Tag: hiding

If I am hiding and moving silently at the same time, what is my total movement penalty?

In D&D 3.5, according to page 79 of the PHB under the move silently skill:

You can move up to one-half your normal speed at no penalty. When moving at a speed greater than one-half but less than your full speed, you take a –5 penalty.

And, according to page 76 of the PHB under the hide skill:

You can move up to one-half your normal speed and hide at no penalty. When moving at a speed greater than one half but less than your normal speed, you take a –5 penalty.

Assuming:

  • I have no special abilities that have any relevance to this circumstance

  • I am able to move silently and hide in the same round

  • I wanted to do this without incurring a penalty on my skill checks

  • My normal movement speed is 30ft

Would my speed, which I have opted to reduce, be to 15ft or would it be 7.5ft?

Passive Perception or Active Perception Check to detect hiding enemies?

I’m DMing for a party that constantly says stuff like we’ll walk slowly and carefully, or we’ll look around as we walk, to make sure there’s nothing threatening or out of the ordinary.

Say there’s a monster hiding near the PCs (stealth check 14). All the PCs have a passive Perception lower than 14.

Given the above statement by the PCs, should I now ask for an active Perception check to see if they spot the monster hiding? Should I always ask for an active Perception check from now on, since they’re always being careful? On one hand, they did say they were being careful and looking at their surroundings. But on the other hand, I feel like that’s already assumed, as a party of adventurers wouldn’t just nonchalantly walk into a dungeon – therefore I feel like this is exactly what passive Perception is for.

Does hiding variables work in terms of blocks or line-by-line?

Let’s assume I have the following code:

declaration of a declaration of b ..a..b {   ..a..b   declaration of a    declaration of b   ..a }

In this code {} represent the inner block. declaration represents binding occurrence, and .. represent applied occurrence.

So my question is that is it legal to use the outer scope variables inside an inner scope and then redeclare them ? If so how does the hiding of outer variables system work (Does it start to work when it sees a redeclaration)? Thanks in advance.

When spotting a hiding creature, is hearing useful?

If you were playing hide and seek, you would expect to find people by spotting them visually (toe sticking out), looking for clues (footprints), or by sound (hearing them moving around).

It’s not clear to me exactly how spotting someone in 5e works. Broadly speaking 5e divides senses into “vision” (normal vision, darkvision, blindsight, truesight), hearing, and other senses (taste, tremorsense).

From reading the rules for hiding it seems to me that you are assumed to be completely silent, and thus hearing is useless for detecting hidden creatures.

Hide

The hide action states:

When you take the Hide action, you make a Dexterity (Stealth) check in an attempt to hide, following the rules for hiding. If you succeed, you gain certain benefits, as described in the “Unseen Attackers and Targets” section later in this section.

There are two parts to hide. First, successfully use the rules for hiding to hide, then you will become “unseen”. Right from the start, we are talking about being “unseen”, not “unheard”.

Hiding

The rules for hiding state:

You can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly, and you give away your position if you make noise, such as shouting a warning or knocking over a vase. An invisible creature can always try to hide. Signs of its passage might still be noticed, and it does have to stay quiet.

This clearly divides the mechanics:

  • You can’t hide if you can be clearly seen
  • You have to stay quiet, or you give away your position

This implies if you are hiding, you are assumed to be quiet unless you are making noise. What’s more, there are special rules for if you do make noise (you give your position away). Whereas if you can be seen, you can’t even hide.

The rules go on to say:

In combat, most creatures stay alert for signs of danger all around, so if you come out of hiding and approach a creature, it usually sees you. However, under certain circumstances, the DM might allow you to stay hidden as you approach a creature that is distracted, allowing you to gain advantage on an attack roll before you are seen.

Again, the rules say “seen”, not “sensed” or “detected”. It seems to me the rules continue to assume that a hiding creature is not making any noticeable noise, and thus cannot be detected by hearing.

The rules continue:

What Can You See? One of the main factors in determining whether you can find a hidden creature or object is how well you can see in an area, which might be lightly or heavily obscured, as explained in chapter 8.

This is very clear text. What you can or can’t see affects whether you can find a hidden creature. Specifically lightly or heavily obscured areas.

Lightly or heavily obscured areas

The rules for lightly or heavily obscured areas says:

A given area might be lightly or heavily obscured. In a lightly obscured area, such as dim light, patchy fog, or moderate foliage, creatures have disadvantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks that rely on sight.

A heavily obscured area–such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage–blocks vision entirely. A creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area.

Both of these conditions are purely visual. That once again seems to indicate that searching for hidden creatures is a purely visual check. Otherwise these conditions would have no effect in the vast majority of cases since most creatures have ears or other senses. The rules say this is “one of the main factors”, so it’s unlikely they meant “in the rare event when a creature relies purely on sight”.

Perception

We can also look at the description for Perception:

Your Wisdom (Perception) check lets you spot, hear, or otherwise detect the presence of something. It measures your general awareness of your surroundings and the keenness of your senses.

Here we have the division: – spot: vision – hear: sound – otherwise: stuff like tremorsense or other exotic senses

The rules go on to give examples:

For example, you might try to hear a conversation through a closed door, eavesdrop under an open window, or hear monsters moving stealthily in the forest. Or you might try to spot things that are obscured or easy to miss, whether they are orcs lying in ambush on a road, thugs hiding in the shadows of an alley, or candlelight under a closed secret door.

We have here an example of both “hearing” stealthy monsters, and “spotting” hiding thugs. Hiding is a specific mechanic with its own unique mechanics, a subset of stealth although it requires a stealth check. This again seems to imply that “hearing” isn’t useful for detecting a hiding creature. As further reinforcement we have the mention of “in shadows”, which is visual.

Unseen attackers and targets

At the start we mentioned the benefit of hiding is that you are an unseen attacker, let’s investigate what that means:

Combatants often try to escape their foes’ notice by hiding, casting the invisibility spell, or lurking in darkness.

When you attack a target that you can’t see, you have disadvantage on the attack roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or you’re targeting a creature you can hear but not see. If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you automatically miss, but the DM typically just says that the attack missed, not whether you guessed the target’s location correctly.

When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage on attack rolls against it. If you are hidden–both unseen and unheard–when you make an attack, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses.

There are several things to note here: – It gives the example of “lurking in darkness”, which is purely visual. – If you can’t be seen, there is disadvantage on the roll. – If you can’t be seen or heard, you have to guess the location, and then you have disadvantage – Hidden is called out as “unseen and unheard”, once again matching up with our expectation that hiding means you aren’t making sound.

In conclusion

After a careful reading of Hide, Hiding, Stealth, Perception, and the Light and Vision rules the conclusion seems clear to me.

This has lead me to believe that it is expected for readers to understand that for normal humans without any special senses, detecting a hiding creature is a purely visual perception check. Thus things like dim light or darkness would affect these rolls.

I have investigated every rule discussed in all sections relating to hiding, but there may be something else somewhere. Is there any other information (features, monsters, official adventures) which indicate that you can detect a hiding creature with hearing?

Beginner looking to clarify how hiding works

I’ve just bought a starter set, and struggle a little to understand the concept of hiding. Do I roll a d20 + DEX (stealth) when I first want to hide, and note down the number. Then, for each turn that a creature is actively looking, roll a WIS (perception) for it and compare this against the written value?

What about passive perception? If a creature isn’t actively looking, do I instead compare its “WIS (perception) score + 10” to the written value?

And a slightly more general question – the rulebook isn’t clear on what happens when a “check” results in a draw. Who “wins” here? In the example of hiding, who does a draw count in favour of?

Nystul’s Magic vs Scrying. Does it in any way help a target in hiding from a scry?

I’ve not been able to find an answer to this. If it has been addressed, or if I am overlooking something obvious, I apologize.

The potential interaction of the two spells, seems ambiguous to me. And I can’t figure out if there is a possibility that Nystul’s Magic Aura might serve to cloud a Scrying attempt.

Are the examples listed under the two options, False Aura and Mask, to be understood as exhaustive? Because in spite of many people often jumping to the, “if the spell doesn’t say it does something, it doesn’t do it” argument, I often see a ruling going against that “dogma”.

Nystul’s Magic Aura:

You place an illusion on a creature or an object you touch so that divination spells reveal false information about it. The target can be a willing creature or an object that isn’t being carried or worn by another creature. When you cast the spell, choose one or both of the following effects. The effect lasts for the duration. If you cast this spell on the same creature or object every day for 30 days, placing the same effect on it each time, the illusion lasts until it is dispelled.

False Aura. You change the way the target appears to spells and magical effects, such as detect magic, that detect magical auras. You can make a nonmagical object appear magical, a magical object appear nonmagical, or change the object’s magical aura so that it appears to belong to a specific school of magic that you choose. When you use this effect on an object, you can make the false magic apparent to any creature that handles the item.

Mask. You change the way the target appears to spells and magical effects that detect creature types, such as a paladin’s Divine Sense or the trigger of a symbol spell. You choose a creature type and other spells and magical effects treat the target as if it were a creature of that type or of that alignment.

E-Mail privacy proxy for hiding real e-mail?

Do E-Mail proxy services exists to improve privacy and security?

Privacy in the sense that one wouldn’t need to give a website his/her username (possibly even in the firstname.lastname@domain.tld form) and in a security sense that the used e-mail couldn’t be used to log into the e-mail service (thereby making it useless for a leaked password, because the e-mail address couldn’t be used to login).

Example:

john.doe@gmail.com could be someone’s e-mail. If there were a Google Privacy/Proxy service then one could generate as many random e-mails as possible and if one would be sent spam to, or leaked, it could be disabled:

  • abcdef@gmail.proxy
  • 290dcef@gmail.proxy

could both redirect mail to john.doe@gmail.com.

One could be blocked/disabled/removed if wanted without abandoning the real account (e.g. because 290dcef@gmail.proxy has been compromised or spam is being sent to it).

Would it really improve security and privacy? Or am I missing something?

And does such a service exist? (as a bonus, replying from such proxy e-mails would be even better, converting the real account from field to the proxy mail address)

Hiding rough whereabouts of a machine with IPv6, without using a proxy

Since I configured my smartphone Access Point Name (APN) of the type APN protocol from including the value IPv4 to including the value IPv4/IPv6, generally all different addresses I got after restarting my smartphone about 10 times, started with:

2001:44c8:

44c8 seems to me to stand for “Bangkok, Thailand”.

Although the question might seem absurd;
Is there is any way, besides surfing through a proxy IP address, for hiding rough whereabouts of a machine with IPv6?

If one creature detects a hiding creature, do all other creatures automatically detect you too?

The rules for Hiding state:

Until you are discovered or you stop hiding, that check’s total is contested by the Wisdom (Perception) check of any creature that actively searches for signs of your presence.

and

When you hide, there’s a chance someone will notice you even if they aren’t searching.

Generally 5e tries to stick to plain English and tries to match real life where possible.

It seems to me that the rules are written in a way that says detecting a Hidden creature must be done on a per-creature basis. It isn’t clear to me that if one creature detects a Hiding enemy with Passive Perception or the Search action, all other creatures automatically detect it too.

Obviously in real life even if one person detects something, they need to at least communicate that to others. And even then that can often be not enough for the second person to detect the thing.

How to prevent a scrollbar with momentum scrolling from hiding itself on iOS Safari?

When you add -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch; to a scrollable element such as a div for instance, you gain a smoother scrolling experience (native momentum scrolling) but then, you lose the ability to have the scrollbar constantly shown. Because for some obscure reason, Apple decided it’s good UX to hide the scrollbar most of the time.

The problem is that when only 3 items show in your scrollable content and the rest isn’t partially cut, you have no hint telling users that there is a scrollbar and that more items are available.

I would like to know if there is a way to have a scrollable div with momentum scrolling but that never hides itself.