Sneaking is op because you can start a battle with a sneak attack from Astarion and then the combat tracker is just Astarion and the enemies that saw him, or maybe only the little pillar of light that shows up.
Once Astarion gets locked into the combat tracker you can still maneuver everyone else around the enemies sight lines and get a few more alpha strikes in outside of the combat tracker. My paladin – in full plate – can walk right up to an enemy that’s frozen in the combat tracker as long as he doesn’t walk into the sight cone.
I beat dror, m, and gut in the goblin camp all without any of them taking any turns because I was able to alpha strike them into the dirt by just starting combat with the whole party sneaking, and then walking them right up outside of the combat tracker.
Is there a party that can really exploit this? Ranger, wolf barb, shadowharts +10 party sneak, and an assassin rogue? Just alpha strike everything.
The game is as hard as you want to make it. If you think it’s broken, don’t use it. Simple as. There’s enough food to long rest after every encounter. Do you do that?
Isn’t there a long rest clock, per se? Aren’t certain events dependent upon or locked behind various thresholds that way?
Sure seems like some of them should be, but from as far as I can tell from my own game and from YouTube, no.
Dammit, I’ve been restricting their use worse than ol’ Link with health potions. 🤦🏼♂️
It’s one of my biggest criticism. The premise push you toward minimizing the rest, and so does the gameplay (because it would be silly to just heal for free al the time, right?).
Turns out, I slept too little and I have so little development that required me to sleep to have them happen :(
There are points where if you long rest it will fail the encounter, but they are rare.
Verisimilitude. First time it happens it took me out of flow. Now I notice when NPCs use it against me.
To answer your question, no I don’t rest after every fight. That’s missing the point. Maybe I didn’t do a good job explaining in the post. I like nuking people. Was curious if others came across this mechanic and how they use it.
If this was criticism of the difficulty I’d say ideally every character would get locked in turn based when combat started. Stealth could also use a pass to make it a little more internally logical. I shouldn’t be able to walk undetected in plate, in half light, at 45 degrees to someone’s eyeballs. But I’m not criticizing.
Should noise and peripheral vision be things? Yes. Are they well defined in 5e? No. Is the game capable of being a great stealth game with the engine? Also no.
The biggest issue is the preciseness of the field of vision. It could probably be wider once combat has begun, but also there could be a gray area around the red where you don’t know if they can see you.
You could use:
Modding community will come up with some fun stuff. I’m pretty excited to see where that goes in the next few years.