Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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There is no evidence that the requirements for taking the hide action are also requirements for remaining hidden. It's a plausible interpretation, but in no way forced, and winds up making the hide action mostly useless (being invisible while behind total cover, heavily obscured, or outside of an enemy's line of sight doesn't do anything). There are plenty of people who have argued for the 2024 rules meaning that you can, for example, hide and then leap out from hiding to get the benefit of being invisible on your first attack.
Except that for Hide, specifically, the invisible condition drops if you are found. That's the point of the comment.
To me the difference between being in certain place while you're hidden or not is handled this way;
If you don't Hide while you benefit from;
Heavily Obscured: Others have the Blinded condition while trying to see you.
Three-Quarters Cover: You have +5 bonus to AC and Dexterity saving throws.
Total Cover: You can’t be targeted directly.
If you Hide while you benefit from;
Heavily Obscured: Others have the Blinded condition while trying to see you. Your location is unknown and you have the Invisible condition while hidden.
Three-Quarters Cover: You have +5 bonus to AC and Dexterity saving throws. Your location is unknown and you have the Invisible condition while hidden.
Total Cover: You can’t be targeted directly. Your location is unknown and you have the Invisible condition while hidden.
My rule of thumb for hidden creature in enemy's line of sight is;
While Heavily Obscured, behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover: Wisdom (Perception) check to find you.
While not Heavily Obscured, behind Three-Quarters or Total Cover: Enemy find you. (auto-success)
There is no evidence for location being unknown. Thus the difference is:
There is some reason to think that Hide was meant to make you unheard as well as unseen, but I'm reluctant to read in a benefit that is completely absent from the rules text.
This is how i have been using Stealth at my table so far and it has worked for us.
The Dungeon Master decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding, so YMMV
I base my ruling on the possibility of guessing the target’s location as one the side benefit of Hide vs Invisible alone as described in the rules below.
One of my other ruling you can take the Hide action when you have the Invisible condition or the enemy has the Blinded condition.
I've also been toying with the idea of also taking the Hide action when you have the Prone condition behind Half-Cover obstacle other than creature.
I see where you are going with this, but I think the idea is that half-cover is simply not enough to hide behind, even if you are prone. However, if you are under half-cover and then drop prone, there could be many situations where that actually upgrades your cover to be able to hide behind.
I also don't want to put words in Pantagruel's mouth, but I think their main problem is that a lot of what you are doing leans very heavily on inference and the "the DM determines..." clause. It is simply not clear what the designers intended for you to actually be able to do once hidden and on that point, I agree.
I do, and i also encourage everyone to use Stealth in a way that works best for them. At my table we've used many different take on Stealth since 2024 to find an approach that worked for us. I've seen varying ways how Hide has been used with different tables handling it based on personnal inference.
The Half Cover houserule worked better in distance (30+ feet) than at proximity (5-10 feet) as we tested some versions to allow more possibility to use Hide and rely less on deep foliage and large tree or rock during roadside ambush for example etc... But we aren't over with playtesting.
We've added that you can't remain hidden while taking Dash as an action. Moving without cover while hidden requires you to time out the movement and pick your spot. But you can remain hidden while taking dash as a bonus action, which rogues can do. This allows rogues to hide behind cover, and dash out to make a melee attack while hidden to maintain advantage for the sneak attack. But, because the rogue burned the bonus action to pull it off, they can't use the bonus action to disengage or hide again that turn. So it becomes more of a desperation move for the rogue. It's worked out well.
That one is hotly debated. The definition of "found" in the Hide rules requires beating the stealth roll with a perception check. But it's not clear if that definition is inclusive or exclusive. This one has come up at our table when our Druid was wildshaped into something with tremorsense. (For the life of me, I can't remember what it was.) Our DM has ruled that a creature with tremorsense gets advantage on their perception check to find the hidden character. (They know where to look.) But it's not automatic. They still must spend the action on searching for the hidden creature, and hit the roll. A creature with truesight or blindsight with an unobstructed view finds automatically without acting and without rolling anything. However, even if the creature with tremorsense fails to find the hidden creature, it can still attack it at disadvantage since it knows the location of the target. It just can't see it.
This is based on the invisibility condition stating that the invisible creature is concealed unless it can be "seen." And the description for tremorsense stating that it does not provide "sight." So something with the invisibility condition is, by definition, concealed from a creature with tremorsense. And if something is still concealed from me, I can't reasonably state that I found it.
I think you are going to run into an issue with the rules in that there are a handful of starting points that lead to the same effect.
Hide is an ACTION that leads to the condition INVISISBLE.
HEAVILY OBSCURED is a terrain feature that impses the condition BLINDED.
Both BLINDED and INVISIBLE impose advantage on one attack and disadvantage on another attack depending on who has what condition and what direction the attack is going.
So theres going to be a lot of redundancy, yes?
The difference is heavily obscured is a terrain feature you can walk into or around, but cant do much else about and HIDE is an action you can TAKE.
Both lead to advantage / disadvantage on attacks, because advantage/disadvantage can cancel but they dont stack. That keeps the dc rolls sane. If conditions imposed, say +5, then power gamers would try to be heavily obscured AND imvisible AND make the enemy blinded, for a +15 bonus or something. They could regularly create situations where they cant fail, and that is actually boring.
But because most condition impose advantage/disadvantage and they can cancel but they cant stack, the dice rolls stay sane.
Thats great for game mechanics. Players have some chance of success and some chance of fail.
But it means a LOT of features, actions, terrain, and conditions all end up with the same effect: you get advantage on attacks, or whatever. And from a player's intuition point of view, its going to feel... weird...
Hiding, heavily obscured, invisible, are mechanically nearly identicle. They are all slightly different paths to the same result, so theyre going to feel a tad redundant.
"There is a difference between finding and seeing." Thus, you had stipulated that the hider was "found". Once found, the creature is no longer hiding and does not have the invisible condition.
I agree that the limits and conditions to "find" a hidden creature are hotly debated. I do not agree that, once found, there is any grey area for a creature to still be invisible, as Stabbey stated.
I just don't think "knows the location of the target" is justifiably different from "found the target". And all of this just backs up Pantagruel's point. The RAW is unclear so we look for intent. But the rules don't even give us an idea of what the intent is, so we are left to bicker about it amongst ourselves.
EDIT: sorry, I was getting confused as to who was saying what. Should be cleaned up now.
It's clear that a creature that is 'found' as intended by the hide action is no longer invisible, because the hide action outright tells you that. The problem is that it's not clear whether hide is talking about natural language use of 'found' or some more specific definition, and even if it's natural language, there are ways the word is found is used that don't really make sense for defeating stealth (for example, you might say you've found something if you've merely located it with reasonable accuracy, even if you cannot see it).
What this rapidly winds up turning into is just the 2014 "the DM decides if the situation is appropriate for hiding". Which was a perfectly workable rule, it just sometimes meant that players wound up being surprised by being unable to hide when they thought that hiding would be possible.
"The Dungeon Master decides when circumstances are appropriate for hiding" is right there in the 2024 PHB, too (in Chapter 1). So someone with even a min Stealth roll of 27 doesn't try to walk invisibly across the entirety of Faerun.
"Find" is meant to be open-ended (but explicitly includes a successful Search action), because there are thousands of ways it could come up...you know, like you draw attention to yourself by cartwheeling around or sitting in your target's lap.
An easy, supported by the rules in the book, variation is "you move out of cover to stab someone but their Passive Perception beats your Stealth." Meaning they hear you, most likely. Thus all the "move silently" discussion that actually spawned this thread. Roll Stealth to move silenty (also directly from the rules, and supported by at least one published adventure). My house rule would be that, in combat, you just use the Hide's value for the first movement.
Every single piece of this lines up perfectly with the "Unseen Attackers and Targets" box in chapter 1, as well.
And yet there are a number of people that argue it isn't; that the Search Action is the only way to "find" a hidden creature. And it's not like they don't have support in the rules. The DMG states that "Noticing a hidden creature is never trivially easy or automatically impossible, so characters can always try Wisdom (Perception) checks to do so." This is strong (not-definitive) evidence for their argument. That's two places in the rules for hiding where the only given way to "find" a creature is with a perception check. Then again, the DM determining whether the conditions exist to be able to hide is strong (not-definitive) evidence that there are other ways to "find" a hidden creature.
The problem is... we don't know. One side says "this is obviously the way". The other says, "No, this is clearly the way." And round and round we go. We don't even know if the conditions for taking the Hide Action are supposed to be conditions for remaining hidden. There is no text on it one way or the other. We simply have inference, and, due to that, we have argument when inferences from one person don't align with inferences from another.
This isn't the case where clearly the intent was for magic users to be able to cast cantrips, even though the RAW prohibit it (cantrips are "known", spellcasters can only cast spells that are "prepared"). We easily hand-wave that as a mistake in the written rules and everyone is in agreement on what they should say. In contrast, the hide rules are convoluted, imprecise, and it's impossible to tell what the designers even intended a hidden creature to be able to do with they way they were written. On top of that, the errata didn't actually change either argument and they are both as strong as ever.
The Hide action requires you to make an active Stealth check. That's the only active part of the Hide action. If the Hide action isn't supposed to make you unheard as well as unseen, then how does one become unheard? Do you think that the intent is for you to make a Stealth check as part of the Hide action, and then make a second Stealth check to also be quiet?
Whenever your DM calls for a Stealth check, do they always ask for two separate rolls, one for visual and one for auditory? I can't imagine they do, therefore, I can't imagine saying that the Stealth check as part of the Hide action does not count for both visual and auditory.
Blindness/deafness and silence? DM fiat? There is no actual rule that allows you to become unheard in 2014.
Those are both pretty ridiculous extremes.
- There are at least three explicit "finding" mechanics covered already in this thread: a Search Action, Passive Perception, and Tremorsense. All are pretty explicit.
- And the rules are covered in invocations of the DM making a judgement call (it's literally 1/3rd of the actual Hiding section of Chapter 1).
This all sounds like competing strawmen, and I chose to ignore both.
The first third of that Hiding section is a list of applications: "whether to spy on one another, sneak past a guardian, or set an ambush." So I don't buy that they haven't stated intent of the rule, either.
My assumption is that they rewrote the stealth rules in 2024 for some reason, which means there must be something about the 2014 rules they didn't like. The usual paragraph people point to is
and that they viewed this as a "mother may I" mechanic that they wanted to make more consistent... but I don't know what they wanted to make it more consistent to.