The Hide Action: A Rule That Can’t Fully Commit

The new Hide action in the 2024 Player’s Handbook is trying to solve a real problem, and it does, partially, in a way that creates a new one. The flat DC 15 is a sensible floor. The invisibility language is a mess. And the gap between those two things is where your table is going to have arguments.

The Rule

Hiding is now a discrete action. To attempt it, you need to be out of an enemy’s line of sight, or have at least three-quarters cover. You make a Dexterity (Stealth) check against a flat DC 15. If you succeed, you become invisible, but your location is not unknown. Creatures can still search for you. If an enemy determines your location, you lose the invisible condition.

The PHB also specifies that you can use the Hide action to sneak past a guardian, which explicitly implies you can move while hidden. This is not a contradiction, but it is a tension the rules never fully resolve.

Reference the 2024 Player’s Handbook, Chapter 1 (Playing the Game), under Actions.

Common Misreadings

The biggest one is treating invisible and location unknown as the same condition. They are not, and the 2024 rules make that explicit in a way the 2014 rules never did clearly. Being invisible means you can’t be seen. Having an unknown location means enemies don’t know where to aim. You can be invisible and still have a known location. You can have an unknown location without being invisible. The Hide action only gives you the first one. This distinction matters the moment anyone asks, “Can I still attack the rogue if I know they’re behind the barrel?”

The second misreading is assuming the flat DC 15 replaces the Perception contest entirely. It doesn’t. DC 15 is the threshold for the Hide attempt itself. Creatures can still use their action to Search, making a Wisdom (Perception) check, to try to find you. The DC 15 is a new hurdle, not a replacement for being found.

Edge Cases

The three-quarters cover clause is genuinely strange. The rule says you need to be out of an enemy’s line of sight, then says you can also hide with three-quarters cover. Three-quarters cover does not break line of sight. So either this is a deliberate mechanical exception (you can be seen but still hide effectively), or it contradicts the line-of-sight requirement, and the rules don’t adjudicate which one wins. Our read is that it’s intentional, a nod toward the “you can hide in the shadows even if someone can technically see your outline” interpretation, but we’d understand a DM ruling the other way.

Movement while hidden is the deeper problem. If hiding makes you invisible but not location-unknown, and you can move while hidden, what does a creature know about your position mid-movement? The last known location makes intuitive sense as a baseline, but the rules don’t say that. If you Hide behind a pillar and then walk ten feet to a different pillar, did the creature’s knowledge of your location update? Expire? Stay fixed? There is no answer here. You are going to make a call at the table and it will be right because it has to be.

The sneak attack loop for rogues is worth addressing separately. The DC 15 does add a roll to the cycle, but any rogue with a reasonable Dexterity modifier and proficiency clears DC 15 with room to spare by level three. This is not a meaningful nerf for a well-built character. It is, however, a useful tool for newer DMs who needed explicit language to push back on hiding in a featureless hallway. The rule gives you a framework to say “there’s nothing to hide behind” without having to invent a ruling from scratch.

At the Table

Treat the invisible condition and the location-unknown condition as separate trackers. We’d suggest making this explicit to your players: hiding makes you invisible, but if I think it’s reasonable that a creature knows roughly where you are, I’ll tell you. This isn’t a gotcha; it’s a transparency call that keeps the table from arguing over whether the guard “should have” known.

For the movement problem, we’d default to last-known-location plus reasonable inference. If you hid, then clearly moved (your footsteps, a knocked-over torch, whatever), the creature’s knowledge updates to wherever the evidence points. If you moved silently in a way that left no trace, the original location is stale. This isn’t in the rules. It’s common sense dressed up as adjudication, and that’s fine.

On the DC 15 itself: resist the urge to scale it by environment. We know it feels wrong that hiding in a pitch-black room costs the same roll as hiding in an open field at noon. But the Search action and the passive Perception rules exist to handle that asymmetry. If the environment makes finding someone trivially easy, their passive Perception handles it. If it makes finding someone nearly impossible, they probably don’t bother searching. The DC 15 is the cost of entry; everything else is the context around it.

One place to be decisive: if there is genuinely nowhere to hide, you cannot hide. DC 15 is a floor, not a magic number that lets a rogue vanish into thin air in a room with no furniture, no shadows, and three enemies watching them. The rule requires being out of line of sight or having cover. No cover, no action. That part, at least, is written clearly.