For what it's worth, the probability an undetected invisible assailant (advantage on initiative) wins initiative against a single surprised opponent (disadvantage on initiative) with the same bonus to initiative is only 81.58%. So almost 1 in 5 times, a single ambushed enemy goes first.
This gets worse the more surprised enemies there are. P(ambusher with advantage goes first | all combatants have the same initiative modifier):
2 surprised opponents: 66.56%
3 surprised opponents: 54.30%
4 surprised opponents: 44.30%
5 surprised opponents: 36.14%
6 surprised opponents: 29.5%
So even with just 3 opponents, you've only got about a 1 in 2 chance of going first as the ambusher. Against typical party sizes, you expect at least one of them to act before you.
If any of the surprised opponents has a higher initiative bonus than the ambusher, these odds drop even further.
Given a party of adventurers is generally 4-6 players, it isn't a rare occurrence for an ambushing enemy to be beaten on initiative. It's actually the expected result.
(Method: generated the probability of any given result for both 2d20 drop highest and 2d20 drop lowest. Computed the probability of each die pairing by multiplying the vectors and forming a matrix. multiplied all elements of this matrix by the corresponding elements of a matrix of the same size that was 1 wherever 2d20 drop the lowest > 2d20 drop the highest (which is a triangular matrix with a diagonal of 0s, and 1s above it), then summed all squares of that final matrix).
There's no time machine. When action initiate combat its not resolved before Initiative but after in turn order, as explained in the DMG which can still be anticipated. Wether you're Invisible or surprised by combat starting doesn't make any mention changing that fact, all it does it say is affecting Initiative with Advvantage & Disadvantage respectively.
So when the narratives transition to violence everything pause to follow combat steps by steps how combat unfold; 1. Establish Positions 2. Roll Initiative 3. Take Turns
At this point you know you're surprised by combat starting with Disadvantaged to Initiative, while the Invisible creature have Advantage to Initiative.
You still can't see anyone Invisible who's action initiate combat which you anticipated somehow. How much is revealed at this point is up to DM.
There's many ways this can be described the rules don't elaborate on this. Did you see, heard, smelled or otherwise sensed something moments before the attack? Or suspect something due to lack thereof from unusual silence. Perhaps birds took off right before the attack following a noise. Ambusher jump out of the woods about to attack etc The more you fill the blank, the more narrative support to rules mechanic there will be.
That is essentially what the Devs were saying in the Dragontalk: Sage Advice when suggesting to come up with narrative ways to describe it when the D20 throw you a curve ball in unexpected ways.
There's no time machine. When action initiate combat its not resolved before Initiative but after in turn order, as explained in the DMG which can still be anticipated. Wether you're Invisible or surprised by combat starting doesn't make any mention changing that fact, all it does it say is affecting Initiative with Advvantage & Disadvantage respectively.
So when the narratives transition to violence everything pause to follow combat steps by steps how combat unfold; 1. Establish Positions 2. Roll Initiative 3. Take Turns
At this point you know you're surprised by combat starting with Disadvantaged to Initiative, while the Invisible creature have Advantage to Initiative.
You still can't see anyone Invisible who's action initiate combat which you anticipated somehow. How much is revealed at this point is up to DM.
There's many ways this can be described the rules don't elaborate on this. Did you see, heard, smelled or otherwise sensed something moments before the attack? Or suspect something due to lack thereof from unusual silence. Perhaps birds took off right before the attack following a noise. Ambusher jump out of the woods about to attack etc The more you fill the blank, the more narrative support to rules mechanic there will be.
That is essentially what the Devs were saying in the Dragontalk: Sage Advice when suggesting to come up with narrative ways to describe it when the D20 throw you a curve ball in unexpected ways.
Yeah, except the dragontalk assumes 2014 surprise rules, where the surprised characters don't get to act in round 1. Totally different, because at least if they're not acting, they don't have a time machine and it doesn't disturb causality, and not at all applicable to the 2024 rules. (Nor does it help that there's no narrative way to handle the unobserved invisible attacker or the subtle spell sorceror - if they're delayed for some reason, combat simply doesn't happen until they do manage to act). Even in the context of the 2014 rules, their discussion about narrative ways to explain weirdness only makes sense in the context of 'i draw my dagger in the middle of the masquerade ball' and similar situations, where people can react to things they can see (the dagger visibly being drawn) before the attack is actually made. If the invisible assassin gets distracted by seeing his aunt sally at the ball or a massive pile of almond pastries, no one does anything in the meantime, because nothing is happening as far as everyone but the assassin is concerned.
Here's the problem: Some characters are surprised but act before anything happens that would have surprised them - that's a time machine in action. The cause is in the future.
And the initiating character does not even expect to act first most of the time. Nor are they committed to do the action that would have initiated combat. So combat just starts for no reason, and could potentially not involve any combat at all (the attacker chooses to withdraw unobserved because the enemies act first). That's non-linear causality, quite possibly resulting in no causality at all (the initiating character gets killed before they get a chance to do the thing that was theoretically initiating combat, and is thus killed for no reason at all).
Both of these are huge problems, and no one could reasonably think things should work like that.
And they also lead to narrative problems. The evil chancellor orders his guards to kill the PCs, and the guards catch the PCs by surprise somewhere in the castle. The PCs win initiative and kill the guards before they act. Now instead of acting in self defense, the PCs are murderers under your interpretation - the guards never actually did anything! The PCs just suddenly slaughtered them, and that's how any eyewitness would describe the events that actually happened. The chancellor comes off as the good guy when he advises the king to imprison the PCs. It's an absolute disaster from a narrative perspective, because the PCs only attacked the guards because they were told they were being attacked!
There's no time machine. When action initiate combat its not resolved before Initiative but after in turn order, as explained in the DMG which can still be anticipated. Wether you're Invisible or surprised by combat starting doesn't make any mention changing that fact, all it does it say is affecting Initiative with Advvantage & Disadvantage respectively.
So when the narratives transition to violence everything pause to follow combat steps by steps how combat unfold; 1. Establish Positions 2. Roll Initiative 3. Take Turns
At this point you know you're surprised by combat starting with Disadvantaged to Initiative, while the Invisible creature have Advantage to Initiative.
You still can't see anyone Invisible who's action initiate combat which you anticipated somehow. How much is revealed at this point is up to DM.
There's many ways this can be described the rules don't elaborate on this. Did you see, heard, smelled or otherwise sensed something moments before the attack? Or suspect something due to lack thereof from unusual silence. Perhaps birds took off right before the attack following a noise. Ambusher jump out of the woods about to attack etc The more you fill the blank, the more narrative support to rules mechanic there will be.
That is essentially what the Devs were saying in the Dragontalk: Sage Advice when suggesting to come up with narrative ways to describe it when the D20 throw you a curve ball in unexpected ways.
Initiative is an mechanic used to make narration of actions happening in quick succession easier to manage. Seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing something is covered by Perception, not Initiative. If someone did not have a high enough active or passive Perception to notice an ambusher, having a high Initiative does not mechanically provide a benefit to Perception. A gut feeling due to an unusual silence, or animal reactions might be Insight. The same issue arises. There's no mechanical benefit to Insight from a high Initiative.
An attacker jumping out of the woods and being spotted doesn't apply to the OP's scenario, which has an ambusher already in hiding using an ability which makes them magically transparent and their footsteps silent.
Both of these are huge problems, and no one could reasonably think things should work like that.
And they also lead to narrative problems. The evil chancellor orders his guards to kill the PCs, and the guards catch the PCs by surprise somewhere in the castle. The PCs win initiative and kill the guards before they act. Now instead of acting in self defense, the PCs are murderers under your interpretation - the guards never actually did anything! The PCs just suddenly slaughtered them, and that's how any eyewitness would describe the events that actually happened. The chancellor comes off as the good guy when he advises the king to imprison the PCs. It's an absolute disaster from a narrative perspective, because the PCs only attacked the guards because they were told they were being attacked!
Guards attacking PC's in the castle is not a good example to support your case, because there could be any number of indications, expressions, body stance, pace of movement, and obviously the sound of swords being drawn.
The surprise system only really has problems for an unseen attacker who kicks combat off, but their initiative puts unaware characters ahead of them and lets them react to actions which haven't happened yet.
While action initiating combat aren't resolved before Initiative, something is iniatiated to make others surprised by combat starting. Something is told to DM to start combat.
DM preferring to limit Initiative randomness can always use Initiatice Score;
So what I actually do is a system that amounts to "if you successfully surprise the enemy, you win initiative". To cut down on die rolls I just combine the check for whether you successfully surprise the enemy (stealth vs perception most of the time, sometimes deception vs insight) with the initiative roll. This does mean the person who kicked off the combat might not go first, but at that point there's a narrative explanation: you botched your attempt to surprise them and they saw you coming.
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For what it's worth, the probability an undetected invisible assailant (advantage on initiative) wins initiative against a single surprised opponent (disadvantage on initiative) with the same bonus to initiative is only 81.58%. So almost 1 in 5 times, a single ambushed enemy goes first.
This gets worse the more surprised enemies there are. P(ambusher with advantage goes first | all combatants have the same initiative modifier):
2 surprised opponents: 66.56%
3 surprised opponents: 54.30%
4 surprised opponents: 44.30%
5 surprised opponents: 36.14%
6 surprised opponents: 29.5%
So even with just 3 opponents, you've only got about a 1 in 2 chance of going first as the ambusher. Against typical party sizes, you expect at least one of them to act before you.
If any of the surprised opponents has a higher initiative bonus than the ambusher, these odds drop even further.
Given a party of adventurers is generally 4-6 players, it isn't a rare occurrence for an ambushing enemy to be beaten on initiative. It's actually the expected result.
(Method: generated the probability of any given result for both 2d20 drop highest and 2d20 drop lowest. Computed the probability of each die pairing by multiplying the vectors and forming a matrix. multiplied all elements of this matrix by the corresponding elements of a matrix of the same size that was 1 wherever 2d20 drop the lowest > 2d20 drop the highest (which is a triangular matrix with a diagonal of 0s, and 1s above it), then summed all squares of that final matrix).
There's no time machine. When action initiate combat its not resolved before Initiative but after in turn order, as explained in the DMG which can still be anticipated. Wether you're Invisible or surprised by combat starting doesn't make any mention changing that fact, all it does it say is affecting Initiative with Advvantage & Disadvantage respectively.
So when the narratives transition to violence everything pause to follow combat steps by steps how combat unfold; 1. Establish Positions 2. Roll Initiative 3. Take Turns
At this point you know you're surprised by combat starting with Disadvantaged to Initiative, while the Invisible creature have Advantage to Initiative.
You still can't see anyone Invisible who's action initiate combat which you anticipated somehow. How much is revealed at this point is up to DM.
There's many ways this can be described the rules don't elaborate on this. Did you see, heard, smelled or otherwise sensed something moments before the attack? Or suspect something due to lack thereof from unusual silence. Perhaps birds took off right before the attack following a noise. Ambusher jump out of the woods about to attack etc The more you fill the blank, the more narrative support to rules mechanic there will be.
That is essentially what the Devs were saying in the Dragontalk: Sage Advice when suggesting to come up with narrative ways to describe it when the D20 throw you a curve ball in unexpected ways.
Yeah, except the dragontalk assumes 2014 surprise rules, where the surprised characters don't get to act in round 1. Totally different, because at least if they're not acting, they don't have a time machine and it doesn't disturb causality, and not at all applicable to the 2024 rules. (Nor does it help that there's no narrative way to handle the unobserved invisible attacker or the subtle spell sorceror - if they're delayed for some reason, combat simply doesn't happen until they do manage to act). Even in the context of the 2014 rules, their discussion about narrative ways to explain weirdness only makes sense in the context of 'i draw my dagger in the middle of the masquerade ball' and similar situations, where people can react to things they can see (the dagger visibly being drawn) before the attack is actually made. If the invisible assassin gets distracted by seeing his aunt sally at the ball or a massive pile of almond pastries, no one does anything in the meantime, because nothing is happening as far as everyone but the assassin is concerned.
Here's the problem: Some characters are surprised but act before anything happens that would have surprised them - that's a time machine in action. The cause is in the future.
And the initiating character does not even expect to act first most of the time. Nor are they committed to do the action that would have initiated combat. So combat just starts for no reason, and could potentially not involve any combat at all (the attacker chooses to withdraw unobserved because the enemies act first). That's non-linear causality, quite possibly resulting in no causality at all (the initiating character gets killed before they get a chance to do the thing that was theoretically initiating combat, and is thus killed for no reason at all).
Both of these are huge problems, and no one could reasonably think things should work like that.
And they also lead to narrative problems. The evil chancellor orders his guards to kill the PCs, and the guards catch the PCs by surprise somewhere in the castle. The PCs win initiative and kill the guards before they act. Now instead of acting in self defense, the PCs are murderers under your interpretation - the guards never actually did anything! The PCs just suddenly slaughtered them, and that's how any eyewitness would describe the events that actually happened. The chancellor comes off as the good guy when he advises the king to imprison the PCs. It's an absolute disaster from a narrative perspective, because the PCs only attacked the guards because they were told they were being attacked!
Initiative is an mechanic used to make narration of actions happening in quick succession easier to manage. Seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing something is covered by Perception, not Initiative. If someone did not have a high enough active or passive Perception to notice an ambusher, having a high Initiative does not mechanically provide a benefit to Perception. A gut feeling due to an unusual silence, or animal reactions might be Insight. The same issue arises. There's no mechanical benefit to Insight from a high Initiative.
An attacker jumping out of the woods and being spotted doesn't apply to the OP's scenario, which has an ambusher already in hiding using an ability which makes them magically transparent and their footsteps silent.
Guards attacking PC's in the castle is not a good example to support your case, because there could be any number of indications, expressions, body stance, pace of movement, and obviously the sound of swords being drawn.
The surprise system only really has problems for an unseen attacker who kicks combat off, but their initiative puts unaware characters ahead of them and lets them react to actions which haven't happened yet.
While action initiating combat aren't resolved before Initiative, something is iniatiated to make others surprised by combat starting. Something is told to DM to start combat.
DM preferring to limit Initiative randomness can always use Initiatice Score;
Ambusher 15 + DEX mod
Surprised 05 + DEX mod
So what I actually do is a system that amounts to "if you successfully surprise the enemy, you win initiative". To cut down on die rolls I just combine the check for whether you successfully surprise the enemy (stealth vs perception most of the time, sometimes deception vs insight) with the initiative roll. This does mean the person who kicked off the combat might not go first, but at that point there's a narrative explanation: you botched your attempt to surprise them and they saw you coming.