My understanding in 5e rules, is that if I attempt to start a surprise round, all of your party members should get a full action during their turn of the surprise round before your opponents even roll for initiative, giving all your characters a chance to make an attack before the enemy even gets a chance to make their first turn.
While I realize, I'm necroing this thread, I was looking for some rhyme or reason to how surprise works in BG3 and clearly it simply doesn't.
That said, this is not how 5e works at all and this has been a huge misinterpretation of the rules from a tabletop perspective by many people. Firstly, there's no such thing as a surprise round. Surprised is a condition. While surprised a creature cannot take actions or reactions. Surprise does not have to apply to all creatures on one side of a fight. Secondly, by 5e rules, nothing happens before everyone rolls initiative. You don't get attacks outside of initiative under any circumstances. The mere intent to take an offensive action results in initiative being rolled. Jeremy Crawford has gone in depth on this topic a number of times because it is so widely misinterpreted.
Edit: With further testing... reloading the same scenario multiple times - all 4 characters hidden, ranged sneak attack with Astarian, sometimes we get all enemies surprised, sometimes we just get initiative as normal and sometimes everyone rolls initiative but it behaves as though everyone except Astarian in the party is surprised while the enemies act as normal.
