How Not to Be Seen
Sassy behir is best behir. Except for my buddy Kazzat, of course. Dude was the finest bro a wizard ever had. Bodyguard, lowrider mount, and surprisingly comfortable mattress, the electrical burns were well worth the effort. As much as I love my snaky blue dragonkin though, they’re not really the subject of today’s comic. Rather, what say we talk about that far deadlier beast: the Stealth/Hide/Sneak/How-not-to-be-seen rules?
My first encounter with the difficulties of stealth came courtesy of my favorite tactical minis game: Mordheim. The lore is cool, the low number of models is cool, and the fact that it literally translates to “Home of Murder” in German is 1) hilarious, and 2) also kind of cool. What’s not cool, however, is playing the “Breakthrough” scenario as a melee-focused warband. You can see those cursed Reiklanders across the river. Their stupid helmet feathers are waggling back and forth in plain sight, mocking you, and you can’t wait to smack the stupid off of ’em when they try and charge through your line. They don’t have any other choice. They’ve got to reach your board edge to win, and sure as shit you aren’t going to sprint across open ground to get at ’em. That’s how you wind up looking like a pincushion. And so you wait, all of your dudes posted up in alleyways or behind piles of debris, a smattering of Hidden! tokens lying next to them.
“Dude… are you going to move?”
“Hell no! You’re the melee squad. You come to me.”
“But you’re the one who has to break through. It’s the name of the scenario.”
“What? I can’t hear you. You better come out of hiding and repeat that.”
And so you sit there like a couple of Zax, not moving and not really playing the game. Or at least, that’s what happens in the worst case scenario. My favorite Mordheim games had a bit of a gentleman’s agreement going on in the background: You’re there to fight like manly men (especially you, Helga), so get in there and mix it up!
In a weird sort of way, stealthing around in an RPG shares that mindset problem. The stealthy player thinks that hiding every round in every terrain is viable. It’s what the character is built to do after all. Meanwhile, the GM is sitting there like, “No, you can’t hide behind the halfling.” If you’re using a battle map of some kind, you can always try marking which terrain creates suitable hiding spots, but that only goes so far. You’re inevitably going to find a corner case where the wall isn’t quite high enough, the smoke isn’t quite thick enough, or the foliage isn’t quite dense enough (looking at you there, Thief). In these scenarios, I find that it’s best policy for the sneaker-to-be to play a little Mother May I. If you know your going to dash in, stab the monster, and then dive for cover, make sure to ask your GM if cover is available before you’re halfway through the maneuver. Anything else is asking for disappointment and, even worse, a sassy-behir style argument.
How about the rest of you guys? Have you ever had trouble adjudicating the stealth and hiding rules in a game? Let’s hear your tales of hide-and-seek gone wrong in the comments!
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A short one that happened yesterday during a game I was running: the rouge who just opened the gates to town tried to hide in the middle of the open gateway, and when I pointed that out to them their response was to sidestep to the gate and hope no one would notice them next to it…
As evinced by the 1990 Shadowrun promo video, sidestepping can be a surprisingly effective means of stealth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GPGQoR6f6w
Mostly my problem is that nobody uses Stealth in my groups. When I try to use it, they often blow it by not being stealthy. Cover is the least of my concerns.
For real? But I was under the impression Stealth was crazy easy in 5e. Just get half the group to make the check and you’re golden, right?
Depending. If you are trying to surprise an enemy, everyone has to pass their check. Still, I could count on one hand the number of times a group has tried, and it really does work often enough if you do.
Wait a minute. When we talked about this back in the “Michigan J. Fighter” comic…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/michigan-j-fighter
…we were talking about group checks. Why wouldn’t they apply in a “surprise an enemy” situation?
Surprise has its own rules.
“If neither side tries to be stealthy, they automatically notice each other. Otherwise, the GM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side. Any character or monster that doesn’t notice a threat is surprised at the start of the encounter.”
https://www.5esrd.com/gamemastering/combat/#Surprise
Well shit. And here I was all excited that 5e solved the problem of “group stealth.”
It does unless you are trying to Surprise an enemy. You could still use group checks for sneaking past guards or creeping close enough to an enemy camp to listen in on them, etc. Still, I admit Surprise is half the point of Stealth.
The longer I play, the more I think game rules are like coding. They’re a language used to describe function, and there are multiple ways of expressing the same interaction. Actually, that insight may be the one underlying 5e’s “leave it to the GM” design philosophy. “Here are some tools. Use them as you will.”
Technically, the (most) rules requires either cover or concealment. That is usually ok when adjudicating a more abstract coarse grained situtation, like rolling for “sneaking into the castle”.
For more fine grained situations, like in combat, one should really determine if the character actually has cover based on the terrain features locally. When trying to sneak from for example one tree to another, if someone is explicitly watching the open air with no cover between them, it should be an automatic failure, or at least a hefty penalty to the opposed check…
I really need to start to enforce this with the stealthmancer in my current campaign, but it’s seldom worth spending time on…
When you dash across open air and wind up in “a very obvious piece of cover…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTQYEkIvN2M&t=0m59s
…I think that consequences are fair ball.
Your video is unfortunately private, but I’d love to see the reference if you figure it out later.
I hate to beat the 5E drum again (No I don’t) but the stealth rules there are pretty elegant.
When you are [bold]unseen[/bold] (Though there’s some unweildiness in the terminology, as creatures with Tremorsense/Blindsense can “See” you even if they can’t literally see you.) You may attempt to hide. Hiding is a simple matter of rolling stealth and hoping it beats your enemy’s passive perception.
If you’re in the open, you’re seen, so it doesn’t matter if you’re unheard. If an enemy checks the area you’re hiding, you’re seen. If the enemy uses perception, they roll against your stealth, and if they succeed you’re no longer hidden from them.
There are some strange interactions in the 5e system though (especially if you follow RAW). For example, if I’m a rogue with the skulker feat and expertise in stealth and athletics, I can walk up to a creature with darkvision in the dark, grapple it, and then hide, since for the darkvision creature, the darkness acts like dim light, which the skulker feat enables you to hide in.
And as long as that creature can’t beat my stealth check with his perception, he can’t find the guy who’s keeping him from going anywhere by grabbing his shirttail.
5e gets a lot right. The leave-it-to-the-GM design style works in a lot of cases, but I don’t think this is one of them. Stealth (and especially combat stealth) is one of those points where “elegant” threatens to become “vague.” It can work depending on the GM and the table, but I’ve seen enough threads about corner cases to know that the rules are less than straightforward here. A quick example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/2tpmq6/5e_how_in_the_nine_hells_does_stealth_work/
“How can he see me? I got a 27 on stealth!”
“He sees you with his eyes, because you are trying to hide in the middle of a well lit hallway.”
I see that you too have played with gentlemen of the roguish persuasion.
That’s when you reveal you’ve taken the Hellcat Stealth feat. How does it work, you ask?
…
Hey, what’s that over there?!
Well. The answer is, “It works well.”
Anything in the tank for dragon senses though? I hear they prey on hellcats.
I’m lucky that I get to have both a high Stealth check -and- access to Invisibility (and Greater) as an Inquisitor in this regard, though it remains helpful to keep moving so the enemy can’t aim rockets at the vague position that the arrows are arriving from. I’m in an Iron Gods campaign this time around, so that matters.
I’ve only played three types of characters, all told. The caster types make themselves invisible and don’t actually do anything that qualifies as an ‘attack’ so there’s no origin point to target (and they’re generally in the air, too, so good luck to your opponent to pinpoint your random coordinate in three dimensional space), the sneakery types that try to make their incredible nuisance-if-left-unchecked look like the least nuisance so the relative aggro stays low (Bane+Judgment Inquisitors, Sneak Attacky Rogues, etc.), and the blatant fellows who take pride in vacuuming up priority onto their dent-ridden, enchanted mithral and adamantine plate and chain to give the latter categories time to ply their trades.
Well hey, as long as those rockets aren’t filled with glitterdust you should be fine, right?
How is Iron Gods, btw? I snagged it in a humble bundle on the vague notion that I’d run it one day. No real plans for it at the moment though.
Let me tell you about the party’s problems with Glitterdust.
Actually, no. I’ll leave that one alone.
Iron Gods is much better that Wrath of the Righteous, for starters. It’s got a solid identity, but it goes enough different places that everyone will have a time in the sun. Durable Adamantine arrows are my friend, I sprang for a full quiver of them.
You know the term ‘Rocket Tag’? When everyone can one-shot everyone so it starts to be a battle for initiative and positioning. The rockets this time are pretty literal, and 3 rockets in a round -hurt-, so I’ve found. The Myrmidon bots can see invisible things, so I have to actually -hide- hide or make myself a non-priority like was stated earlier. Glass Cannons gotta be careful.
In summary! I like it. I recommend.
That “solid identity” is what keeps me coming back to Pathfinder APs. Even something simple like the “them ogres ain’t right” aspect of the The Hook Mountain Massacre is so far removed from the generic Tolkien version of the encounter…
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/lotr/images/6/6b/Hobbler-trolls.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/2000?cb=20130411232012
…that it still feels fresh, even after years of gaming. I’m betting that, given my love for Thundarr the Barbarian, Iron Gods would be right up my alley.
Can we also mention DMs who think dragons with auto-truesight can’t be snuck up upon?
A plague on both their houses!
Hmmm. Less the Stealth shenanigans, the problem I always run into is the inherent unbalance of group Stealth vs group Perception.
Even if it’s group passive perception you’re battling, it doesn’t matter how good your best stealth people are as long as someone isn’t good at it or a single person rolls low.
On the flip side, I’m pretty sure almost every instance of true ambush I’ve seen in D&D games is the GM just declaring it to be so, since I’ve rarely seen parties whose best passive perception is low enough that monsters trying to stealth wouldn’t run into the exact same problem and have Goblin 7 both the entire thing for the entire raiding party.
In certain editions of games they say groups of monsters only roll once for the group, solving the reverse-issue. Some games let the party do the “assisted stealth”, where the good stealthers can cover the bad ones. Some others have feats for it, instead of just giving it. I do find that to be an injustice, yet… Realistic. No amount of hand-holding by a master thief will make me in real life be able to move silent through a forest. Snap, crunch, stomp.
Yeah. We talked about this a bit back here:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/michigan-j-fighter
I tried to implement the “the worst sneaker makes a roll, but the rest of the party can roll to aid” solution. It was a bit on the easy side, unfortunately. That poor mob boss was murdered like a chump in his bed.
Oh so we did. Pardon me then. My memory is not the greatest.
Still it says something about the issue that it’s a known issue to everyone and I’ve never heard of or been able to come up with any brilliant solutions to fix it in a more or less universally satisfying way.
No worries. We’ve had several thousand words worth of conversation since this comic launched. I think missing one or two references is allowed. 🙂
For us, the basic-rule-of-thumb is: if they have line of sight, you can’t hide.
So my stealthy musket-wielding Kobold Slayer slips around a corner, rolls stealth, then sneaks back up to said corner and tries to snipe for that nice Sneak Attack bonus.
Notice I said “up to” and not “back around”? I don’t have “Hide in Plain Sight”.
RPGs require suspension of disbelief, and that door swings both ways. Players don’t like being railroaded, and DMs don’t like obviously rediculous antics.
Now on a side note, I want to make a special shoutout to one of the best Teamwork feats I have seen.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/stealth-synergy-teamwork/
Oh no…. The syntactical nightmare returns!
If you’re not familiar, there is a raging debate about that feat. Does it mean that “you take the highest roll (17), then add Amy’s +7 and Bob’s +2 and Cindy’s +11 for a total of 37,” or does it mean that “you take the highest roll (17), then Amy adds her +7 for a 24, and Bob adds his +2 for a 19, and Cindy adds her +11 for a 28?” There is passion on both sides, and last I checked there was no clear answer in sight.
Stealth and Hiding, well sometimes you simply can’t end of the Line, since youre in Plain sight. But thats rarly an Issue, because hey Invisible! And there they go. I pretty much outrigh tell them if there is cover or if they need Invisibility.
The one Problem i have with Mega Stealthers is, that all the other Players have to sit around while, he makes a Solo scout Mission. Our Solution was just let him quickly Scout JUST the next Room. He gives them Intel, and then the Group can crash into the Room, with at least a little more Strategic planning.
In my Out of the Abyss game I’m running a chain pact warlock. We use the same method. My imp is a one-room-ahead scout, fluttering in invisibly while the rest of the party waits in the next room. The power play is to let him scout the whole dungeon for us, but I think a little self-censoring is valuable. You want to keep things fun, and mapping the dungeon sans risk is distinctly unfun. As for in-game rationale, you don’t want to risk being too far away from backup if things go south. My two cents anyway.
I’ve seen both sides. Being “The stealth gal” can be a double edged sword. On one hand, I horrified a GM with a Rogue / Shadowdancer by sneaking into the Orc Army Encampment and assassinating their generals, poisoning their food and water, and then sneaking out without being spotted. Hide in Plain Sight is frightening.
On the other hand, I’ve forced the party to bust in to save me by botching a stealth check and tripping over a rock, alerting an entire cave full of hobgoblins to the presence of my half-elf self.
The GM handled most of it pretty well, though he rethought his position of “the orcs have darkvision and so aren’t using torches” after that session when he found out Hide In Plain Sight for the Shadowdancer is based on the actual light conditions, not if someone can see you or not. Being a supernatural ability, I am happy it works this way.
Well done on the Orc KO. And well done for your GM. That mess is tough to run for, especially if you don’t see it coming.
Do you find that there’s enough balance between “no one can ever see me I auto-win the encounter” and “I have catastrophically screwed up and am about to die?” Or upon reflection, do you think it’s a bit too swingy?
The real problem is Hide in Plain Sight. The way the Pathfinder rules are written, as long as my goblin stays in his town, no one will ever see him again. Prior to getting that ability, lack of cover or concealment was the best way to defend against someone who’s stealth skill is literally comparable to an invisible copper piece under the sofa. Now, by the rules, this little green dude can pee on a guy’s shoes and remain unseen.
“Oi, why are me boots wet? Must be raining.”
Hellcat Stealth as well. Both have a way of kicking the suspension of disbelief straight in the crotch.
Fun Fact: It is technically possible, through exactly one method, to create a creature of opposite alignment to what they’d typically have in D&D 5e (They can’t be True Neutral though since it doesn’t have an opposite). The Deck of Many Things Balance Card. It overwrites reality itself to create its effects, so drawing the Balance Card will invert the alignment of ANY creature. For a Behir, this would make it Neutral Good. It will be my MISSION the next campaign I play a divination character in to make this happen and get a Behir pet.
Playing the Low Rider song every time you charge into battle is definitely a perk.