When I first start playing and Dungeon Mastering (DM’ing) Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition a couple of years ago, I remember one of the most confusing aspects about playing is the rule about Surprise when it came to rolling Initiative. Did it make sense narratively? Sure. But mechanically it was so meticulous and clunky and time consuming to get it set up just so you can actually start the first round of combat.

Watch the video version of this article below.

How Surprise Worked In 5th Edition

In most cases, surprise is achieved through a party being stealthy. If you’re not familiar with this, here’s generally how surprise works for Initiative in D&D 5th Edition (2014 rules), which is always determined by the DM:

• Anyone who is attempting to sneak makes a Stealth check.
• The surprisers’ stealth rolls are compared to the Passive Perception score of the people they’re attempting to surprise. Any creature whose Passive Perception is below the Stealth roll of the ambushing creature has the “Surprised” condition. Otherwise, they don’t get the Surprise benefit on that creature*
  • *”That creature” is used here because if you have different creatures with different Passive Perception scores, then you’re having to figure out who gets surprised by who since they may get surprised by some player characters but not others.
• Everyone rolls initiative. The DM creates the Initiative order list based on their rolls.
• In the first round of combat, you go through Initiative order as normal with the following differences:
  • Those who are surprised cannot move or take an action on their first turn of combat. So their turn ends as soon as it starts.
  • Those who are surprised can take a reaction after their turn ends (this part often gets overlooked or confused with the end of the round instead of turn).
• Combat resumes as usual when the 2nd round begins.

*please note that this is the most common situation for surprise. There’s other ways surprise can happen. There’s also a whole discourse on “There isn’t a surprise round in 5e,” which is an entirely different discussion.

If you followed all of that and still with me here, you have either done this many times before or have a really high Constitution score.

Needless to say, this was clearly trying to create a sense of immersion but got really confusing very quickly and made combat go slower at the beginning.

New Surprise Rule In 2024 5th Edition

So when the Player’s Handbook for 2024 came out, I was happy to see that they decided to change how surprise is determined. Now (for most situations), all that a party needs to do to surprise an enemy is to either succeed on a Stealth Check that has a set Difficulty Class (DC) of 15 (so no more looking up and comparing Passive Perception scores) or another situation that a DM may rule as surprising the enemy or initiates combat, such as a kobold artificer interrupting an enemy’s speech by attacking with a firebolt (which in this case, only the kobold gets to claim surprise and roll Initiative with advantage if the DM deems it so).

So I love that change. More straightforward, easy to determine, gives DMs flexibility on determining this, gets to combat more quickly.

But then I read what the consequence was when someone is surprised:

 If a combatant is surprised by combat starting, that combatant has Disadvantage on their Initiative roll.

When I first read this, I felt a bit underwhelmed by this. Having Disadvantage on an Initiative roll wasn’t consequential enough in my eyes. Only affecting your order in Initiative didn’t really feel like a result of being surprised. There’s also the argument that someone with Disadvantage could still roll high enough and go higher in the initiative order than someone who does a straight d20 roll and rolled poorly. So then there was no real result of the surprise when that happens and it felt like it was just a lost opportunity even if you executed a great plan to surprise them.

So, I thought about what I could do to give Surprise a more “consequential” feel.

My Attempt In Making Surprise Feel More Consequential

My first thought was, “Well if they have Disadvantage for being surprised, then the surprisers should get Advantage on their roll.” Not exactly equivalent to what we had in 2014 but at least it adds to it, right?

But then you get those pesky classes like Barbarian (my favorite) and Rogue’s Assassin who at certain levels will get Advantage on Initiative rolls. So that doesn’t really give them an additional benefit that way. Plus the new rules for Hiding says if you are Hiding, you have the Invisible condition, which means you get to roll advantage if you’re hiding at the start of Initiative. So if you caused the Surprise, you inherently get that benefit.

So I thought “Okay, well what if we said ‘If the surprisers already have advantage on initiative rolls, then they can add their proficiency bonus.’” Brilliant! I love it.

Except, that’s what the Alert Origin Feat gives. So a player may feel cheated out of that benefit if they take that feat.

Okay then, so let’s say if the surprisers already had Initiative advantage as part of a feature or feat, and they can already add their proficiency bonus, what if we allowed them to have advantage on their attacks on their first round of combat?

Yes! Great idea!

… but then what about the Barbarian’s Reckless Attacks, or Rogues or Sorcerers or the new Weapon Mastery Vex property. So that became a potential downhill spiral.

So then I thought, “Well, what about…” and it was at this point I realized that I was basically reconstructing what made the 2014 rules of Surprise so frustrating.

Resolving Surprise Attacks With The 2024 Surprise Rule

To be open and honest, this next section wasn’t originally part of my article. I was actually done at this point. But after I wrote this article, I was in the Dungeons & Dragons Official Discord and someone posted a scenario they recently ran into when running a game as a Dungeon Master:

An NPC archer is hundreds of feet from the target.

The target does not detect the archer and fails its roll.

Can the archer attack before initiative happens?

In this scenario using the 2024 rules, what should happen is that initiative is rolled with the surprised party rolling at disadvantage and the surprising party rolls with advantage. But the DM actually had the surprising NPC get an attack off before initiative was rolled and the players had concerns about this because they felt like the new rules weren’t applied here.

Honestly, this is probably going to happen a lot. What the DM did here is reasonable given the situation and what was historically done in many games of Dungeons & Dragons. The players were also reasonable in their concerns as well, and this is where we start to see one downfall of the new Surprise rule. Although the designers were trying to make it more straightforward but also give more freedom in running these scenarios, it also leaves ambiguity that can be challenging for some tables to resolve.

So in our discussion about this situation, here are a few suggestions that I think are good (albeit not perfect) options that tables can implement at their table.

Option 1: Adopting & Adapting The Baldur’s Gate III Method

This method is taken from the recent popular Dungeons & Dragons video game, Baldur’s Gate III. My suggestion isn’t going to be 100% reflective of what they do in the video game, but it will be adapted to the w2024 5th edition rules in a way that I think can be a good option for everyone at the table. (If you’re not familiar, here is how Surprise Attacks work in Baldur’s Gate III).

Using the scenario above, here is what this option looks like:

1. Have the character attempting to make a surprise attack roll a Stealth Check (DC 15).
2. If that character is successful, they can attempt an Attack or Magic action on a character that has not noticed them.
   • Doing so will initiate combat after the attack is resolved, and will also count as that character’s action for their first turn in combat (they will still have movement and bonus action if they wish)
3. After the Attack/Magic actions succeeds or fail, everyone rolls for Initiative.
   • The Surprised characters roll with disadvantage
   • The characters who succeeded on their Stealth check that didn’t initiate combat rolls with advantage
   • The character who initiated combat with their action in the Stealth Attack does not roll, even if they have a feat or feature that allows them to roll for Initiative since attacking gives away your location.

Again, this is not perfect, and you can even use this and change whatever you like to what you and your table thinks is reasonable. But the idea here is to try to make it clear how this situation will get resolved that everyone can be happy with. I feel like this helps make things fair by having the surpriser use their action on their first turn of combat.

Option 2: Use Initiative Scores

Although not a new mechanic in Dungeons and Dragons, the 2024 Dungeon Master Guide provides an option for Dungeon Masters to use for Initiative called Initiative Scores. If you’re not familiar with this idea, this functions like a Passive Initiative, where the DM and players can create a standard Initiative score to use instead of rolling the dice for Initiative. Every character/creature would start with a baseline score of 10. Then you would add modifiers, buffs, debuffs, etc. to that score. So if a character has a DEX modifier of +3, then their score would get bumped up to 13. If they have Advantage on Initiative rolls either because of a feat or feature they have, or because of the current situation (such as succeeding on their Stealth check to surprise their enemy), then they get a +5 to their score. Conversely, if someone was surprised, they get a -5 to their score.

Using Initiative Scores does two things here that I think is helpful to the Discord scenario. First, using this list eliminates the possibility of rolls not going in favor of the character/party that is doing the surprising. The DM in the scenario had a concern (which I brought up earlier in this article) that if the rolls were bad for Initiative, then the characters who were surprised could still technically go in turn before the surpriser and interrupt the stealth attack, even though they technically shouldn’t have been able to. Using Initiative Scores helps reduce the chances of that happening by not relying on dice rolls but instead on passive scores based on their attributes and other factors.

The second reason why this is helpful is this gives DMs a tool to make surprise feel more natural in the rare case that a surprised character is still higher than the surpriser in Initiative. Let me explain what I mean here.

In the new rules, if a DM has an NPC that succeeded on their stealth check, then technically the players won’t know that the NPC is there. But if you have your players roll initiative without an observable effect for the players, then this can lead to confusion. Let’s say that characters are in a castle and they’re talking to the guard, and they didn’t notice the stealth NPC aggressor in the rafters who is about to attack them with their bow and arrow. Following the new rules, you call for initiative but the players don’t really know why that’s happening until you tell them they’re rolling with disadvantage. Well, even though they can now deduce that they’re getting surprised, they won’t really know why until the NPC shows up. But if they rolled higher than the NPC, then they go before them. But in this scenario, the player shouldn’t know they’re getting surprised yet, so they either have to ignore this and do something awkwardly on their turn (e.g. “I just keep talking to the guard, I guess”) or they now might say their character wants to search for something even though nothing in the story really prompts it.

Using Initiative Scores, you no longer need to ask players to Roll for Initiative. In the scenario above, if a character is placed higher in the Initiative order than the surpriser, you can help guide the scene naturally without calling to the players’ attention what is happening until the attack happens. Essentially, as the DM, you can use the Initiative Score list to direct the scene until the surprise attack happens.

Let’s say the Initiative Order looks like this, from first to last: Player Character 2, Player Character 1, Sneaky NPC, Guard. The Sneaky NPC is the one that is doing a stealth attack, but they’re still lower in the initiative order. Here’s how the scene can play out for you as the Dungeon Master:

Player Character 1: I ask the guard if they’ve seen our dwarven friend Gundren.

Dungeon Master: The guard says they haven’t seen anyone lately that fits that description. (Looks to Player 1) At this moment, what is your character doing?

Player Character 2: My character is going to read through the posts on the Quest board to see if there’s anything of interest there.
Dungeon Master: Sounds good. (Looks to Player 1) Does your character want to ask the guard anything else or would they like to do something different?

Player Character 1: My character is going to thank the guard and then also look at the Quest board.

Dungeon Master: As your characters are looking at the board, Player Character 2 gets struck by an arrow. You turn around and you see that there’s an archer in the rafters. The guard is going to then attempt to sound the alarm. That now ends the first round of combat since the archer got a stealth attack on you. We are now going to start round 2 of combat, and here’s the order…

In this situation, the players didn’t know there was an archer because the NPC rolled high enough on their stealth check. They did what their character would do, and essentially their first round of combat has taken place by implementing the Initiative Score and surprise. Then instead of rolling Initiative, they just keep going in the order that was already predetermined. This allows for a surprise to feel natural and not disrupt the game, getting into combat immediately.

I personally think this is a great option. It does require the DM to make sure they are doing this in a natural way that won’t call players attention to this in the future if they direct the scene this way only in this kind of situation but if this is your style of DM’ing, this will work really well for you.

Option 3: Adding The Unseen Attackers And Target Rule

Another option that the table can have is a bit more straightforward that can help reduce the inconsequential effect of high initiative rolls, and that is remembering the Unseen Attackers And Target rule:

When you make an attack roll against a target you can’t see, you have Disadvantage on the roll. This is true whether you’re guessing the target’s location or targeting a creature you can hear but not see. If the target isn’t in the location you targeted, you miss.

When a creature can’t see you, you have Advantage on attack rolls against it.

If you are hidden when you make an attack roll, you give away your location when the attack hits or misses.

When you implement this rule, you then help increase the chances that the surpriser gets their attack off without interruption by giving advantage on initiative roll and attack on their first turn, and disadvantage on initiative and first turn attacks to the surprisers who go before them.

Now, is this 100% guaranteed? No. Does it still get weirdly metagamey since the players now know there’s an NPC that they shouldn’t have been able to see until they attack? Yes, but the chances of them hitting are still low. As a DM, you could also add a condition where you tell the players they cannot see this NPC until the NPC’s turn is over (since you would do the same if their character got the drop on an NPC), but it still poses the problem of what the character should do if they don’t notice this character yet.

Record The House Rules Interpretation

Ideally, the DM should have this conversation with their players before they start their campaign. This way everyone can agree to how to resolve this if the situation occurs. But if you’re already playing in a campaign and the situation arises, have a conversation with your table on how all of you would like to rule this, then document this interpretation. The House Rules Interpretation document is a suggestion from the 2024 Dungeon Master Guide, which I strongly support. It allows everyone to review those interpretations so they know how to resolve this that’s consistent with previous rulings. This will definitely look different from table to table, but having a table conversation about this allows everyone agency to buy into the new rules or interpretation of it, thus allowing you all to enjoy the game.

Conclusion

So looking back at this new rule for Surprise at Initiative, I’ve learned to love it. Sure, it’s not as consequential as an actual surprise attack, but I’d rather take the more straight forward approach to get right into combat rather than taking 20 minutes to determine what happens in the first six seconds of combat.

And that’s what some of these new changes have been about if you’ve been reading the new books. It’s about making it accessible, straight forward, and focusing on the fun, which I think the new rules accomplishes that here.

I think the suggestions listed here for how to resolve some of the Surprise situations that may occur are good options as well that can at least give you a starting point for a conversation with your table. Each suggestion has its advantages and disadvantages, but if the players and DM can agree to this, that’s what matters the most.