Never Split The Party 4
It’s always the problem with stealth missions. If you send in a solo sneak, Padfoot McBackstab is suddenly one failed check away from “surrounded and outnumbered.” If you subscribe to the buddy system, then you’ve just doubled your chances of somebody biffing the roll. And if you elect to chuck the whole party at the problem, you suddenly find yourself in Michigan J. Fighter territory. It’s moments like these when I would rather change tactics.
Of course, successful sneakery does have its appeal. The fringe benefits are outstanding! You get terribly comfortable masks… slimming black outfits… tight breeches… Your whole aesthetic is suddenly rock solid! But if you do go in for the stealth commando, there’s one accessory you cannot live without.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
“Alright! That’s two dagger damage and… carry the one… 1,309 sneak attack damage! Then I reenter stealth.”
“What are you hiding behind?”
“I… What? What do you mean ‘hiding behind?’ I just stealth!”
The missing ingredient, of course, is a little thing known as “cover.” But as goofy as it sounds, our hypothetical rogue isn’t necessarily wrong. Different systems come at it from different angles, with variations like hide in plain sight or halflings that specialize in hiding behind larger creatures getting extra options. But no matter what system, you’ve still got to get on the same page as your GM. Because when they don’t think you have enough cover… Well, let’s just say that there are documentaries on the subject, and you do not want to appear in them.
Question of the day then! What is your favorite mid-combat hiding place? Have you ever argued with a GM about whether or not you had enough cover to be sneaky? Did you manage to hide behind that arras, or did you wind up getting Polonius’d despite your best efforts? Sound off in the comments with all your best literal-cover stories!
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Typically, my favourite hiding place mid-combat is behind the party tank. ^^;
Of course I either fire off spells from that position or get ready to flank whoever gets close to said tank.
I’m rolling a cute l’il gnome mesmerist on Sunday, and it just occurred to me that I should make friends with my party’s designated big guys ASAP.
What do the cards say for Assassin’s ambush attempt?
“Outlook no so good” and “don’t count on it.”
I’d ask if they had Braille on them, but she thought this was a good idea, so…
Given how effective Assassin is, and how NPC-class miss nefarious noble (or as she’s known by friends, Mistress Neffy) is, this might be going into overkill territory.
She does, however, have lots of money with which to buy security – and a decent track record of surviving and/or avoiding hostility pointed her way. Preparation is worth something.
Her name is Lady Duplicity. And she’s totally going to appear on the cast page one day when I have all the free time in the world and unicorn pigs fly out of my butt.
You are now obligated to draw/include unicorn pigs in the comic. Or put them in Brie’s petting zoo.
Didn’t know unicorn pigs could fly through, don’t you mean pegahogs?
I think those would be alicogs…
I’d love to see a Laurel-version of a tarot deck, now that I know it exists. Could be merch-able!
She’s floated the idea before, actually. I’ll let her know there’s community support.
I recently played a ranger who had a pet monitor lizard- a particularly large, aggressive monitor lizard. This monitor lizard was roughly the size of a horse, capable of eating medium humanoids rather quickly.
This ranger had master stealth, but often lacked things to hide behind.
However, her pet, at level 14, took an ability that gave it hide in plain sight.
A large creature provides enough cover for a medium creature to hide behind.
So my ranger got hide-in-plain-sight by proxy, using her monitor lizard as cover to hide behind while it hid in the open.
I get how this works. I agree that this works. I don’t like that this works.
I would be sorely tempted to say:
OK, you hide behind your lizard.
Then your lizard goes into hiding in plain sight.
Thus, your cover having disappeared, you suddenly appear in plain sight.
See, the upside is that my ranger had an answer for this: the fact that her primary weapon is a serrated greataxe (a rune that gives +1d4 damage, but can be activated to increase that to +1d12 which makes the serration spin, like a buzzsaw) If you couldn’t find her, she just shot you with arrows. Finding her makes the situation INFINITELY WORSE, because she switches to melee.
Is it better or worse than the ranger hiding behind the lizard, and the lizard hiding behind the ranger?
Obscuring Mist is one of the most underrated spells in Pathfinder 1e. Not only does it give total cover to your entire party, but because you attack and defend from different corners it is possible to assymetrically benefit from it without suffering the same penalties. Hardly ever see anyone else use it though.
Had a character that abused this hard, a Slayer with a Saltspray Ring, which constantly emits 10 feet of mist (which this character could see through). Ranged sneak attacks were never easier, and the 50% miss chance helped a lot too. The best part was that the opponent’s targeted spells could just never hit me, or anyone standing behind me. Some enemies could see through it with Blindsight and the like, but those were rare.
As I understand it, the rule is “stand on the edge of the mist and get all the benefits and none of the penalties,” right? It’s all about attacking into mist squares rather than out of them.
I’ve seen it ruled two ways. The normal way is that the amount of mist you attack through is what matters, so if you stand 10 feet into the mist, anyone attacking you suffers total concealment, but if you attack from the corner closest to the mist you only attack through 5 feet, so you only suffer partial concealment. You’re basically popping out of the mist to fire a shot and then jumping back in.
There’s another interpretation that makes it more powerful, where the thing that matters is the distance between targets while there is mist between them, no matter how little mist there actually is. In that case, as long as part of your square has mist and another does not, you can potentially get total concealment for free. It makes archers with Smoke Arrows busted.
> as long as part of your square has mist and another does not
I assume that’s only possible for creatures larger than medium. Otherwise how could part of a square have mist?
In all cases, this mess feels like gamesmanship. It’s an artifact of the grid, same as the old “I approach the spearman on a diagonal so he doesn’t get an AoO.” We can justify it as popping in and out of cover, but it’s bizarrely powerful and very rules-wonky.
> how could part of a square have mist?
If the source of the mist makes it in a circle, like the spell Obscuring Mist, some squares on the edge will only be partially covered. If it’s made in a square, like with Smoke Arrows, you can fire it at an intersection instead of the center of a square to partially cover it.
The rule is internally consistent, at least, and it allows for cover and concealment to not be symmetrical for attackers and defenders, which is realistic. It’s better to get behind a wall than to be out in the open. That said, it doesn’t really work if you use theatre of the mind, and many groups houserule the cover rules so whether or not you have it in any situation is up to GM fiat. Personally, I like consistency, so I would rather play in a game that uses the cover rules than one that didn’t.
The kobold rogue in the party currently has the Skulker feat, which allows him to hide in dim lighting and darkness like some sort of crazy ninja. Which can get pretty annoying when youre underground and everything is dark, let me tell you.
Sounds like the dude picked the right feat for the right campaign, lol.
Our rogue/ranger does his hundreds of damage from potentially 400 feet away with a heavy crossbow that doesn’t have the loading property… and he has a cloak of invisibility. Along with a couple other rather OP items, he can technically solo a dragon (he almost has, three times now!) so when it comes to stealth, he always is.
But before he became captain so-OP-the-DM-will-kill-us-all-to-get-at-him, we actually had more than a few sessions with all of the above comic problems of stealth gone wrong (or “right”?) with him as our still the most stealthy character.
I think the best version had to be the Lord of the Rings moment, where he said he uses his cloak to pretend to be a rock… and it worked! But I think the most fun variant of stealth without real cover is when he used to try to “hide” behind my character…
My character is an 8 foot tall juggernaut forgeborn, so it is not exactly out of the realms of possibility. But his character is not exactly small at 6 and a half feet of half orc… but when your stealth stat is so high that even without rolling the dice you are probably already “passively” invisible, well, it is Skyrim sneak 100 all over again 😀
So you have fantasy Häyhä? Nice, expect your GM to drop magical artillery, hordes of cheap disposable grunts by the ton and a “evil” variant of him.
All for naught but a lucky roll which he still survives.
> captain so-OP-the-DM-will-kill-us-all-to-get-at-him
The power gaming is strong with this one, lol.
My Rogues generally *don’t* use stealth during combat, unless the terrain happens to be well suited to it.
More commonly, I’d be relying on flanking (or equivalent)… staying on the move, looking for opponents who are preoccupied with a raging Barbarian, or busy trying to kill the Wizard.
When is the terrain well suited to it?
Anything where line of sight is particularly disrupted… forests, columned halls, a warehouse lined with shelves, etc. Places where you’ll naturally be moving in and out of sight during combat, and where an opponent could easily lose track of where you are.
As opposed to say, open spaces that might offer some cover, but where you’re going to have to work to actually disappear from view. In those cases, it’s usually easier to just walk up behind someone who’s distracted by your allies, and harvest their kidneys.
In 5e I’ve seen players get a lot of milage from Minor Image.
It’s usable at-will, last 1 minute and doesn’t require concentration.
Just create a hologram of a 5-foot wide solid object (boulder, large barrel, armoire, appropriate to the environs), stand inside it, and start sniping while the target tries to figure out where the arrows are coming from.
I will refer you back to the documentary in the OP:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VokGd5zhGJ4&t=60s
The bush would be an even more obvious hiding spot if it wasn’t there last time you passed by the park.
(Or if you were in a dungeon, but hewhosaysfish sadly specified “appropriate to the environs”.)
In middle of combat there is only one acceptable place to hide, behind a shield wall. Unless it’s ranged combat with fire arms then use terrain to your best ability.
Ahh shield wall, what can’t it do. It is even the only true safe space, anything else is wishful thinking.
> In middle of combat there is only one acceptable place to hide
Indeed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ohk5Swy-04&t=55s
My favorite hiding places in combat are “(Greater (Invisibility” and “Dimension Door”.
You can’t use “uncanny dodge” on a question. That’s not even how the ability works!
Smoke or illusions are usually your best bet for hiding if Hide in Plain Sight or similar aren’t an option. Gnomes or Humans with Racial Heritage (Gnome) can get the Effortless Trickery feat which lets you concentrate on an Illusion (Figment) spell as a swift action. Use it to make a screen of fog or shadow that you can see through (since you know it’s illusionary) but opponents can’t (since they need to interact with it to get a save), while still having the ability to full attack. This is also handy for interrupting a charge or targeted spell with a readied action- they need line of sight, so drop a screen down to block it. Using a standard action to waste the big boss’s turn is a heck of a good deal.
A more common trick is to play a Sylph (or a Human with Planar Heritage (Sylph)) and get the Cloudsight feat to see through fog and mist as if it weren’t there. The Saltspray Ring can create a continuous effect around you similar to Obscuring Mist, for one-sided concealment.
For actually hiding in combat, Hide in Plain Sight is almost mandatory just because cover is so situation-dependent. You can flip a table or dive into the brush but that requires there be something there to interact with. That also means the DM has another thing to consider whenever setting a scene in a place with combat- what am I describing that can be used as cover?
Ideally the scenario would play out that the player asks the DM if there’s anything large enough to hide behind or places where light doesn’t quite reach in the room rather than jumping in and then saying it or expecting the DM to have a list of possible cover prepped for each area, that way the DM can choose how they want that option to play out at that time.
Even then, HiPS does a good job of avoiding the issue of ‘how not to be seen’ with only one or two possible places someone could’ve gone (or the person doing the exploding seeing where they ended their movement before vanishing and just yeeting a fireball at it).
For more rp-isg purposes, a smoke bomb you throw near a foe or a smokestick lit by your familiar can do the trick of distracting or obscuring you long enough to get to cover or even make a ‘bridge’ between two hiding spots so opponents have to guess which you’re hiding behind, dropping a tapestry on them from above on the wall, using Expeditious Construction to MAKE a wall… there’s a few options, it’s about where you are and how much creativity you have with it.
Or the fight could take place among rocky outcroppings or in the aftermath of a bar brawl where tables already exist in a flipped state, in which case you thank you DM for throwing you a bone.
Methinks you’ve played this character.
Funny enough, no, but I absolutely want to. That or one of the few dozen others I put together, of varying levels of mechanical cheese and character depth. Pathfinder’s biggest sin is being so fun to make more characters for while not having as many chances to play them, heh.
Even without special feats/abilities, we often ruled that if (from the foe’s perspective) the prospective stealth mini couldn’t be seen behind another mini, then concealment was achieved. Hide checks and the occasional invisibility in mid-movement were often pulled off this way.
My favorite stealth moment was in a shadowy basement. The PCs had tracked down the reanimated corpses of an NPC team that just *happened* to closely match our heroes in class/party dynamic. This “Skeleton Crew” was ready to march forth to kill again when the party cornered them. There was the “aha” moment of discovery and acknowledgement of which marker was which undead adventurer or PC. Then we rolled for Initiative and a Spot check (which they all failed). The NPCs used modified Init: one roll, modified for each critter. As I moved the first few pieces on the game mat, I quietly palmed the Dead Rogue’s marker with my off hand. Later in the round, one player counted the markers on the board, frowned, counted them again, then began muttering. Other players noticed, discussion ensued, and they finally asked for a redefinition of the tokens. I ID’d them all.
Players: Wait! Where’s the Rogue?!
Me: (in mock innocence) What? (examines map) Hunh. I’ll be darned! You’re right, he’s gone! Oh, well. I suppose there’s no telling where he is now. Don’t worry, I imagine he’ll turn up somewhere.
As it was, the party’s sorcerer later found out where that Rogue was hiding, and in the worst possible way.
This is one of those spots where a VTT has the advantage over physical game space. Much easier to hide a rogue on “the GM layer” than opting for the IRL sleight of hand. Cool move at the table though!
‘Kay, this is unfortunately obscured by the banner, but… is Barbarian actually about to sneeze from Assassin’s bun (or whatever his hairstyle is called) tickling her nose?
Head canon accepted.
Best group stealth is Russian stealth. Send assassin kill everyone while the group waits and then he let them in once everybody is dead 🙂
Also one of my favorite cover was a single strand of hair, but that was mostly on Exalted and a Fair Folk game 🙂
Just turn sideways! They’ll never see you behind a whole hair!
I mean, clearly the best stealth position is behind the notes the Bard is singing to give you that 1d6 (or whatever) bonus. =P
Sadly, it’s too small for that. “About the size of your outstretched hand.”
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/s/solid-note/
😛
My parties always split up into Stealth Team and Charisma Team. Half the party does their best Oceans 11 impersonation while the other half knocks on the front door and does their damndest to sell some encyclopedias. The advantage of this split is that typically both teams are close enough to one another that when the shooting starts they can reinforce each other while also ensuring stealth team doesn’t have to gently lower the heavy armor users quietly through the probably nonexistent skylights.
So to answer your question, where do the party sneaky fellows hide mid combat? Behind the people trying to get rid of their fast talking, blatantly lying, probably insane colleagues.
Actual attempted distractions include impersonating the following: the Humane Society, members of a religion, food delivery technicians, the government Census, an actual god, a very confused group of coffee drinkers who were insistent that the assassins’ guild was actually a cafe, pirates, fake pirates, traveling circus performers, gardeners, caterers, tax collectors, boat inspectors, and more.
Yeah, paladins and rogues traditionally don’t get on well, but a paladin is fantastically useful as a distraction. They’re like armor-plated Mormons or Witnesses… send them to knock on the front door, and let them draw heat while you head in the back window.
It’s clever play. But then again, that’s not exactly “in combat.” If you’re using a distraction like that, it’s “just before combat.” I do like it as an example of facing though. While there is no mechanic for facing, it can matter narratively in distraction cases like this.
“We are but three lost circus performers. Tell us, is there a village nearby?”
In D&D 4e, there’s a fun permastealth rogue build I’ve done before.
Just staple together a few feats, wear one magic item, and make sure to take the Cunning SNeak class feature, and you too can hide every round in the partial concealment that you have indefinitely despite the rule that states you can’t hide using the same action that takes the hidden status away from you.
How do you DM for a such a thing?
Mostly you just bully them with AoE attacks.
Having concealment and being hidden not only won’t stop a fireball aimed in your general direction, you don’t even get bonuses to avoid it aside from the off chance the enemy drops the explosion in the wrong location entirely.
Maybe Assassin should look into better feat selection.
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/press-to-the-wall-combat/
Hide in Plain Sight is neat with my Shadow Dancer.
Take 10 nearly got him killed once because the BBEG had even better take 10 on perception. Otoh it also saved him from a TPK earlier on (hide in plain sight + wall climber + expeditious retreat)
A spell of Silence can go a long way to hide a party.
I rarely play sneaks. (I prefer heavies and casters) When I do I like to make good use of the important rule everyone forgets: Mixing skills and abilities. Sure I can use Dexterity (Stealth) to skulk in the shadows, or I can use Charisma (Stealth) to walk by the guards like I belong, or Intelligence (Stealth) to pick out good hiding spots for my less stealthy allies.
This reminds me of a scene in one of the last Star Wars EU books, X-Wing: Mercy Kill. From a discussion Wraith Squadron’s leader and most senior member have on how all of them are going to be there during an infiltration mission:
“Isn’t this more of a one or two Wraith job? Minimum presence, maximum speed?”
“This way we have maximum mutual support.”
“Which makes sense if we know there’s going to be a firefight. Having all of us there just increases the odds of us getting caught.”
“In which case we know there’s going to be a firefight.”
“Insanity is contagious.” — Yossarian