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Exactly. Whether your characters are noticeable or not is entirely up to GM fiat, rather than being a challenge your characters can be better or worse at. Either you are noticeable, in which case you you need a rock, hill giant's leg, or dark corner to hide in, or you're not noticeable, in which case there's no game.
Well, yeah, whether or not your character stands out in this particular story is based on the story. If I am playing a tiefling orc in a village where everyone else is a gnome, I'm going to stand out. No skill rules will make me not stand out because that makes no sense in fiction.
I'm losing sight of your point here. It seems like you want a board game without any leeway for interpretation or you want a couple thousand pages added to the CRB. Both of which sound kind of miserable. Granted, I haven't played Shadowrun so maybe that game legitimately just does this better. Also, this part: There's no "Well, there's no rule for hitting someone with an axe, but it makes sense that that could work" or "There's no rule for casting a spell, but I guess I could let you do it this time."
Shows you are new to the forum. We have people who insist you can't hit a chair with an axe because the rules don't say you can. Similarly the rules explicitly leave it up to the GM whether you can strike particular creature that is grappling you but outside of your normal reach, because sometimes the creature would grapple you with a part of it's body and other times it would use telekinesis, a lasso, or a big set of tongs.
And spells? Don't get me started at spells. We have people who posit that nagas can't cast spells because they don't have hands for somatic components. We have e,tended debates about invisible creatures can flank.
No rule system can cover every possible eventuality. PF2 is just more honest about it.
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Well, yeah, whether or not your character stands out in this particular story is based on the story.But it's a part of the story that players don't have any tools to affect. You can't be measurably good or bad at escaping notice; just good or bad at hiding behind a rock. The fighter doesn't have to rely on the GM to decide "Well, according to the story, you get to hit that orc with an axe." The wizard doesn't have to wait for, "Well, according to the story, now you're allowed to cast Fireball." Skills labor under limitations that other class abilities - other players' ability to affect the story - do not.
No game can cover every eventuality, but they should cover common and important ones in the genres they're attempting to cover. I do think it is a weakness that Pathfinder attempts to support sneaky characters and urban adventures and does not support the way you sneak through busy urban environments very well. The progressive challenge rules (Chases, Heists, Infiltration) are an improvement over some D&D/likes but there's still a soft spot in the rules here.
Also, I don't want to get too deep into Tolkien pedantry! I just want to emphasize that a character who is sneaky without being literally unseeable is a perfectly ordinary sort of character to play in a fantasy game.
If your character isn't trying to blend in, then I don't see how it couldn't be GM fiat - as Captain Morgan says, there's no way for the rules to really know if you blend into the situation or not. Even if something was tried with rarity, it's just far too context dependent - a Shoony will blend in if it's in a Shoony village, and the stock-standard human won't blend into the seedy bar if they're wearing shining golden armour with holy symbols of Iomedae painted on every surface. If your character isn't trying to blend in, then I don't know how their skillset could effect it? If your character is trying to blend in, then I really do think use of the Deception skill is an appropriate way to handle this. Using Stealth determines visibility; your character isn't trying to avoid being seen, they're trying to avoid being seen as a threat. Trying to present yourself in a way that implies a lesser threat than is the case is a pretty clear example of Deception. If you're trying to sneak through busy urban environments, you're either trying to do it by avoiding being seen (going through the sewers, sneaking along rooftops, jumping between back alleys that aren't frequented) and can use Stealth, or you're trying to walk down the street without people realizing who you are and you can use Deception to handle that. The third option is that you're not trying to avoid being seen, but people just don't notice you because you fit in - and that's just way too specific to the context of the setting and story to have rules that work, IMO. I do think that Impersonate requiring 10 minutes and a Disguise Kit is a bit constricting in some of these situations, and would definitely hand-wave it personally - if you're just throwing mud on yourself and wrapping a dirty old cloak around you to try and blend in as a beggar in the slums, that shouldn't require very much of anything, and contributes to a view of Impersonate as very specifically impersonating another creature with a lot of effort put into that disguise.
I do like the progressive challenge rules, and I agree with your appraisal that they're similar to Forged in the Dark-style rulesets (the entire Victory Point system is basically Clocks from FitD, and I think it still works remarkably well here in a more rules-orientated game). I think they're a neat way to tell some of these stories in a more abstract way that doesn't result in too much detail on individual moments that could make these stories take up more table time than they need ('OK, make a Stealth check to sneak past the guards and into the underground tunnel nearby - that'll add one infiltration point!' is a lot faster than 'That's actually a 35-foot wide gap, so I'm afraid even with your preparation for this by boosting your speed, you'd still only make it halfway across... [leads into 30 minutes of planning and discussion for this one small scene]').
The ability to have more abstract uses of skills is part of the reason why I think there are less of the concrete rules around them in comparison to other character abilities. Fundamentally, most character abilities are only applying to one mode of the game - encounter mode, downtime mode, exploration mode. Strike doesn't really need rules for how it interacts with the more abstract Exploration mode, because if you're making a Strike then you're likely in Encounter mode - and as Captain Morgan mentioned, people do seriously question whether you can Strike an object because the rules only explicitly allow a Strike against a creature. Having the Strike assume it's Encounter-only has caused confusion when it's extrapolated out to other contexts. Similarly with most spells, they're quite specific in what they do and it's less commonly in Exploration mode - and when they do have effects there, you often still need to collaborate with the GM to ensure they work. Black Tentacles will almost always do what it says on the tin, but will my creation of an Illusory Scene that depicts the dying allies of the guards we're trying to sneak past attract their attention, or are these people who won't leave their post for such a thing? That's inherently context dependent and you can't know that as a player without collaboration with your GM.
The reality is that skills are the only guaranteed ways that players can interact with the world in a non-combative way. Some PCs may have other options, but all PCs have skills, and it's the assumed method of interaction with most of the world. This means they have to be far more general, because an RPG can only focus on some parts of the world - PF and D&D games choose tactical combat as their area of focus. That means the rest of the mechanics have to be more abstractable. Some skill uses are basically encounter-only, so your Demoralize or Bon-Mot usage is basically entirely clear on how and when you can apply that, but they can only do so because they're not really defining a way to interact with the world. Deception has to cover all ways that your PCs could deceive those around them, so it won't have as clear-cut uses, and sometimes there are times where it's going to feel like there isn't a clear-cut application of a specific use of the skill to this situation. It's unfortunate, but I think PF2's approach is the better one here - to embrace that skills have to be a framework, and encourage the GM to find out what works for the situation within that framework. Normally Stealth is DEX based, but sometimes it might have to be WIS based because you're in a very strange situation. If Impersonate doesn't feel like it applies to the situation at hand, maybe going with a generic Deception roll is the best way to handle it. PF1 attempted to have a lot more of these situational use of skill checks clearly defined, and honestly it just lead to that being ignored at almost all tables I played at - I know almost no-one who uses the set Diplomacy DCs, or even really seen the Survival DCs to track used. They're clunky, and don't apply in many situations, and just get ignored. We seem to have different perspectives on what would be worth putting into the CRB for doing these sorts of stories, but I do think the framework-based skill system that acknowledges it must be more abstract to allow for the flexibile ways one can interact with the world is a significant advantage here.
(I've also been very generalized with my comments on ttRPGs here and want to acknowledge that - there are definitely games like Burning Wheel where the social interactions are the focus and are very clear, but other interactions that are clear in D&D/PF are more abstract, or even games like Blades in the Dark/any of the Powered by the Apocalypse games that are abstract across the entire game, designed to facilitate interesting stories more than tactical gameplay!)
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But it's a part of the story that players don't have any tools to affect. You can't be measurably good or bad at escaping notice; just measurably good or bad at hiding behind a rock or getting the first turn in a fight.
I'm sorry, I don't want to come off as disrespectful here, but this doesn't make any sense to me. Players have TONS of tools to effect how noticeable they are. The fact that there isn't a numerical score attached to them doesn't mean they don't exist. Players choose their character's appearances, equipment, and clothing, which is like 90% of not standing out. And there are spells and items you can get to let you switch that up on the fly, too. The other 10% is really just keeping your cool and not acting visibly weird or nervous, which is a perfect fit for Deception if it requires a roll.
I am running a PF2 converted War for the Crown campaign. Characters fit into the royal court by investing in appropriate noble's outfits, openly carrying only one handed melee weapons instead of two handed or range weapons, and not casting spells despite there being a multitude of spell casters present.
The players guide also makes it abundantly clear how human-centric the campaign is, and how racist the nobility of Taldor can be. Despite this, one players chose to be a halfling. This seriously crimps the PCs ability to be taken seriously for influencing powerful people because NPCs just think of halflings as "the help." But the tradeoff is that people don't pay her much attention, which sets her up to spy, eavesdropping while she serves drinks and such.
Trying to replace these contextual factors with a numerical bonus would really just make the game drabber and feel less like a story.
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Trying to replace these contextual factors with a numerical bonus would really just make the game drabber and feel less like a story.Yet nobody says, "Trying to replace the contextual factors of fencing with a numerical chance to hit with a melee attack would really just make the game drabber." Nobody's out here posting, "Really, it's taking the fun out of the game to reduce the whims of the ley lines to a simple spell DC."
Nobody has to play mother-may-I with the GM to have their other class abilities work. Classes have numeric abilities so you can understand how likely your character is to succeed in a given situation. If you just leave all of that to GM fiat, then why bother giving Paizo a pile of money to make rulebooks? I can do rules-free RP for free.
It really does seem like a matter of focus to me - where do you want the CRB to focus? If it were just adding a section to Stealth and Deception to add in some more explicit options for the initial questions being asked, that wouldn't add very many pages. It seems like you're arguing more for a fundamental change to the whole skill system to have it reflect a similar level of detail as for combat, and that just seems like something you can't reasonably do. The CRB is already a big book - adding in that level of detail and options for surviving in the wilderness, for sparring with wit in the court of public opinion, for investigating the mysteries of magic, and so on, is just going to bloat the book. Some people may view the survival options as fundamental to the genre of story that Pathfinder is trying to tell - I'd be more inclined to view social scenes as the fundamental one from that list. We all have different preferences on what deserves that focus, and it can't be all of them at once.
Pathfinder 2 makes it clear what gets the focus, and then tries to provide a framework to work around that enables easy application of the existing rules to those areas that don't have the focus. The robustness of the maths means there's definitely room to expand on it if it's relevant - as I'm planning on doing in my upcoming Ironfang Invasion game, where the first book will have a more detailed subsistance minigame. I do also feel it's worth pointing out that I don't think it's too hard to get a feel for how likely your chance of success would be in a given situation even without knowing the exact rulings the GM would make. It's definitely not set in stone, but the consistency of the maths means you can make ball-park estimates. If you're trying to track a group of two 3rd-level enemies who got away from you in the plains, there's various ways the GM could set the DC within the framework provided:
1: Go for an easy method, and set it at the standard DC for a 3rd level effect: DC 18
2: Compare it to the sample Survival skills, and decide it is somewhere in difficulty between a rampaging bear and a stealthy panther, giving you the Trained DC with the Hard modifier, or the Expert DC with the Easy modifier: DC 17 or DC 18, respectively
3: Compare it to the stealth DC of the creatures who ran away - lets call them charlatans - giving you a DC 18 check.
I'm sure there are other ways to set it, or maybe there are circumstances you're unaware of, or anything that could change it. But guessing it's ~16-19 at least, 17-18 most likely, seems a reasonable choice. Compared to your 4th level druid's Survival modifier of +12, you're pretty confident in your chances. If you know the rough level of the source of the challenge, you can be very safely it'll be +/- 5 from that level's DC, and likely +/- 2 barring large circumstantial changes. Whether or not your turning into a creature with Scent to track will take the DC (and by how much) is certainly not something you can guess until you're very familiar with the GM's style, but I've not had my players feel like they're unaware of their rough success chance for outside-the-norm ideas in my experience.
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Trying to replace these contextual factors with a numerical bonus would really just make the game drabber and feel less like a story.Yet nobody says, "Trying to replace the contextual factors of fencing with a numerical chance to hit with a melee attack would really just make the game drabber." Nobody's out here posting, "Really, it's taking the fun out of the game to reduce the whims of the ley lines to a simple spell DC."
Nobody has to play mother-may-I with the GM to have their other class abilities work. Classes have numeric abilities so you can understand how likely your character is to succeed in a given situation. If you just leave all of that to GM fiat, then why bother giving Paizo a pile of money to make rulebooks? I can do rules-free RP for free.
Fencing is not a comparable example to the color shirt you choose to wear. Or rather, standing out in a crowd would largely be things you don't roll for with fencing either. You don't roll dice to decide if you can buy the rapier, belt it on, or draw it. And that's most of what you need to do to not stand out in a crowd, unless your face is plastered on wanted posters. And if your face is on wanted posters, that's what the Impersonate action and disguise kit are for.
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If anything, the GMG did go out of its way to provide special rules for outlier scenarios and empowers you as a GM to run noncombat encounters in the way that is going to be best for your game, as opposed to force the players to have to roll stealth 3 times every round while they try to sneak through a city at night, with 90% of the rolls immaterial to the success of the mission, as anyone seeing the players for most of that time might not really care if they are there or not, the GM crafts the encounter as an infiltration encounter, or as a chase or as the kind of VP encounter that will best satisfy the context of the encounter for the adventure.
Saying that the rules are for the GM to just have to make everything up is a great disservice to the GMG and how much support the game gives to GMs to not have to make everything up, but rather, have a tool kit of 4 or 5 different kinds of encounters that are really easy to set up and run.
PFS scenarios really do this all the time so if you are struggling to think about how to run such encounters take a look at the PF2 PFS scenarios for ideas.
I'm just here to note that all skill checks have that caveat. And it's an optional one.It seems strange to me to have that caveat for skills when it isn't similarly applied to any of the other common attribute-based checks.
Anyhow if you don't feel like reading the posts, feel free to not reply!
Sorry, I shouldn't have come across so flippantly. I did read or skim all of the posts, but stealth rules are a slight weakness in my knowledge, you offered lots of stuff to chew on, and I saw this little thing I could correct, as well as an overarching disagreement on changes in core design that would potentially make discussion of stealth rules moot and thus be good for me to comment on. It doesn't seem this conversation will bear much more fruit if it boils down to "I'd rather have extra detail/defined focus on x than y" or "I don't like leaving so much to the GM", though that's obviously just my speculation.
As for what you mentioned, a skill check is Flavor Thing + Stat, while miscellaneous other stuff is often just Stat. So when the emphasis is on Flavor Thing, it makes sense to me that that would be immutable but the Stat part could change in service to the flavor.
It sounds like you want to be able to sneak up on a level appropriate encounter foe, and one shot them without giving away your position.No, I want it to be possible to fight an enemy without alerting his friends under the right conditions, since it's a genre staple. Right now, even if you can otherwise one-shot a level-appropriate enemy, you can't do that. So there's lots of sneaky scenes you just can't do without throwing either or both of the skill system or the combat system out the window.
If you attack someone or cast a spell, you immediately aren't hidden any more. The enemies immediately know that they're under attack, that their ally was taken down, and as long as they can see at all, they can see the attacker immediately. Now, the attacker can immediately run and hide, but you can't do the scene where you take out the guards without alerting everyone unless the guards are so isolated from each other that none of them have LOS to each other.
You're making up some fake bad rules about rolling dice in trivial situations to rail on about how dumb those fake bad rules are. That ruleset that exists strictly on your imagination sure sounds like it sucks, but it doesn't do what I want anyway!If anything, the GMG did go out of its way to provide special rules for outlier scenarios and empowers you as a GM to run noncombat encounters in the way that is going to be best for your game, as opposed to force the players to have to roll stealth 3 times every round while they try to sneak through a city at night, with 90% of the rolls immaterial to the success of the mission, as anyone seeing the players for most of that time might not really care if they are there or not, the GM crafts the encounter as an infiltration encounter, or as a chase or as the kind of VP encounter that will best satisfy the context of the encounter for the adventure.
Why can't you lure the enemy around a corner? There is no rule that says all enemies will automatically hear you kill a low level guard if you do it out of sight. Maybe the GM will have the guards make a perception check and possibly come and investigate, so you have to hide the body quickly or have some other plan in place, but I am struggling to think of any game that has rules for killing someone right in the line of sight of an enemy and they don't do anything. That feels like a hokey video game, not a staple of the fantasy genre...unless you are talking 20th level, god-like rogue abilities, which the game also has.
It handles these special situations, as special kind of encounters. PFS does this in almost every scenario. Your encounter of wanting to rough up a rival in public, but not too public a set of circumstances is a perfect set up for a VP encounter where party members might use intimidate, athletics, perception, and even deception to provide a show of force, but have to be careful about going to far. Maybe if they get too many points in one round, the crowd takes notice and starts calling for the guard, giving the PCs a round to either run away, or have the situation turn into a timed combat encounter where the gaurds eventually arrive to arrest everyone.
I really, really recommend you look closely at how flexible, but specific the victory points system is, and how easily a GM can graft it into these kinds of situations, even rewarding players who might have relevant skill feats by letting them pick up more than 1 point per encounter if they can affect multiple people with a single action, or treat the degrees of success one better even. PF2 has been the most fun game to design outlandish encounters in because it is almost as flexible as a rules light system, except it is not rules light and the core actions and activities can really easily be applied to many different situations with only a little modification from their traditional combat applications.
The VP system can overlay a combat encounter. You can count up VP after every round and easily have things like "Is a party member hidden at the end of a round?" factor into whether the slider moves towards captain Akkab intervening or not.
There are multiple PFS scenarios that treat crowds of people as terrain features or even hazards if that is a better fit for the encounter than treating them as creatures.
And a whole lot of what you are talking about is going to be deception in PF2, not stealth. The create a diversion action or use of spells that fascinate the crowd are very easy ways to draw attention away from something else going on. What you want is for the character who creates the distraction to also be able to be the muscle in a combat encounter and that sounds much more like master proficiency skill feat territory at a minimum, with room for some more specific feats for create a distraction instead of focusing so heavily on lying and feinting.
I agree that the exact support for all of your various encounters isn't explicitly spelled out yet, but the framework is all their to handle it very easily and it doesn't seem like it would have been good to prioritize for the core rulebook anyway as these encounters don't scale up to 4 players very well, which is the basic framework that APs and scenarios are designed around, hence why a lot of them are better off not being combat encounters by themselves but lead ins to combat encounters or chase challenges that follow combat encounters based upon how long the combat takes.
I know nothing of these other systems, but I don't feel the need to know them to run these things very easily in PF2. If you have other rules that work well for making these edge case encounters work for your campaign, I think you are perfectly fine using them.
Hazards in PF2 can be complex with action routines. I think a potentially hostile crowd, who can either be disapaited, directed, or used for cover fits exactly what you are trying to do.
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Reading some of the published adventures might help too. Age of Ashes book 5: Against the Scarlet Triad is a high level urban adventure that does a lot of this stuff.
The following terminology is used in the Liberation task.
Awareness Points: This is a value for tracking how
suspicious guards and bystanders are (see Awareness
on page 25). Failures and critical failures typically
increase Awareness Points. When Awareness reaches
certain thresholds, new Complications and dangers
come into play.
I think at this point we are just on "go read the rules" they are free online but unless people actually bother to go read the system they are complaining about not being adequate, things will just carry on in circles.
Agreed. Reading the rules and playing the game are absolutely crucial for having a good understanding of where the game could be better and where it works out just fine.
Sounds like Victory Points inverted, which makes a lot of sense for this type of thing.Reading some of the published adventures might help too. Age of Ashes book 5: Against the Scarlet Triad is a high level urban adventure that does a lot of this stuff.
The following terminology is used in the Liberation task.
Awareness Points: This is a value for tracking how
suspicious guards and bystanders are (see Awareness
on page 25). Failures and critical failures typically
increase Awareness Points. When Awareness reaches
certain thresholds, new Complications and dangers
come into play.
Yep. Now I didn't play through book 5 and I will say Age of Ashes isn't the most polished product (being rushed to get printed alongside the core rulebook and being written while the rules were still in flux) but it seems like a solid example.
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The disconnect I'm seeing here from the OP is that PF2 is a game that sort of requires a good faith attempt from the GM to run a game/tell a story that the players will enjoy and that the players trust that this is what the GM is about here.
All the stuff like "leaving it to GM fiat" is that the whole system is set up to enable the GM to finagle a whole bunch of stuff. If we're living with things like the rarity system or top-down monster/NPC construction, we're already going to have to assume that the GM isn't doing stuff just for the hell of it (and shouldn't say "no" to players without a decent reason).
Extensive and specific subsystems constrain the GM in a way that PF2 just doesn't seem very interested in, particularly with something loose but flexible will work fine at most tables where the GM and their players are on the same frequency.
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Yep. Now I didn't play through book 5 and I will say Age of Ashes isn't the most polished product (being rushed to get printed alongside the core rulebook and being written while the rules were still in flux) but it seems like a solid example.
The victory point system is such an obvious consequence of the degrees of success system, I've even seen it used by authors who hadn't had the GMG in their hands yet. I think at least several of the cases where we say "oh that's clearly VP system" just happened to be fellow travelers.
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PF2 already sort of handles this sort of gradiated awareness for hiding behind a rock outcropping in a dungeon. Valjean can't hide from Javert in a crowd of people RAW (AFAICT),
Let me direct you back to the First Rule of Pathfinder:
The first rule of Pathfinder is that this game is yours. Use it to tell the stories you want to tell, be the character you want to be, and share exciting adventures with friends. If any other rule gets in the way of your fun, as long as your group agrees, you can alter or ignore it to fit your story. The true goal of Pathfinder is for everyone to enjoy themselves.
If the GM and players agree that hiding in a crowd is something that could reasonably be attempted, then allowing it is RAW by means of the First Rule.
The party wants to punish a member of a rival gang. They want attack that rival gangster in public, to intimidate their enemies, but not attract so much attention that guards come down on their heads. But they don't want to do it if the guard lieutenant that hates them is on patrol. How do they identify a place to have this fight? How do they attack someone without attracting too much attention? How do they tell if their hated gang rival is around? How do they tell if their hated guard rival is around and a threat? A robust framework that incorporates both skills and combat (and spells, of course) could handle this, and many other sorts of scenes.
Really this seems pretty straightforward to me.
- Finding out where the guard patrols: that'd be Diplomacy to Gather Information, or perhaps Society or a relevant Lore like Underworld or City Watch Lore to Recall Knowledge where and when the patrols happen. Since this is the sort of check where you might get it wrong and get a rude surprise, this is probably a secret check. Since it's focused against the specific guard lieutenant, the DC would be a level-based DC based on the lieutenant's level.
- Figuring out where and when the enemy gang will be is a similar knowledge check, but probably against a DC of a typical member of that gang.
- Now that you have an idea who's moving around where, you could decide to scout out the location or just pick a spot on the map. Scouting out the location could be done with Perception (with a dash of Sense Motive) to get a sense of what sort of people move around in various candidate spots and how they might reach. As a GM I'd probably aim to give them two spots to choose from, each of which has something going for it. One might be easier to escape from for the PCs if something goes wrong, the other might have a particular crowd that would be a nice bonus if the PCs could impress them.
- Now we get to setting up the ambush. The PCs want to hang around in the area without drawing attention. They could stay out of sight (Stealth) or blend into the crowd (Deception). The DC is the best Perception in the rival gang, since Perception is the natural counter to both these skills. This one would be a good one to use victory points on, with the amount of successes determining how good the opening position of the fight is. If the PCs bomb it completely, then the rival gang sees them from far away enough that they can just bail. On a middling success they've walked into the trap but aren't hopelessly outmaneuvered. And on a massive success maybe I'll just knock over one of the rival's mooks because the PCs knocked him unconscious for free.
- Now a fight breaks out. The PCs want to keep it subtle enough that the guard doesn't come. The rivals maybe also want that. The crowd might take it one way or the other. This seems like another good one to use an ad-hoc VP system for. Let's call them Awareness Points. Each round the fight takes two beads go in the jar, simply because this can't go right forever. However, you can try to manage the crowd with skills like Intimidate or Diplomacy to make it clear that this is just gangs among each other, and on a success only 1 bead goes into the jar, on a crit 0 go into the jar, and on a crit fail an extra bead goes into the jar. Now, the more violently you fight, the more beads go into the jar. So nonlethal attacks are fine, but a strike with a lethal weapon is another bead in the jar. Big weapons and ranged attacks are even more threatening to the bystanders so that's 2 beads instead. Magic is never really that subtle so that's also 1 bead. And area attacks like a Fireball just immediately tip over the jar. And when the jar's too full, the guard arrives in a few rounds.
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From my own experience, the stealth rules work amazingly. The only downside I have faced is that I have had a couple GMs (and fellow players) who have sucked the fun out of stealth because of grognard rules and "realistic" play. For example, I was not allowed to stealth in a dungeon because someone needed light, and everyone automatically saw us. As far as I understand and have played with in groups coming to PF2e with an open mind, the stealth rules are very fun when played how I understand them.That doesn't even make sense. I mean, the whole group wouldn't be able to sneak past anything together to save their life, but having someone walking around with a torch in the dark is a great distraction for you to hide in the shadows and use stealth for initiative.
I agree. Those two GMs sucked. I am just glad that I no longer have to play with either of them. And the worst part is that one of them is an avid user of these forums and makes up things specifically to counter the rules if (and that’s a very big if) he accepts that he is or has been reading the rules wrong, unless it is to the detriment of players.
Edit: As I said, it depends on the GM.