Someone asked me why I cared, and I can say that when you organise public play every week in a store, you really don't want core rules to be confusing.
D&D (2024) Stealth Errata
- Thread starter mearls
- Start date
One of the assumptions of 5E hiding that you may not be aware you're making:
Does being "hidden" mean
In some versions of D&D, it's possible to be invisible, but you're making enough noise, etc. that the opponents can still point to where you are on the battlefield. While there was a separate state which meant that not only you couldn't be seen, the opponents couldn't tell exactly where you were standing.
I'm not sure that "stronger" state is defined in 5E. You can conceal yourself so enemies can't see you, but - by the rules as written - can you make the enemies lose track of where you are on the battlefield?
Cheers!
Does being "hidden" mean
- the opponent can't see you, or
- the opponent has lost track of where you are?
In some versions of D&D, it's possible to be invisible, but you're making enough noise, etc. that the opponents can still point to where you are on the battlefield. While there was a separate state which meant that not only you couldn't be seen, the opponents couldn't tell exactly where you were standing.
I'm not sure that "stronger" state is defined in 5E. You can conceal yourself so enemies can't see you, but - by the rules as written - can you make the enemies lose track of where you are on the battlefield?
Cheers!
Unless your players are on the forums, you'll have to have the argument again when you give them your ruling.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
But it could be to one’s benefit to have already heard the likely arguments.
That is because the Invisible condition is descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes the effects of being unseen, it doesn’t make you unseen. The feature that grants you the condition is what determines whether you are unseen or not, and how you lose it.
This is a point some have tried to make in the past, but people continue to get hung up on "Invisible condition doesn't say you're invisible=you can be seen". Well, as an example, the Poisoned condition doesn't say that you're poisoned, so does that mean that you are not? Yet people automatically assume that the Poisoned condition means you're poisoned. So if it works for one, why can't people do the same with the other? Because one is clearly understood (poisoned) while the other has different interpretations depending on the context. It doesn't help that in 2014 the term "Invisible" was gamified, so people are unable to accept that it no longer means what it used to.
cbwjm
Seb-wejem
Depends how argumentative your players are. I think with my group I can get away with saying, I've discussed this with others online and this is how I'm ruling it, and then we get back to the game.
Exactly. Hearing the different angles in a forum also gives me a broader view of the issue. It's also very useful as a designer to see how people interpret and use rules.
It would also be to one's benefit to have a group that doesn't argue at the table like folks argue on messageboards....
Really? Seeing thousands of different people all of whom have thousands of different interpretations and uses of a rule is useful?
To me, that just seems the result would be to not bother writing any RPG rules at all, since every single player would only be stretching every rule like taffy anyway, LOL.
At the end of the day... even a completely water-tight rule system is going to get players who play the game and yet still change things within that water-tight system that they don't like. So how meaningful does that water-tight system end up having to be? What's the point of worrying about trying to design a water-tight system for the handful of players who will play it exactly as written... when who knows how much of (general) your audience is going to end up futzing with it after the fact regardless?
Designing a water-tight system with no loopholes or whatnot is only going to matter to a percentage of (general) your game's audience. So at some point there comes the cost-analysis on whether it's worth it to keep banging away at the rules trying to close every corner-case. And in most cases... the answer is "It's not worth the paper it's printed on, because most players don't give a hoot and are going to rule it the way they always wanted to from the beginning, regardless of what we printed on the paper."
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The trick is concealment uses different rules. When I’m in fog I am NOT invisible, instead, the person trying to see me is considered blind. So see invisible doesn’t negate the fog.
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