where you'd need to roll Stealth since there's no longer any situation in which a Perception check would be needed to see through it. An interpretation of "you can't be seen as long as no one is able to see you" just doesn't make sense either from a gameplay or a rules standpoint.
The notion that "Hidden means you are... still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemies light of sight" has no basis in the rules. Those conditions explicitly only apply to make the initial Hide check. Likewise, we have a different set of explicit conditions for when you stop being Hidden.
We have a list of things that stop you being hidden but it is not an exhaustive list, it is a list of conditions which INSTANTLY end the hidden condition. It is explicitly stated that you only have the Invisible condition 'WHILE HIDDEN'. It doesn't take a genius to realise that a creature coming out from behind a box, waltzing around in plain sight isn't hidden. To determine what makes a creature hidden, we have to revert back to the initial criteria of what grants the Hidden Condition, that is :
a) you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check
b) while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover
c) you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight
The list you refer to is not the list of items you have to do to maintain being hidden, it's a list of things that definitely end being hidden and nowhere does anything state that these are the only things that end the hidden condition.
The notion that "Hidden means you are... still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemies light of sight" has no basis in the rules. Those conditions explicitly only apply to make the initial Hide check. Likewise, we have a different set of explicit conditions for when you stop being Hidden.
If you're going to apply the interpretation that maintaining the conditions for becoming Hidden is necessary for remaining Hidden, then you've effectively deleted the Stealth skill from the game. There's no longer any situation where you'd need to roll Stealth since there's no longer any situation in which a Perception check would be needed to see through it. An interpretation of "you can't be seen as long as no one is able to see you" just doesn't make sense either from a gameplay or a rules standpoint.
That is no longer accurate as of the change in the errata and clarification in Sage Advice.
so under the initial wording of the hide action your statement was possible, it is no longer valid with the updated errata and subsequent printings of the phb.
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As a DM, I'm struggling to figure out how to present a challenge to a party with even rudimentary stealth. As far as I can tell, it's very easy to simply skip entire areas of encounters, MAYBE for the cost of a 2nd level spell (pass w/o trace).
Why? Well let's look at the rules for hiding and the invisible condition:
and
So, if you succeed on a DC15 stealth check behind cover, you are invisible. I've tried not to rule this as being equivalent to the spell (transparent), but my rulings start to become contradictory. So you have the Invisible condition while hidden. How do you stop being hidden? "...you make a sound louder than a whisper, an enemy finds you, you make an attack roll, or you cast a spell with a Verbal component."
So let's look at an easy example which came up at my table. The party is at the entrance to a room containing a table with a person on either side of the table. The party needs to get past the people. So, the party casts Pass without Trace, easily makes the DC15 stealth check, and become invisible. They then walk, including their Large Shield Guardian, 5 ft. behind one of the people at the table fully in view of the other person, but they are invisible so they get by.
Did they make a sound louder than a whisper? Well, they rolled above a DC15 on their stealth, so presumably they are quite stealthy as they move past. The party can dash, past creatures, dance in front of them...This stanza doesn't really apply in most cases because the stealth check itself implies you do what you are doing quietly.
Did the enemy find them? Well, the enemy had no reason to actively make a perception check so never made one, and their passives are often lower than the DC15 in the first place.
Did the party attack or cast a spell with a verbal component? No, they just walked past the encounter entirely.
Now, I'm concerned that the party could do this for entire chapters of published adventures w/o a problem, and all it really costs them is one second level spell. They can sneak into a hideout past all the enemies. They can infiltrate a castle and find their missing companion. They can sneak through a cave and never once be detected. And it's so easy to do, 75% chance to succeed for anyone who hasn't bumped their Dex or Stealth checks.
That's bad enough, but let's go to example 2.
The enemy has been tipped off that the party is coming, so they sit aiming their weapons towards the corner that the party has to round, preparing an ambush. Unfortunately, the party becomes invisible, walks around the corner and sees the ambush, but can fortunately just run past the ambushers. For extra measure, they do a little dance in front of the ambusher just to mock them. There go all ambushes against the party.
The fact that Pass without Trace functions as a group-cast invisibility spell at the same level that you get Invisibility, AND gets the rider that you can still cast non-verbal spells seems ridiculously unbalanced to me for a start.
But the DM has some tools for countering invisibility. Let's try using them:
Let's take example 2 and make the enemies some mind flayers, but let's add an Intellect Devourer with Blindsight. The party walks around the corner, and the Intellect Devourer sees them. Surely their invisibility ends, right? NOPE!!!
Did the party make a sound louder than a whisper? No.
Did the enemy find them? No, because no creature made any perception check. You may be thinking "well just rule that if they step into the open where a creature sees them, like with blindsight, then rule that as them being found and forgo the check." But consider the rogue. The Rogue goes behind cover and uses the BA to hide. They then walk out of cover, and make an attack. If they are seen when they exit cover, then they don't get advantage on their attack, and so they don't get their sneak attack. In fact, that makes it impossible to get sneak attack via hiding, unless you continuously can't be seen even while attacking. You'd have to implement Facing rules with sight cones and the like to be able to sneak attack from stealth. Note, this was a problem in 2014 too.
Did the party attack or cast a spell with a verbal component? No, they just walked around the corner.
So what's the benefit of Blindsight then? Well, you are not concealed to the Intellect Devourer, and your attacks with them are not affected. But you remain invisible to the rest of the mind flayers. Maybe the intellect devourer can prompt active perception checks or encourage the mind flayers to target you while invisible with disadvantage attacks or AoEs. The same thing is true of Truesight. If seeing is not equal to finding (which it can't be if rogue stealth sneaks are to be preserved), they affect the creature with the sense, and only that creature.
What about light? Surely if the party consists of creatures w/o darkvision and they need a torch or lantern, it'll be easier to detect them. NOPE. Any equipment you are wearing or carrying is also concealed. So the torch is invisible, but it's shedding light, which may or may not be visible by enemy creatures. And if it is visible, it's light coming from nowhere; maybe you can approximate a space that it could be coming from, if the creature is smart enough to think "Aha, there must be an invisible halfling here."
How about some urban encounters. The party needs to cross a drow city and avoid all of the patrols, all of the civilians...everything. Well, they make their stealth check and cast their spell outside of the city, then walk in past the guards. They walk in the middle of the streets, and nobody can see them, and nobody makes active checks to find them. Maybe someone bumps into them in the street, but does that change anything? I'm about to run this kind of encounter, and I don't know how I can possibly challenge the party if they choose to skip the entire city with a 2nd level spell, cast however many times it takes.
The only thing I think these rules have done is undermine a DM's ability to reasonably rule. For its faults, 2014 was vague enough that the DM had to adjudicate situations independently. Spells like Pass without Trace didn't make you invisible, but rather helped conceal you with shadows and magical manipulation of the space and light around you. Now 2024 has turned stealth into the most exaggerated fantastical version of itself (anyone who uses Sneak in Skyrim, you know what I'm talking about).
After all of that, please, if anyone has a solution to these problems, let me know. If I've misunderstood the rules or have missed something, tell me. If you have your own rules to help make this...playable, I'd love to hear them.
First of all, if the party wants to dance behind a group of enemies, they need to make another stealth check. Second of all, you don't need to make a perception check to see somebody who's just standing there. If a person is hiding, that means they're being stealthy. They aren't dancing in front of guards. Finally, if you aren't convinced and want a solution, add a creaky anything. They walk the wrong place, creaky floorboard. They open a door, creaky door. They open a drawer, creaky drawer.
I'd rule that some of the cases you described would cause the creature to lose the Invisible condition. For example, the one involving Mind Flayers:
Or the example with the torch, or the party being in plain sight.
But this topic and your situations have indeed been debated a lot in the forums. You might want to check out other opinions there or join one of the recent threads to help with your ruling:
Yes, let's check these rules. I have underlined the important parts. TarodNet has already linked most of the information relevant for this but to just make the point more simply...
the main caveat to the invisibility granted by the hide action is you must remain hidden. To become hidden, you must be behind cover or be heavily obscured and not be in an enemy's line of sight, the moment any of these caveats are no longer true, you are no longer hidden and no longer benefit from the invisible condition from hiding. So you can't hide behind a box, jump out and walk past an Intellect Devourer, the moment you jump out from behind the box, you're no longer behind cover and thus no longer are considered hidden (meaning no invisible condition from hiding).
You do not need to remain behind cover or be heavily obscured to remain Hidden. There are four conditions that break Hide. If you do not violate any of those four conditions, you remain Hidden.
Considering that The Dungeon Master decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding, i would rule the enemies find the party in such case.
This has been litigated to death, see the posts TarodNet linked to. You essentially have 3 options:
1) Rule that if a hider is no longer obscured from the vision of an enemy that enemy finds them. Yet this means the rogue cannot hide then run out of hiding and stab someone with sneak attack, but is that such a bad price to pay for your game not being fundamentally broken?
2) Make separate rules for in-combat hiding and out-of-combat hiding. The "Hide" action is clearly meant to be used in combat, so you are free to use the 2014 rules for hiding outside of combat if you so wish.
3) Let your party be permanently invisible at all times outside of combat.
Everything there is to say, has been said already. We don't need more people stirring up a "let's all hate on WotC designers, so we can feel smuggly self-righteous about how we're so much smarter than them" session.
I think the key principle here is: everything that can be done with Invisibility can be done with Stealth.
This is not 'overpowered'. Invisibility costs a second level spell slot and Concentration. Stealth has preconditions for activating it and an opposed roll to see through it.
First, a quick bug report. If you go to the "Playing the Game" section of the Basic Rules on D&D Beyond, there are two places where you can hover your mouse over the word "Hide" to see a tooltip of the Hide Action rule -- these pop up as the old version of the rule before the recent errata. But if you click on those same links, they do take you to the correct location in the Rules Glossary with the updated version of the rule. It's possible that some people are still seeing the old version of the rule depending on how they are accessing it.
This simply is not true. As written, the four conditions that you mention do not constitute an exhaustive list:
The word "only" does not appear anywhere in that list -- these are not the only ways that you can stop being hidden. As Plaguescarred points out in a subsequent post, the DM is free to rule that you stop being hidden for all sorts of reasons.
One of the most basic reasons why you might stop being hidden is if you stop hiding. Hiding is an ongoing activity that requires ongoing effort. If you stop putting in this effort and begin to just walk around in the open, then you are no longer hiding and therefore you stop being hidden.
The Rogue is not meant to be able to do this. That's the whole reason for the second portion of the Sneak Attack feature which allows the Rogue to Sneak Attack when an ally is located within 5 feet of the enemy.
If an enemy is alert and not engaged in melee, a Rogue is not supposed to be able to walk around wherever he wants and stab that enemy right in the face from melee range while remaining "hidden". Instead, the 2024 rules now allow that Rogue to remain hidden in "only" three-quarters cover while attacking from range. The Rogue can do this as long as he is still out of the enemy's view (ignore the phrase "line of sight" there, it's bad wording that needs to be changed) which he can determine before attacking ("you can discern whether it can see you" -- i.e. ask the DM if it can see you).
As for melee, options are limited. If the enemy happens to be close enough while you remain hidden, then you could initiate a melee attack from 5-feet away and retain the bonus from being hidden for that attack. That would be an uncommon scenario.
Remember also that a DM can simply grant advantage whenever he deems that the situation calls for it:
So, in the case of the Rogue -- suppose that a guard is not currently engaged in melee combat, but he is described as sleepy or distracted while facing a certain direction or with his head down or whatever. The Rogue's player expresses a desire to quietly sneak up behind this guard across 15 or 20 feet of open space to attack him from behind. The DM might ask for a Stealth roll and then might just grant Advantage to that Rogue's attack.
It's extremely important to note that the Advantage on that attack would NOT be due to the Rogue being Hidden and/or Invisible or due to any of the written rules for the Hide Action or even for Unseen Attackers. It would be due to the DM situationally granting Advantage because the particular circumstances were appropriate to do so.
If instead the Rogue makes this attempt, but the DM declares that the guard was actually faking his sleepiness and he is in fact very much awake and alert and aware, then the Rogue might have just been lured into a difficult situation and would certainly not be granted Advantage on his attack in that situation. This sort of flexibility is possible because the Hide action does not actually allow for this type of attack to be considered as an attack from a Hidden position and so the rules do not automatically apply that Advantage -- it's situational.
Would you have to make a Perception check to find them? Passive Perception might be high enough to spot a creature with a successful hide roll. At least that's how we use passive senses.
I'll tell my players they see a guard who seems very alert, or nervous, on edge. Peering into every bush and so on to indicate a high passive perception.
That simply isn't true. Invisibility stops you being seen, it does nothing against sound and so a creature can simultaneously know where you are and not see you while with Stealth the creature does not know specifically where you are or if you are even there but would see you if you stopped hiding, such as walking into plain sight, you certainly can not walk up to it say "hello" and remain invisible, so no there is no such "key principle".
To make it more clear, when hiding you only have the invisibility condition because you're somewhere that is outside of the creatures' line of sight and actively moving/hiding to stay out of that LOS. If you tried moving from one obstructed area to another, it is fair for the DM to determine if you can do so or not and might call for new stealth rolls, might call for no roll or might just say that you can not do it while hidden. It is down to the player to describe how they try to remain hidden while moving and for the DM to judge how that works. With the invisibility spell, you make no such calls, you can walk through plain sight and as long as the creature has no sense that detects you, it can not see/sense you at all.
This either implies that you have to be found with a Wisdom (Perception) check, or it's one of the ways you can be found and the others are not listed. But suppose you are right and there is a set of actions the party can take which break their stealth. What are those actions? Can they round a corner into an ambush, then dash through the ambush without ever being detected because they are invisible (as my player did)? This set of actions is never discussed anywhere, and succeeding on the Stealth check in the first place seems to indicate that the set would be small or non-existent. Dancing invisibly and quietly in front of an ambusher's face is just a clear example of the rules' absurdity.
As for the creaky floorboards, aren't they avoiding those by rolling high enough on the Stealth check in the first place? If not, that seems like the DM just saying "you didn't fail according to the rules, but I say you failed anyway."
Hiding does not make the characters invisible. It gives them the Invisible condition, which is a set of mechanical advantages you get when other creatures cannot see you.
Is their decision to keep calling it "invisible" confusing? Very much so. It helps to think of it as "unseen".
Now, how do they lose the condition? In practice, a lot rests on "an enemy finds you". It is not possible for simple mechanics to adjudicate all possible cases of how an enemy may find you, so it's up to the DM to do so. In particular "being out in the open in a well-lit space with nothing to distract the observer" seems like an easy one. Skill checks are for situations where there is uncertainty, and this isn't one of those. (Note that if they had wanted to say "an enemy makes a perception check", they could have, and did not. They used the more open and vague phrase "finds you".)
At this point I believe checking the Sage Advice would be beneficial as it offers some clarity
The issue with 2024 is that invisible is a condition but the condition itself doesn’t really state how you are unseen. Basically it was a horrible design choice to have hiding and the invisibility spell attempt to use the same rules. It is supposed to function like 2014 and there isn’t supposed to be a major difference.
I think everyone else covered the topic.
"Enemy finds you" isn't a vague GM-adjudicated rule. It's explicitly laid out in the previous line: "Make note of your check’s total, which is the DC for a creature to find you with a Wisdom (Perception) check.".
In terms of Invisibility vs. Stealth, they both do exactly the same thing: give you the Invisible condition. The only difference is in terms of how it ends.
No, this is all just an example of obvious misinterpretation of the rules, I'll put it down again, it's really quiet clear.
Again, the rules state "while Hidden", Hidden means you are continuing to hide which means you are still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemy's line of sight. The moment you're not behind cover or enter an enemy's line of sight you're clearly no longer hiding or hidden.
The following list are just a list of things that definitely break the hidden condition rather than a definite list of things that can break the hidden condition. That is for the DM to decide but you don't suddenly become impervious to sight because you're hiding, you're only invisible in that you're behind cover and can not be seen because there is something else in the way. Could WotC worded this much better? Yes, Definitely yes. But you're not invisible, you're concealed. Personally I wish they had called it the "Unseen" condition and didn't lazily write the Invisible spell as "it gives you the invisible condition", it's very sloppy and doesn't clearly indicate that the Invisibility spell actually makes you actually invisible.
Important clarification.
the errata to the phb and the online version says “while hidden” the physical version of the book does not. Based on the text in the physical book the interpretation offered is 100% possible, hence the need for the errata.
The notion that "Hidden means you are... still behind cover or obscured and not in any enemies light of sight" has no basis in the rules. Those conditions explicitly only apply to make the initial Hide check. Likewise, we have a different set of explicit conditions for when you stop being Hidden.
If you're going to apply the interpretation that maintaining the conditions for becoming Hidden is necessary for remaining Hidden, then you've effectively deleted the Stealth skill from the game. There's no longer any situation where you'd need to roll Stealth since there's no longer any situation in which a Perception check would be needed to see through it. An interpretation of "you can't be seen as long as no one is able to see you" just doesn't make sense either from a gameplay or a rules standpoint.
We have a list of things that stop you being hidden but it is not an exhaustive list, it is a list of conditions which INSTANTLY end the hidden condition. It is explicitly stated that you only have the Invisible condition 'WHILE HIDDEN'. It doesn't take a genius to realise that a creature coming out from behind a box, waltzing around in plain sight isn't hidden. To determine what makes a creature hidden, we have to revert back to the initial criteria of what grants the Hidden Condition, that is :
a) you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check
b) while you’re Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover
c) you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight
The list you refer to is not the list of items you have to do to maintain being hidden, it's a list of things that definitely end being hidden and nowhere does anything state that these are the only things that end the hidden condition.
That is no longer accurate as of the change in the errata and clarification in Sage Advice.
so under the initial wording of the hide action your statement was possible, it is no longer valid with the updated errata and subsequent printings of the phb.