The Nerfing of Surprise

 One tidbit in today's Fighter deep dive was a rather immense change to how Surprise works as a mechanic.

First off, I think it's notable that Surprise in 2014 5E might not work the way that you think it does. In previous editions, there was a "surprise round" that took place before combat actually started. A lot of players, I think will insist that they can perform combat actions prior to the rolling of initiative, treating it as a sort of surprise round. But that's not actually how the game works.

The current rules, instead, have a sort of "condition" called surprise. When you roll initiative to begin combat, you first determine if certain characters are surprised. Most typically, this will happen if the aggressors are hidden from the surprised creatures. For example, let's say your Ranger has cast Pass Without Trace, bumping up the party's Stealth checks by 10, and with a group check, everyone in the party surpasses the monsters' passive Perceptions. The way it works (again, this is the current rules system) is that, even if the party is unleashing their barrage of attacks, you still roll initiative before anyone actually does this.

Surprise, however, means that you cannot move or take actions (including bonus actions) on your first turn in combat, and you can't take reactions until your first turn ends.

Interestingly, this means that an enemy wizard, for example, who rolls well on initiative, might still be able to cast Shield to block your attack.

It's funny, because I think the default manner in which I think most tables play this is quite different: usually, I see a number of "out of initiative" actions taken, with the first round of combat only taking place after, say, a Fireball has already gone off and potentially killed off some of the monsters in play.

Still, the net effect here is largely the same. The key, though, is that simply telling the DM you do this before they call for initiative is not sufficient to bypass the potential to be at a later point in the turn order. Indeed, I would actually say that this could be more effective given that a surprised creature cannot take reactions until they've had their "surprised turn" on the first round of combat.

But according to Jeremy Crawford, this mechanic was too effective - given that a typical combat only lasts a handful of rounds, giving players (or a sneaky monster) a full additional round to act before their foes can is, to the designers' opinions, too big of a benefit.

Thus, the rule is now significantly simplified: a Surprised creature has disadvantage on Initiative Rolls.

This is actually kind of crazy: Advantage and Disadvantage are powerful features, but they're still fundamentally just nudging the probabilities. You might roll a natural 20 on your Stealth check, creeping up utterly unseen, but if you whiff your Initiative roll and, despite disadvantage, that Troll rolls an 18 and a 19 on their Initiative, they still get to act before you.

I will say that the saving grace here is that you will still have the Hidden condition if you succeed on your stealth checks. Thus, even if that Troll gets higher in the initiative, they won't be able to see you or know exactly where you are - I think the DM can rule whether they even know specifically what is up or if they just have a bad feeling about what's happening, or even if they waste their turn because they don't realize that they're in a fight at all.

Champion Fighters, Assassin Rogues, and eventually all Barbarians do wind up getting advantage on their initiative rolls. Because of this, they become effectively immune to being Surprised, though of course they lose out on the advantage they'd normally be getting.

Still, this will definitely make the tactical advantage of sneaking up on some monsters a bit less powerful, but also protect players from sneaky monsters as well. And I do think that Stealth remains a powerful option to avoid fights outright.

But the ambush is definitely not going to be as great as it once was.