The way I am seeing it is that if all characters are brought into combat at the same time, then only groups of four players will be able to make surprise attacks since they are only controlling one character each and can coordinate properly using chat, just like in DnD when a group all ambushes at the same time. The attacks are all happening at once, if the enemy is unaware of the party, then they don't get to make any extra checks or roll initiative in the middle of the ambush.
Not sure that Larian would get it right in singleplayer to have all four of our characters get to make their surprise attacks before the enemies do anything. Once the first character has attacked, there would have to be an immediate popup or something asking if we wanted to do surprise attacks for each of our other characters (to simulate the full party ambush.) I feel like their version of Surprised would be the enemy constantly rolling Perception checks in real time until our characters who are now in TB mode are guaranteed to fail their stealth rolls, and because we cannot control more than one at a time, we get screwed out of a proper ambush. Having an actual pause and ready attack features seems like it would be less complicated than all of this.
The way I am seeing it is that, if one character attacks from Surprise, then all player characters AND enemies are brought into the combat TB mode, and enemies have to make a Perception check or be Surprised = lose their first turn. This way, it doesn't require a huge amount of coordination from the players. The other 3 characters just have to be relatively close by.
Since enemies would be pulled into TB mode, they would
not be constantly rolling Perception checks in real time. They'd roll Perception once, either at the beginning of the combat or the start of their turn. A success means they could act that first turn; a failure means they couldn't.
The logical way to approach surprise rounds would be to just have all our characters get pulled into turn-based while the others are still in stealth. Those characters are still stealthed, still under the stealth rules, but get a free turn while the enemy is surprised to do whatever. That seems like an entirely reasonableapproach to take.
By this, do you mean that the stealthed characters
wouldn't be pulled into TB mode? Being stealthed isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with being in TB mode...
This only works if BG3 doesn't double count surprise rounds. Under your suggestion, stealthed characters not brought into TB mode should not get an additional turn the same round they enter the combat.
