Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Surprise rounds not triggering

Hey there, so I submitted a bug ticket about this, but in the meantime, I thought it would be good to also post this here to see if there are others with a similar issue and perhaps share strategies/work arounds in the meantime. Also since im not sure if its a bug, technical oversight, or intended. anyway, here is the problem.

When attacking from stealth outside of combat (particularly with bows/crossbows) and combat initiates, this occurs in the following situations:

- killing a character with a single attack (such as with one standard weapon action) while no characters are in combat won't initiate a surprise round with the remaining enemies and standard combat will start

- attacking from stealth while no characters are in combat when the target or surrounding npcs have guard behavior, triggers a guard notification (such as the narrator saying you picked a fight or are being attacked for assault) and wont initiate a surprise round and standard combat will start

- attacking neutral or hostile npcs while no characters are in combat from stealth sometimes wont trigger surprise rounds and standard combat will start

This was noticed while trying to stealth attack the shattered sanctum sub-map of the goblin camp with a ranged gloom stalker ranger. Despite attacking from stealth out of combat as often as possible in the sanctum, no surprise rounds were triggered except one time on a lone Minthara (having killed the surrounding NPCS without her being made aware)


I know surprise rounds are supposed to be able to be initiated in normal combat since i have gotten it before (as written above) and ive seen instances of other people triggering surprise rounds such as a barbarian shoving a goblin off the roof in the blighted village which triggered a surprise round.

This is particularly devastating to Gloom stalkers since their whole playstyle revolves around ambushing and surprise. and not being able to trigger surprise rounds because you did too much damage to an npc or because of surrounding npcs being tagged as guards, not only are you robbed of the inherent benefits of surprise rounds, but you almost never get to use the gloom stalker passive that refreshes your action in the surprise round.