Can an envoy use his standard action to do a dispiriting taunt and a move action to use stealth to hide in the same turn?
Yes, hopefully in that order, and assuming he has the cover/concealment necessary for stealth. But generally shoot/cast/act followed by a move action to stealth is always valid.
I also kinda wondered if one could Antagonize or Draw Fire and then hide or run away. Seems like making yourself a target is less effective if you take away the opportunity to attack.
Does the envoy have to already be in cover or concealment to do this or can he do this as long as he moves only up to 1/2 his standard movement to get in a square with cover or concealment? If he goes over half he has to take a -10 to his roll. Am I reading that correctly?
What my 1st level envoy is looking to do is taunt and hide in the first round and attack in the second. If both the taunt and the hide succeed his target will possible have a total of -2 to it's AC from being Flat Footed and a -2 to its to hit rolls from being either Shaken or Off target.
Does the envoy have to already be in cover or concealment to do this or can he do this as long as he moves only up to 1/2 his standard movement to get in a square with cover or concealment? If he goes over half he has to take a -10 to his roll. Am I reading that correctly?
You have to start and end your movement with concealment/cover.
You can use Stealth to hide if you have either cover or concealment...You can attempt a Stealth check to hide either as a move action (if you are planning to stay immobile) or as part of a move action... If you lose actual cover or concealment during your turn, you can attempt to stay hidden, but only if you end your turn within cover or concealment.
If you don't have cover/concealment when you begin the stealth check you can't make it as part of your move, and if you don't finish your move in cover/concealment it ends at the end of your turn.
Can an envoy use his standard action to do a dispiriting taunt and a move action to use stealth to hide in the same turn?
Dispiriting taunt is sense dependent, so you're going to start off with them clearly seeing you
A creature currently being observed can’t attempt a Stealth check without first breaking that observation. To break observation, the creature must either mask itself from your precise senses (with darkness, fog, invisibility, or the like, but not with effects such as displacement that still leave a clear visual indicator of its location), move somewhere it can’t be observed (a place with cover, for example), or use Bluff to create a distraction to momentarily break your observation of it.
And once again, you're going to run into table variation on how stealth works.
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You have to start and end your movement with concealment/cover.
(partial quote of the Hide task)
If you don't have cover/concealment when you begin the stealth check you can't make it as part of your move, and if you don't finish your move in cover/concealment it ends at the end of your turn.
That's not what it says.
You can use Stealth to hide if you have either cover or concealment (or a special ability that allows you to hide in plain sight), or if you have successfully created a diversion with the Bluff skill. You can attempt a Stealth check to hide either as a move action (if you are planning to stay immobile) or as part of a move action. If you move at a rate of half your speed or less, you take no penalty to your Stealth check. If you attempt to hide while moving more than half your speed or after creating a diversion with Bluff, you take a –10 penalty to your Stealth check; these penalties are cumulative if you do both. The check is opposed by the Perception checks of creatures in the area that might detect you. A creature that fails the opposed skill check treats you as if you had total concealment as long as you continue to have actual cover or concealment. A creature that succeeds at the opposed skill check either sees you or pinpoints you (see page 260) in situations when you have total concealment. If you lose actual cover or concealment during your turn, you can attempt to stay hidden, but only if you end your turn within cover or concealment.
There's nothing in the first bolded section that stops you from using part of your movement to reach cover, and then Hiding.
Rather, you can't begin Hiding as a move action all on its own, if you're not already in cover/using a diversion.
The second section I think is more for enabling you to temporarily break cover and move to new cover before your stealth breaks, for example using a colonnade to sneak past an enemy.
You have to start and end your movement with concealment/cover.
(partial quote of the Hide task)
If you don't have cover/concealment when you begin the stealth check you can't make it as part of your move, and if you don't finish your move in cover/concealment it ends at the end of your turn.
That's not what it says.
I'm pretty sure it does.
You can use Stealth to hide if you have either cover or concealment (or a special ability that allows you to hide in plain sight), or if you have successfully created a diversion with the Bluff skill. You can attempt a Stealth check to hide either as a move action (if you are planning to stay immobile) or as part of a move action. If you move at a rate of half your speed or less, you take no penalty to your Stealth check. If you attempt to hide while moving more than half your speed or after creating a diversion with Bluff, you take a –10 penalty to your Stealth check; these penalties are cumulative if you do both. The check is opposed by the Perception checks of creatures in the area that might detect you. A creature that fails the opposed skill check treats you as if you had total concealment as long as you continue to have actual cover or concealment. A creature that succeeds at the opposed skill check either sees you or pinpoints you (see page 260) in situations when you have total concealment. If you lose actual cover or concealment during your turn, you can attempt to stay hidden, but only if you end your turn within cover or concealment.
There's nothing in the first bolded section that stops you from using part of your movement to reach cover, and then Hiding.
It's right there in the first two bolded sentences. Sentence 1: Do I have cover/concealment? If no, can't hide. If yes, can hide. How can I hide? Second sentence tells you how: either spend a move to stay stationary, or you spend a move action to hide as part of that move action. But you can't make that attempt if you don't qualify, and you don't qualify if you don't start in cover/concealment, per the first sentence.
The final bolded sentence lets you know that you can still try to hide if you lose cover/concealment during that movement, but you still have to have it at the beginning (per the very first sentence telling you when you qualify to attempt a hide action) and at the end of your movement.
One could try to argue hide is intended to be an option you can invoke mid-move on a square by square basis, but that strikes me getting us back into the recent Schrodinger's operative questions about when a move action can be reclassified suddenly into a charge or full round action trick attack. If all actions have to be declared and qualified for when you begin them, then to hide you have to be in cover/concealment at the beginning of your move (and you have to declare a full action trick attack before you start moving). If you can update/combine/reclassify actions before they complete then you can start hiding partway through your move (and you can take a move action then "oopsie" it into a full round trick attack after you move around a corner).
There is no real answer to which of these approaches is correct as a matter of the rules or whether there's even a consistent philosophy that should be applied to every circumstance. I prefer the former reading.
But of course we don't even really need to go there in this instance, because the very last bolded sentence would render your suggested method moot. If we only have to move and at some point acquire cover/concealment along the way, it wouldn't be necessary to say that you have to end your move in cover/concealment - that very ending would be your qualification to make a hide check in the first place. A concern for losing cover/concealment and allowance for regaining it at the end only makes sense if you have to have it at the beginning of your movement, too.
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During the recent discussion about "operative movement" everyone was pretty much in agreement that it was okay to pick the steps of your movement one at a time, nobody went so far as to insist that you had to file a complete flight plan at the beginning of the movement (except for charges which specifically require it).
This is just like that. You say you're going to move, so spend a move action to begin moving and halfway through you reach cover and decide to begin Hiding as part of movement.
The last sentence covers a couple of situations:
* Just because you reached cover, doesn't mean you remain unseen if you move out of it again. You can't duck behind a pillar and walk back in the open and expect to remain hidden.
* You can however scamper from one hiding spot to another and remain hidden.
When and how do you apply the more than half your speed penalty to a hide attempt if you can decide to do it mid-movement?
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When and how do you apply the more than half your speed penalty to a hide attempt if you can decide to do it mid-movement?
That's a good question. Actually, it's the same question as "when do you make a hide check if you're hiding during movement".
Do you make the check before, during or after movement?
I don't think it's after, because you might want to start out in a position where you can Hide and then sneakily move somewhere. And depending on whether you win the Stealth check that will work or not, and if you fail maybe you trigger some reactions or readied actions.
Is it before? Then do you have to decide how fast you'll move that action, to determine whether you get a penalty? Or do you apply it retroactively?
Or, as I think, you make the check as soon as you start trying to Hide, which might be somewhere in the middle when you reach cover. Then how do you determine if you were moving too fast?
Say you start out 10ft from cover, and have 30 speed. So you spend your first 10ft of movement getting to cover, and then you go to make a stealth check. I'd say that at that point you have to decide whether to keep only 5ft of movement, or take the penalty and have 20ft of movement remaining.
I have felt that the rule regarding making the stealth check as part of a move action means that you can make the check starting at any point along the movement once you qualify for the Hide skill. So moving 10 feet in the open to get to the cover, making the skill check at that point and continuing your movement while hidden should work.
As for how far you can move, that is determined at the start of the movement when you take the action. Are you doing just a movement? or a normal combined move and sneak? or a combined move and sneak with penalties so that you can move your full speed? Decide that at the start of the action. Then take the movement and make the skill check. You don't have to file a full flight plan, but you do have to choose what action you are doing and take the appropriate penalties when taking the action.
But Xenocrat does have some good points and this ruling could be considered a loose interpretation or maybe even a houserule.
If my character is standing behind another character that is considered cover therefore as long as he completes his turn in a position where he still has cover can he use stealth to hide?
If my character is standing behind another character that is considered cover therefore as long as he completes his turn in a position where he still has cover can he use stealth to hide?
1) characters provide soft cover, the definition of which is it doesn't let you try to hide.
Soft Cover
Creatures, even enemies, between you and the src of an effect provide you with cover against ranged attacks, giving you a +4 bonus to AC. However, soft cover provides no bonus to Reflex saves, nor does soft cover allow you to attempt a Stealth check.
2) A creature that's being observed (like you would likely be because you leaned out and said "We need a pitcher not a belly itcher" to the person shooting at your vesk) can't attempt a stealth check to hide. Some people think cover breaks observation, but that gets really weird really quickly. I think that by far, the better interpretation of the rules is that you need cover and you need people to not be looking at you in order to hide.
Some people think cover breaks observationYou mean, just about everyone else in the other thread about this, because the Starfinder CRB says it repeatedly.
Like a lot of rules interpretations that let you do things you probably shouldn't, i see a lot more of that interpretation on the rules forums than in actual play. You've argued the same thing since pathfinder where you were in the definite minority there.
Under either interpretation of the rules Soft Cover doesn't work for initiating Hide.
I'm thinking that partial cover doesn't either. It doesn't say anywhere that it does. But neither does Improved Cover - which I see as also providing regular Cover. So I think that one should work, but it is harder to prove.