| Niclole |
To answer the title of the post I’m inclined to agree with what seems to be the majority interpretation here: yes you can hide with cover or concealment while observed because they break observation as written in the rules. It’s pretty clearly stated right? I mean continuing to argue that particular point is not clearly stated would seem a bit difficult at this moment in the gentlemen ‘s discussion.
Now I have read all these posts twice and I even did a search and found another post from 2018 where wolf brings this up and I see it brought up again in a post that is still active here. I have taken the time to peruse the stealth, concealment, cover, bluff, observation rules in the book as well. (By peruse I mean I’ve read and reread these things multiple times over two hours).
Based on all this information I’m inclined to heavily lean towards answering this discussion with a solid yes.
(The rest of this post details my feelings on the state of stealth/diversion and is mostly my own musings/ramblings during the reading of this discussion and rules. Everything below is largely opinion based)
The way it is written even forces me to accept that partial cover is adequate to hide (I don’t like that particular one but I don’t see where this is explicitly denied if someone could point that out I’d be grateful)
However, this has made me also have to agree with the opinion that Stealth rules are wonky and open heavily to GM discretion.
For instance diversion seems much less enticing if you have to create a diversion with an action and then use another action to use a stealth check that you could already have done. There are edge case uses that have been pointed out that are to varying degrees acceptable explanations for diversion.
As a GM though it immediately made me feel bad for any player using bluff.
Then as I’m reading diversion it’s like is this supposed to allow you to make that hide check as part of the move action of diversion itself? (I.E to allow you to do the classic hey look over there and then shoot the guy). This would essentially require two checks to grant flat footed against your target the bluff check and stealth check but for a move action. But this seems to step on feints toys (though the applications are thematically different enough and feats are different enough that I’d find this acceptable).
I don’t think that’s what is intended in the end but this is what I mean by open to GM discretion. I don’t find two checks to attempt to get flat footed on a standard action at all broken or even necessarily usable but I do find it to allow for something you quite often see in numerous action/spy tropes that I began to consider it as a house rule. Which led me to reading the diversion feats, class abilities, and the same for feint. In the end I just found more and more confusion with RAW and said eff it.
Other than the question of Diversion’s practical applications I could not think of many reasons why getting to hide would be problematic (it’s not as if flat footed is super op or hard to apply in Starfinder and there aren’t many effects that flat out abuse it). So I don’t think it’s offensive applications are game breaking enough to restrict it. What about defensively? 50% miss chance + cover bonus (to separate sources the cover and hide) seems pretty decent to me.
There are a number of ways to overcome it. For instance using awareness rules themselves. Yes you successfully hid behind the sofa and have concealment but these enemies are intelligent and know you did not move positions so they are still aware of location (which allows attacks) instead of aware of presence (which is the normal result of stealth if the stealth user has been previously revealed and then hides successfully and does not allow direct attacks). I simply picture this as hunkering down really tight behind a cover object so much so that the person can no longer visually see you. Which means you are hidden from vision but not hidden as in hide and seek hidden. The former observer obviously knows where you are but can no longer visually perceive you. They can shoot at you (again common in action spy parody you name it genres) but they have a much lower chance of success. Or you know throw a grenade. Or flank. Or blow up the cover. There are so many tactical solutions to a person hunkering for defense that this case seems almost silly to worry about breaking the game. Let’s face it defense probably sucks in Starfinder anyways.
I think some of the “there is no way you can hide while being observed” reluctance comes from treating hide as “hide and seek hide” (which it sometimes is) vs “you can’t see me” hiding (which I think is the intent in this case). Not being able to see your enemy even if you know exactly where he is sucks big time, ask any soldier.
The reluctance also probably exists in part from some games having such game breaking effects with on demand stealth that they treat stealth more restrictively than I think is the case for Starfinder.
Further complicating this process is something everyone, even the most experienced role players, occasionally has trouble with : viewing the mechanics in the space they occupy. Observed is a state of awareness that can be broken but you can’t use stealth while observed is the real villain here. But that rule is broken and clarified in the very same ruling. Observation is broken by cover, concealment etc. This does not mean the observed state is immediately lost, just that the player can now taken actions that allow the observed state to be lost. Observed is “you can directly perceive a creature with a precise sense”. In most cases the only precise sense creatures possess is sight (with a number of exceptions but those are called exceptions for a reason). In this case the person is observed currently but very easily could attempt to make it hard or impossible for you to “see” them with your precise sense. This makes logical sense to me (depending on the type of cover again GM discretion).
I can even see the argument for the 4.5 states of awareness but really is it necessary here? No, I think it works and most of my confusion doesn’t stem from there but from the number of apparently silly (but cool) things that are in this game that probably don’t do very much to help you “zomg action economy” to “win”. But the number of things you can argue are mechanically bad stupid inefficient or downright handicaps are numerous in every table top rpg that tries to model so many things numerically. And a lot of those things that are arguably mechanically dumb, inefficient or pointless can be really cool narratively. Though that is another discussion and probably a good time to sign off this post with a closing statement:
I’ve always hated stealth in every single rpg I’ve played or ran for these reasons and I feel really bad for any player that likes stealth as I believe if they go back and forth between different groups they will have a very hard time finding consistency with stealth mechanics between different groups. I think this is more a problem of effectively modeling stealth than a problem unique to Starfinder.