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It just occurred to me today since I got an item that can produce light. Does it affect your sneak?

Would I easily be spotted because of my light-producing item? It's not something I can cast, mind you. It's those items that have perma-light within a certain distance when you equip the item while being sneaky.

If not changed on amia, standard spot vs hide modificators should apply

+5 DC at night if the spotter does not have a light (or darkvision).
-10 DC at night if the target has a light on them.

ICly, if you are eminenting light and have no objects to cast Shadow on as well, you can't use HiPS /as long as there are people who can see you before you stealth/. Keep that in mind

Kamina wrote:

ICly, if you are eminenting light and have no objects to cast Shadow on as well, you can't use HiPS /as long as there are people who can see you before you stealth/. Keep that in mind

This is not true. You should take your shadowdancing lessons again.

Actually that's correct. A SD needs a shadow that is at least half it's size and not it's own. If nothing is able to make the sufficient shadow then you can't use HiPS. Granted it's a very hard to attain situation, but it's correct.

Anatida wrote:

Kamina wrote:

ICly, if you are eminenting light and have no objects to cast Shadow on as well, you can't use HiPS /as long as there are people who can see you before you stealth/. Keep that in mind

This is not true. You should take your shadowdancing lessons again.

Well, if you're emitting light, any shadow you approach will be away from you so you couldn't make use of it. Also, you cannot use your own shadow for HiPSing.

That said, wearing a light is basically -10 to your hide score, so don't.

Last edited by Anatida on Sat, Nov 21 2015, 21:27 PM, edited 1 time in total.

The requirements for HiPs is not that you ENTER the shadow, it is that you are within 10 meters of a shadow. Thus a smart shadowdancer can USE the fact that they are emitting light to create a shadow where there might not be another one available.

You can not shadow jump when emitting light because it requires you ENTER the shadow which you would not be able to do while emitting light.

:shock:

EDIT: This is all for IC purposes. Mechanically yes, emitting light does lower your hide skill but I don't know the numbers.

EDIT 2: Oops... 10 meters or 10 feet... I can never remember.

Anatida wrote:

.... You should take your shadowdancing lessons again.

A Dancer need not be 'in' his/her shadow for any of their skills other than Shadow Jumping. A Dancer emitting light can make clever use of it to create shadows that they can then use. Proximity is the only caveat for a Dancers skills, and that is upto and including 10', but not beyond.

Aaaaand Ana ninja'd me

I keep encountering contradicting lore on whether a Dancer can HIPS while emitting light. That a Dancers ability is 'supernatural', and not mundane, it should work, so long as all the rules apply regarding proximity and such. The final ruling on that is beyond my purview however.

Regarding 'other' sneaks.... that is any class that is not a Shadow Dancer, I think that they should not be able to hide very well if they are emitting light. Mundane measures should be made to conceal that light..... so on and so forth.

Kamina wrote:

no objects to cast Shadow on as well

You guys missed this part, which is what I said as well. If there's nothing to create and appropriate shadow then you are boned. Your own shadow doesn't count. So, what Kamina said is technically correct; the best kind of correct.

And it's 10 feet, not meters. Meters would be ridiculous.

-10 to Hide if you have Light on you is correct, also. SD or not, if you have Light on you then you are hurting yourself.

Naiv: I think you misread the wording of Analog's post, I did too at first. He isn't saying you enter your own shadow, nor was I. He meant the shadow you are utilizing.

As I reread his post perhaps I misread Kamina's also. I took his wording to mean you had cast shadow on yourself in some way. I see now how "no objects to cast shadow on" probably meant exactly what Analog and I were saying.

Honestly Naiv, I didn't see your post, nor did I argue with anything you wrote. I only saw Magic's.

And DUDE - I said I was wrong and often forgot the feet/meters.

Relax, you're reading far too much into my post.

So color of light doesn't matter? Any light, even the low light color blue will affect my stealth?

Sadly so Niwatori.

Also my wording was a vague version of Anatida's and Analog's :p

According to NWNWiki, the DC to Spot a stealthed character is 10 easier, if you're carrying any light source *and* it's night. In daytime, feel free to glow like the sun, apparently?

Wait what? Last time I played a shadowdancer, a SD couldn't use hips if they got a light or continual flame spell on them, because they emit bright light for 20 feet, and dim light for another 20 and that doing it is flat out breaking the rules, just like jumping trough objects with shadowjump. Hence the existence of the immunity to spell: light cloak, and the BoT Continual flame page that turns it into an aoe touch attack light spell. The exception might be unless there were an object within 10 feet of them that could emit a shadow large enough, but even then it makes zero ic sense because while you can hide yourself, and with enough skill pnpwise, even help hide allies.. I don't see how anyone can hide the 20-40 feet beacon of light emitting from their armor. Back in the day, this used to cause a good deal of discussion, especially in conflicts because half of the sd community never hid with light on, and the other did the 10 foot range thing claiming it was still possible. Not sure if there were ever any official ruling on the matter.

Anyway, rant aside here's a list of the Spot vs hide modifiers:
+10 DC if the spotter is in combat.
+5 DC if the target is standing still.
-5 DC if the spotter is standing still.
Size modifiers (tiny: +8, small: +4, medium: 0, large: -4, huge: -8).
Area spot check modifiers.
+5 DC for stealthed players (only), if they are in the back arc.
+5 DC at night if the spotter does not have a light (or darkvision).
-10 DC at night if the target has a light on them.

Here's a list of the Listen vs Move Silently modifiers:
+10 DC if the listener is in combat.
+5 DC if the target is standing still.
-5 DC if the listener is standing still.
+1 DC for every 3 meters between listener and target.
Size modifiers (tiny: +8, small: +4, medium: 0, large: -4, huge: -8).
+5 DC for every 40cm of object (including creatures) between listener and target in outdoor areas.
+2 DC in indoor areas if the line of sight is blocked and the target is within 4 tiles.
Area listen check modifiers.

as you can see, in both cases, tiny or small pcs will have a good advantage against those who's not got it, and if you take into account the d20 roll a spotter/listener gets; spotters/listeners with the same skill level as someone with hide/ms will be able to spot them without much difficulty depending on how often the skill checks are actually rolled, unless it's a tiny pc that's standing behind them far away. According to the NWN wiki, spot/hide/listen/ms skill checks are rolled every 6 seconds or every "round", but a player detects for stealth every 5 seconds as the rolls made don't include modifiers but the detecting for stealth part does.

Shadowdancing is a supernatural ability. You're already psychically bending light and shadow with your brain, so hiding with a light source is about as "plausible" as shooting fire out of your hands. The official ruling, from Tormak and Mahtan -years- ago, was that you can HIPS with a light source (because being a lightsource actually makes creating shadows within ten feet of yourself -extremely- easy) but you cannot ShadowJump (because getting -inside- of a shadow, while being a lightsource, is extremely difficult).

The game engine already applies appropriate penalties and bonuses to Hide/Spot when light is involved without requiring any further attention from the SD.

OOOOOH. Yeah I'm mis-remembering, the light thing was on shadowjump, not hips.

NinjaClarinet wrote:

Shadowdancing is a supernatural ability. You're already psychically bending light and shadow with your brain, so hiding with a light source is about as "plausible" as shooting fire out of your hands. The official ruling, from Tormak and Mahtan -years- ago, was that you can HIPS with a light source (because being a lightsource actually makes creating shadows within ten feet of yourself -extremely- easy) but you cannot ShadowJump (because getting -inside- of a shadow, while being a lightsource, is extremely difficult).

The game engine already applies appropriate penalties and bonuses to Hide/Spot when light is involved without requiring any further attention from the SD.

Yups.

I'm pretty sure most if not all of the answers to these questions are here, also.

Gravemaskin wrote:

OOOOOH. Yeah I'm mis-remembering, the light thing was on shadowjump, not hips.

You're not mis-remembering Mahtan's official stance (as of his SD thread) was that you could not HiPS if light was cast on you, a rule which I remember as I was playing an SD at the time and supported the change to the current logic. Casting light on SD's as a supposed way to stop them from HiPSing was a popular maneuver at the time for a while.

Am I the only one who thinks all these rules and restrictions and situational caveats are arbitrary, overcomplicated, and needlessly restrictive? That it's a bit absurd to expect a player to memorize a roster of minutiae in order to avoid the inevitable screams of "you're doing it wrong"?

The main rule as I've known it has always been "use logic and common sense" that covers most of the rules, and all of the good ones.

Liz wrote:

Am I the only one who thinks all these rules and restrictions and situational caveats are arbitrary, overcomplicated, and needlessly restrictive? That it's a bit absurd to expect a player to memorize a roster of minutiae in order to avoid the inevitable screams of "you're doing it wrong"?

Nope.

Analog Kid wrote:

Liz wrote:

Am I the only one who thinks all these rules and restrictions and situational caveats are arbitrary, overcomplicated, and needlessly restrictive? That it's a bit absurd to expect a player to memorize a roster of minutiae in order to avoid the inevitable screams of "you're doing it wrong"?

Nope.

Double Nope~

What's over-complicated, other than the part about having to step into a shadow to SJ?

The conversation evolved from a question about mechanical numbers into one about IC lore - all of which is homebrew because it doesn't really exists in D&D.

And Sorry, I disagree Liz. It's not any more complicated than knowing the lore of playing a Cleric, Mage, or... anything else.

The fact that it is homebrew and looks like it has changed over the years... well I'm getting a lot of that lately with DM turnover and the fact that most of them don't document anything.

Although SD stuff is some of the better documented stuff. It has multiple public threads full of DM responses, which are where the answers in the SD thread I linked are from. There are definitely ??? aspects of Amia as far as information and documentation go. SD is at the bottom of that list. :lol:

Anatida wrote:

And Sorry, I disagree Liz. It's not any more complicated than knowing the lore of playing a Cleric, Mage, or... anything else.

I guess what I mean to be saying is that a lot of this stuff feels way more like rules than lore, to me. Like, "you may only use this power when within 10 feet of a shadow other than your own which is at least half your size"... that sort of thing has a very rulesy sort of vibe to it, you know what I mean? There's no deeper content there, nothing discussing why 10 feet is the universal cutoff regardless of the relative size or power of the SD, or what's qualitatively different about the SD's own shadow as opposed to someone else's, and so on. It's just "you can't do it unless XYZ." Mage and cleric lore is all about "why" and "how" and so forth. SD lore seems to me like it's just all about "yes" or "no."

My issue with the general ruleset of SD abilities isn't that they exist, is that if someone was to come to Amia and roll a Shadowdancer, they don't get any in-game prompts as to how the abilities work under Amia rules. Something like the Paladin's Code item that gets added when you take a level in it could be added when 1 level of SD is taken that has the general shadow rules.

Because this is thread about hide, but evolved in SD discussion, which is off topic, I'll take some remarks here

Sneaking for sneaks question

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