Originally Posted by mrfuji3
Originally Posted by biomag
Yeah, the thing that doesn't make sense to many of us is that 5e doesn't have a line of sight in the sense of characters looking in a specific direction. Its a stylized approach to speed up things by combining all your senses in 'Perception'.

Now one could say that vision should be limited, but when we realistically look at it our field of vision is 180° and not 45-60° as is the game. Also if we hear things, we can just turn our heads and eyes quite quickly.

I think Larian here has gamified the perception too much by taking a highly stylized/simplified perception system and further limited the NPCs by sight cones and mechanics that push things to absurd levels - as mentioned no sound or other senses + the option to lock enemies in place while 'stealthing' with no stealth skill while wearing heavy noisy armour.


Am I a fan of 5e's perception rules? Not really and as a DM even less. But changing an existing ruleset demands taking more into account as the rule itself. Larian doesn't pay enough attention to the collaterals of their homebrews.
Well said.

A mix of 360 perception and sight cones is my preferred solution. 60-90 degree sight cones of automatic detection combined with a hearing radius of stealth check vs perception detection. Has a little bit of both 5e RAW and Larian implementation, and doesn't completely ignore the relatively-core 5e rule that there is No Facing.

I like the idea of using both vision cones and hearing radius. Normal field of vision would be double or treble what you suggests though. We see around 180 degrees with 100 degrees of that being peripheral vision. Ideally subjects/movement caught within the peripheral vision (but not the main field of vision) should trigger a second perception check (first being for making noise that can be detected) and even if successful lead to the enemy focusing attention in that direction after a short pause.

Right now hide is a broken exploit tactic every bit as bad or worse than the now defunct flanking/backstab system. It desperately needs to go. Attempting to hide after an initial attack/detection should be done at stealth disadvantage (double disadvantage for those wearing non-stealthy armor). The AI needs to be tweaked too.

Last edited by Seraphael; 27/12/22 05:26 PM.