The rules for Sneak state that doing anything other than Hide, Sneak, or Step will cause you to be observed (or hidden if you can't be precisely sensed). If you are undetected from a different source, particularly the invisible condition, does this restriction still apply? If not, will it start applying if someone successfully Seeks you and you then successfully Sneak away?
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The Invisibility spell makes you undetected, as that's what the spell says it does. You do need to Sneak to stay that way if you plan to move.
If you aren't Sneaking, you're making noise, so someone could pinpoint your location that way. You would still be Hidden though, so there's the DC 11 flat check to hit you, unless they have some other precise sense.
For example, Oozes don't have vision, they detect movement. Invisibility would not help against an ooze at all.
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The rules for Invisible answer this question fairly well. At least, in the second paragraph. The first paragraph has a bit of a problem.
You can use the Seek basic action to attempt to figure out an invisible creature’s location, making it instead only hidden from you. This lasts until the invisible creature successfully uses Sneak to become undetected again. If you’re already observing a creature when it becomes invisible, it starts out hidden, since you know where it was when it became invisible, though it can then Sneak to become undetected.
So an invisible creature that does anything besides Sneak or Step will become Hidden - everyone will know what square they are in even if they still can't see them.
I think the spell/ effect that caused the condition is usually where this question gets answered.
For the base Invisibility spell:
Cloaked in illusion, the target becomes invisible. This makes it undetected to all creatures, though the creatures can attempt to find the target, making it hidden to them instead. If the target uses a hostile action, the spell ends after that hostile action is completed.
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If a player is under this spell, they only need to not break that hostile action clause. If an enemy were to notice them some other way, the spell is still fine, but the player becomes "hidden" meaning its vague location is known to the 5ft square, but exact location is not.
At any time while properly undetected or hidden, the player can still choose to Stride at full speed and run around making noise or whatever, and the spell does not break.
If a hidden player ever Sneaks, they get another chance to become fully undetected.
At this point it does get a little fuzzy. As long as the player is not passively doing something to give away what square they are in, the Sneak rules seem to strongly say that they remain undetected unless an active seek against them succeeds or they do anything not-stealthy.
"Success You’re undetected by the creature during your movement and remain undetected by the creature at the end of it."
"You become observed as soon as you do anything other than Hide, Sneak, or Step."
In this case, the player is still invisible, so that observed gets swapped to hidden.
But yes, once the jig is up and the enemy knows someone's there, active sneaky-stealth is required to achieve undetected.
Quoting "You become observed as soon as you do anything other than Hide, Sneak, or Step" without its companion sentence "The GM might allow you to perform a particularly unobtrusive action without being noticed, possibly requiring another Stealth check" is actually kind of a significant omission. Not directly relevant to the original question of whether they need to Sneak when moving around, but very important to running invisibility in general.
I'd like to call attention to the spells Flashy Disappearance and Disappearance, since they render the target undetected and also do not use the same restrictions as Sneak. In fact, Flashy Disappearance requires the user to Stride while undetected!
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You successfully Point Out. Those spells are now only Hidden instead of Undetected.
Flashy Disappearance looks fine. Yes, it initially makes you Undetected. It also lets you stride because that specific rule from the spell overrides any general rules. However, once you finish your stride, you can't end up any better than Hidden. You won't be Undetected after the spell and your Stride action finish.
Disappearance is a bit wonky because it causes you to become Undetected while the enemies already know what square you are in... Which is what the Hidden condition is. Check back in a month and a half and see if that has been fixed or not and we can worry about it then.
I would say with Disappearance you do not need to Sneak to stay undetected. You are bypassing everyone's precise and imprecise senses without having to make a check, making it extremely difficult for enemies to pinpoint your location. They have to actively Seek you out to find you at all.
Disappearance might be even nastier than that. The target becomes undetectable to all senses, so when the spell says you can find the target by Seeking, it seems to be referring to the "search for objects" part of the Seek action, which means environmental clues are all you have to work with.
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I would say with Disappearance you do not need to Sneak to stay undetected. You are bypassing everyone's precise and imprecise senses without having to make a check, making it extremely difficult for enemies to pinpoint your location. They have to actively Seek you out to find you at all.
What would be the DC to make a Disappeared creature hidden?
It'd be kind of a feelsbadman if it's just the Stealth DC of the creature, since you'd often want to cast that spell on an otherwise not particularly stealthy target."I cast Disappearance to make Grogg the level 17 Barbarian undetectable to ALL senses".
"Alright, NPCs turn. What's Grogg's stealth DC?"
"He's untrained with a +4 dex mod, so 14."
"Cool, the level 13 Weapon Master Critically Succeeds (on a 2) when Seeking Grogg, so you're only Hidden to them. The Weapon Master Points Out Grogg to all of his buddies, so now you're only Hidden to them, too. The Weapon Master strides up to Grogg."
"Well, can I try to Sneak away?"
"You can try, but at a +4 Stealth Mod, you're pretty unlikely to succeed."
I would say with Disappearance you do not need to Sneak to stay undetected. You are bypassing everyone's precise and imprecise senses without having to make a check, making it extremely difficult for enemies to pinpoint your location. They have to actively Seek you out to find you at all.What would be the DC to make a Disappeared creature hidden?
It'd be kind of a feelsbadman if it's just the Stealth DC of the creature, since you'd often want to cast that spell on an otherwise not particularly stealthy target."I cast Disappearance to make Grogg the level 17 Barbarian undetectable to ALL senses".
"Alright, NPCs turn. What's Grogg's stealth DC?"
"He's untrained with a +4 dex mod, so 14."
"Cool, the level 13 Weapon Master Critically Succeeds (on a 2) when Seeking Grogg, so you're only Hidden to them. The Weapon Master Points Out Grogg to all of his buddies, so now you're only Hidden to them, too. The Weapon Master strides up to Grogg."
"Well, can I try to Sneak away?"
"You can try, but at a +4 Stealth Mod, you're pretty unlikely to succeed."
I think in the case of Disappearance, Seek would work not against Grogg himself, but against clues in the environment that suggest where Grogg might be. Seek isn't going to work against Grogg directly if he's impossible to sense.
It's still possible for a creature to find the target by Seeking, looking for disturbed dust, hearing gaps in the sound spectrum, or finding some other way to discover the presence of an otherwise-undetectable creature.
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The notes in the Invisibility and Stealth rules are linked to those in the Imprecise Senses rules:
Hearing is an imprecise sense—it cannot detect the full range of detail that a precise sense can. You can usually sense a creature automatically with an imprecise sense, but it has the hidden condition instead of the observed condition. It might be undetected by you if it’s using Stealth or is in an environment that distorts the sense, such as a noisy room in the case of hearing. In those cases, you have to use the Seek basic action to detect the creature. At best, an imprecise sense can be used to make an undetected creature (or one you didn’t even know was there) merely hidden—it can’t make the creature observed.
So imprecise senses are good enough to pinpoint location. Unless there's interference, or someone is trying to avoid that sense.
If someone is invisible, vision isn't helping, so you fall back to hearing, which is usually imprecise. So if someone makes sound you hear where they are and they become hidden.
If they stay quite still (= not taking actions other than Hide, Sneak, Step) then you don't get a chance to hear them. If the room is super noisy, you also don't get a chance to hear them.
On the other hand, if they start walking around without Sneaking, they're not actually trying to move quietly and you can hear where they're going.
So actions other than Hide, Sneak, and Step break the Undetected condition (with some exceptions by the GM) as long as the perceiving creature has hearing as a precise or imprecise sense? Even if the creature hasn't Seeked yet? I guess that makes sense. It would be pretty annoying for the perceiving creature if the Undetected one didn't have all those restrictions.
In fact, that's probably the main threat posed by the Disappearance spell. In the Grogg example, perhaps the enemy could Seek Grogg using environmental clues, but then what's stopping Grogg from Striding somewhere else? They can't see, hear, or even smell him, so he'd probably be Undetected while the enemies think he's still hidden where they last found him.
As for Flashy Disappearance, the devs should have had the spell explicitly modify the Stride to keep you Undetected throughout, but I can see the intent.
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Typically when Sneaking or Hiding, you are only rolling against vision and hearing. Unless you know what a creature's senses are, you can't really defend against them, unless you have Foil Senses.
For example, say a creature only has heatvision. Even if you were invisible, you wouldn't beat that sense. You would need a spell like Falsify Heat to be invisible to them. You can beat Scent with Olfactory Obfuscator. Motion Sense it much harder to beat, but you can probably make something else move quicker than you to confuse the creature, or just try to move very slowly. Echolocation would be even harder, since even with a Silence spell up, they would notice the gap in sound you are creating.
The reason I'm suggesting you don't have to sneak with Disappearance is because all the senses above are affected, even echolocation. You literally can not be detected, the enemy would have to use some convoluted method to find your position, and even then you are just guessing. Even See Invisibility doesn't help against Disappearance, as you aren't Invisible, you are simply not detectable through any senses.
Even See Invisibility doesn't help against Disappearance, as you aren't Invisible, you are simply not detectable through any senses.
Umm...
The target becomes undetected, not just to sight but to all senses, allowing the target to count as invisible no matter what precise and imprecise senses an observer might have.
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Count as invisible. If you are blind, it's not like everyone is invisible and therefore you can use See invisibility. The spell makes you treat everyone as blind, deaf, and unable to use any of their senses, it doesn't actually bend light around you like invisibility does.