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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While this is plausible, I'm not aware of it being specifically stated at any point. My general preference for combat stealth is that leaving your hiding spot causes you to be spotted at the end of your turn unless you hide again (so if you dash across an open space to another hiding spot, you'll have to hide again or be discovered, but benefit from invisibility during your turn), but there's certainly no rules support for that preference.
Here's the problem. You are happy to say 'the DM should be in control' just as long as the DM is ruling your way. When the DM is not ruling your way you want to say 'this shouldn't be such a stretch'.
Melee sneak attacks were already quite possible- you either buddy up with another PC- already quite common- or use Aimed Strike for advantage. This claim sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
I'm not sure what statement of mine you're referring to. I think trying to use D&D for low fantasy is a bad idea, because there are lots of elements of the game that fail at basic realism, but if you're trying anyway... the DM picks the DC.
Doing them from Hide is a different situation, but the fact that "sneak attack every round is easy" means that "you can sneak into melee in combat" really isn't a big deal, balance-wise --- it involves a bonus action, high Stealth, target being within Move (or maybe half Move if you want to repeat), maybe taking an AoO, etc.
But then, I'm not the one who keeps saying you shouldn't be able to do this. I'm just pointing out that the new Hide rules mean you can. The "problem" is "Invisible Condition doesn't make sense" and the solution is "actually, it does make sense."
At the same time, high fantasy isn’t carte blanche for players to expect spell-equivalent effects from skill checks. I’ve ready plenty where even the stealthy characters can’t simply ghost across a battlefield unseen without some kind of power or magic gear to justify it, particularly when the conflict is on the small skirmish level of a typical D&D encounter.
The statement was literally in the quote. You said
Yet, when people try to suggest that a DM say 'no, that's not possible' because they aren't running a game with 'Batman level stealth' you want to imply they are 'doing it wrong'.
Sure- it makes sense when people accept it’s not the equivalent of activating the character’s personal invisibility field and that players don’t get to dictate the situational awareness of NPCs mid-combat.
I don't know about "dictate" but I get to make myself invisible, and they need to either Search for me, (or Tremorsense me, whatever,) or get stabbed. Maybe some of them get Observant, etc.
When I would play a crossbow-rogue under the 2014 rules, I could just do this with ranged attacks (yay, Expertise in Stealth), and, with sufficient cover options, keep disappearing every round. But I couldn't with a melee rogue, because the hide rules (and only the hide rules!) gave everything "all around" 360 degree awareness. But in 2024, that rule is gone, and Hide grants effective invisibility, so I can now.
And we weren't talking about out-of-combat stealth with incredibly contrived scenarios, either, but you keep insisting that's what this conversation is actually about. It was about combat uses of stealth.
Guards Alertness: It's not about rotation, its about expectation and mental fatigue. On the one hand, the guard has a rational belief that nothing will happen, because 99.999% of the time, nothing happens. And it's boring as hell. Their mind will wander. Your expectations of human attention span are entirely unreasonable here. Peak vigilance can be sustained for only 15-30 minutes, after which mental alertness drops significantly. Nobody rotates guards on a 15-minute basis.
And your problem is you're assuming the narrative is set by fiat rather than dice. It's not much fun if the player's spend the entire session asking the DM 'does this work?' until they find something the DM thinks is okay. That's why stealth has an explicit rules framework for finding hidden characters, so you don't have to play 'May I' for 20 minutes before you arrive at a DM approved solution.
Further, the Wizard is perfectly relevant. If the Wizard can trivially achieve what the Rogue can't even do, in the Rogue's own area of specialty, why is the Rogue even there? It's a stealth mission, and the Rogue is still useless. Everyone is going to play spellcasters at that table, because non-spellcasters aren't allowed to play. This is a huge problem with D+D in general (cf linear fighters, quadratic wizards), and you're making non-casters relatively worse off than they otherwise would be.
Persuasion is completely different, because it doesn't have a defined DC framework like Hide does, and imo, it doesn't even work like that (see below). There's no objective method for determining a 22 is sufficient. (This is inevitably a 'May I' game, unfortunately).
Unlike Hide, Persuasion does not have a well-defined system for setting DCs. (And imo, you don't persuade people to do things, you persuade people of truth statements. Whether that results in them doing things depends on what believing those truth statements leads them to do).
We do have examples of Intimidate used to get 'kings' to give away their 'kingdoms' in cinema. Dick Tracy comes to mind, where Big Boy intimidates Lips into signing away the deed to the club Ritz (his 'kingdom'). In this case, Big Boy convinced Lips that he would die if he didn't sign it (that's a truth statement). Lips doesn't want to die, so he signs it. (Big Boy kills him anyway, but Lips thought he could live if he signed). If Lips had instead responded with 'then kill me', that doesn't mean Big Boy's intimidation failed - Lips is still convinced he'll die if he doesn't sign. It's just that his response to that knowledge (in this hypothetical) is to accept he's going to die. If the intimidation had failed, Lips would call Big Boy's bluff instead (maybe "you can't kill me, you need my signature"), because he wouldn't believe the threat.
We even have an example of someone asking them to do so causing a king to forsake his kingdom in mythology. India has several examples, starting with the story of King Harishchandra. (Again, what they are convinced of is a particular truth claim that causes them to forsake their kingdom as a consequence).
There's no skill for flapping your hands, so... If you flavor the fly spell as 'I flap my hands to fly', then we would all agree that works, I hope.
Batman-type stealth stunts aren't impossible, they're just beyond human ability to do reliably. Just set the DC high (like I said, a fixed DC 15 is dumb). If you don't want Batman stealth, don't play at a level where people can reliably hit DC 25.
See, this is exactly my point.
You: The DM should be in charge.
Me: The DM says no.
You: Well, the DM shouldn't be saying no.
So,....the DM should be free to rule however you want them to?
The DM shouldn't say "X is impossible" if X is actually possible. While some cinematic stunts are actually impossible, most of them are just extremely unreliable, and thus should have high DCs rather than being impossible.
Ok, but that's a Strawman. We aren't talking about the DM raising the difficulty to higher levels when it is really hard to use Stealth. We are talking about situations where it is completely unreasonable (I'm going to replace Impossible with Unreasonable because, short of the Rogue being a corpse, one could come up with some incredibly improbable circumstances that causes it to be possible) for the Rogue to use Stealth, and then people saying that the DM is doing it 'wrong' (making up rules, house ruling, etc.) for not using DC 15, and they can only be 'found' with a Perception roll with a DC of what they rolled.
The DC 15 rule is egregiously stupid, as is the idea that they can only be found with a search action.
Okay, but how do you determine what’s possible mid-game? Stopping to hash it out would be tedious for the rest of the group if nothing else, and likely would get frustrating if it recurs. End of the day the group largely needs to trust/accept the DM’s rulings for what rolls they can make, and if the DM squeezes too tight it’s probably time to bounce.
How is knowing what square they are in not finding them? In the example where someone sneaks up behind a guard in broad daylight but "they are too distracted to notice and get stabbed from behind," knowing that the person that is "hidden" is directly behind them makes it hard to imagine that they would be totally unaware. You not only know their direction, but you know the direction of their movement, so you would know they were moving directly towards you.
In the "box of junk" example, you aren't looking for the "junk", you're looking for the box that the junk is in. And if that "box" is only hidden because they are crouching behind a low wall, then yeah, you will find it easily.
It tells you direction and their direction of movement. So you can walk towards them and find them. I'm not saying that the moment you cast the spell you will know where they are and they won't be "hidden". But you can find them without the perception check just by continually moving in the direction you know they are. You shouldn't need to roll a Perception check if the magic in your head is saying "north, north, north, northwest, west, east, west, east," because you'll know when you "went too far". And in general, the person is "hiding" because they are behind some kind of cover or obscurement, so finding them on the other side of that wall or bush or whatever is exactly what the spell is designed to do.
Scrying an Invisible (as the spell) creature doesn't let you see them because you literally cannot perceive them through sight at all. But a Hidden creature isn't Invisible (spell) invisible, it's Invisible (condition) invisible, which means if I'm standing a foot away from you and looking directly at you and there's nothing between you and me (no cover, no obscurement, nothing) then I should be able to see you.
And then of course as kenclary noted, tremorsense should be able to find a "hidden" creature without the Wisdom (Perception) save as well. It says “A creature with Tremorsense can pinpoint the location of creatures and moving objects within a specific range, provided that the creature with Tremorsense and anything it is detecting are both in contact with the same surface (such as the ground, a wall, or a ceiling) or the same liquid.” How that would not be the same as "finding" them is beyond me. You know exactly where they are. They would still get the benefit of the Unseen Attackers rules, but not of the Invisible condition.
I have to be brief for now and haven't had a chance to catch up on the rest of the thread so I'll just respond to this for now with a summary of where to find these rules.
To start, being hidden means that your location is unknown because you are unseen and unheard. (See: Unseen Attackers and Targets)
To become hidden (unseen and unheard), when circumstances are appropriate for hiding (see: general rules), you take the Hide action to try to conceal yourself (See: Hide action). The requirements for doing this are: While you are in an Unseen position, you try to make yourself unheard. If successful you become and remain unheard. However, you only have the benefits of this successful action "while hidden", which means "while unseen and unheard" (see above). In addition, even while remaining unseen and unheard, there is a list of things that will actively cause you to stop being hidden (unseen and unheard) immediately.
On that you will get little argument from me.
And, again, I'm not saying people are 'doing it wrong' if the DM is allowing Batman/Naruto level Stealth shenanigans. If that is the game people want to play, that's what they should be doing.
I am only taking offense with the concept 'DC 15, you got to beat my roll, and I don't have to have any concerns whatsoever about cover after I made my roll' and that those who disagree are, somehow, making up their own rules.
I'm not sure how this relates to anything I said. While you could try to come up with specific rules for computing the target number, that seems antithetic to the 5e design philosophy, so it's probably just "roll and the DM will tell you if it worked".