Getting noticed

[Ravingdork]

If you're Avoiding Notice, and an enemy's Perception DC is higher than your Stealth check, what Stealth condition do you possess? Are you observed or hidden at the start of combat?

[Blave]

Avoid Notice wrote:

If you’re Avoiding Notice at the start of an encounter, you usually roll a Stealth check instead of a Perception check both to determine your initiative and to see if the enemies notice you (based on their Perception DCs, as normal for Sneak, regardless of their initiative check results).

It works like the Sneak action. So you're hidden on a failure and observed on a critical failure.

[Ravingdork]

Blave wrote:

Avoid Notice wrote:

If you’re Avoiding Notice at the start of an encounter, you usually roll a Stealth check instead of a Perception check both to determine your initiative and to see if the enemies notice you (based on their Perception DCs, as normal for Sneak, regardless of their initiative check results).

It works like the Sneak action. So you're hidden on a failure and observed on a critical failure.

Good to know! So does the player or GM roll it? I noticed that AN does not seem to possess the Secret trait, but Hide and Sneak do.

[Thod]

Also keep in mind special senses.

Without foil senses (feat) in some cases you can autofail.

[Ruzza]

The way I run it is that I roll it as a Secret check and don't refer to it until enemies are actually present. Then they can roll it as their initiative. Not sure if that's RAW but rolling a Stealth check out in the open before deciding where to move seems like the exact reason that the Secret tag exists. It works more like...

Pkayer: "Alright, I'm gonna hide and creep ahead."

GM: "Got it." (Roll Stealth here)

GM: "In the next room, you spot several orcs playing dice." (Stealth fails against their Perception DCs) "One of them looks up from his cards. 'Hey, what was that noise?' You are hidden, but they are on their guard. Roll for initiative."

[Blave]

Avoid Notice has always been a bit weird. It tells you to roll Stealth, but doesn't tell you against what or what the result would be for any of the degrees of success. Then it tells you that you can roll Stealth for Initiative, which doubles as a check to kind-Sneak (whichout actually allowing you to move).

On re-reading it (again and again and again) I actually think the first sentence doesn't actually tell you to roll a Stealth check. It only tells you to move at half speed so you can attempt a stealth check when neccessary, i.e. at the start of an encounter.

But one question remains: What happens if you sneak past someone and no encounter starts?

If you're successful, you (probably) just stay unnoticed and can sneak along. If you fail and the enemy notices you, you're probably hidden or undetected as per the Sneak action (and detected on a CritFail). I'd assume this would also trigger encounter mode. ... Which would then require you to roll initiative with the option to roll stealth to somehow become undetected again?

You could avoid most of that weirdness by just saying an enconter starts as soon as you're close enough to an enemy to require a Stealth roll. But as soon as you enter combat, you can no longer remain unnoticed since Sneak doesn't technically allow you to be more than undetected. So you can't (by RAW anyway) use encounter mode to handle a situation were a character sneaks past partoling guards in a warehouse unnoticed or something like that.

... Did I mention Avoid Notice is weird...?

[Aw3som3-117]

Blave wrote:

But as soon as you enter combat, you can no longer remain unnoticed since Sneak doesn't technically allow you to be more than undetected.

Note that sneak doesn't have a single mention of unnoticed, including describing what state you might be in when you start sneaking. In fact, it's nowhere in the entirety of the stealth skills section. Also, it's important to note that if you're unnoticed, then you're also undetected. With this in mind we can confidently say that if you're unnoticed and you attempt to sneak, then you follow the rules for an undetected creature sneaking. Okay, so what are the effects of sneaking for an undetected creature. Well, assuming you used sneak appropriately and didn't automatically blow your cover, a success means that you remain undetected. As far as I can tell, if something was unaware of your presence, then didn't detect you, I think it's pretty clear that they'd still be unaware of your presence. Again, these aren't mutually exclusive conditions, and in fact, if you're unnoticed you are automatically undetected as well. Remaining / being undetected doesn't keep you from being unnoticed.

[Ravingdork]

So far I've let the players roll Avoid Notice in the open, then if they get in an encounter without changing exploration activities, they use that Stealth result for their initiative.

Cuts down on the rolling and is close to how I think it was intended. Doesn't make sense to roll twice as that just makes you twice as likely to get spotted.

[thenobledrake]

Blave wrote:

But one question remains: What happens if you sneak past someone and no encounter starts?

That's impossible, as "sneak past someone" is a type of encounter.

Avoid Notice, and stealth encounters as a result, are tricky to understand because they diverge significantly from how Stealth is handled in other rule sets and there is not a detailed example provided to clarify that trying to make Stealth work like it does according to prior/other game experience isn't the goal.

So the basic rundown is that the first sentence of Avoid Notice is a topic sentence elaborated upon by the rest of the paragraph, not a separate check (with no DC or success results categories defined), the Stealth check made as a result of Avoid Notice isn't Secret because it's also an Initiative roll and trying to keep the results of the check unclear from the player is not worth the effort because knowing how well they did or didn't roll can't change their options for when their turn comes around (i.e. they'll realize they rolled poorly whether they see the roll, or they see all the other creatures take their turns before them), and actually sneaking past something requires mapping out where cover and concealment are, using Sneak, Hide, Step and the like, while the other creatures are moving around doing whatever they're doing in the area and probably tossing around a few Seek actions or Striding into different positions that makes line of sight potentially an issue - not the old style one-and-done you roll Stealth against their Perception, and if you get a high result you slip past with zero interaction.