One of my favourite things about Pathfinder 2e is its Alternative Initiative Skills rule. It’s a simple and intuitive guideline for making character skills more valuable and pulling in “exploration”/non-combat mode activities and behaviours into combat initialization.
For those who haven’t played the game before, while there’s a default initiative roll that everyone can use at the start of combat based off of your Perception modifier, you can also use whatever skill modifier maps onto the task you were doing at the time of initiative if you, or your GM, chooses. So, if you’re a Barbarian busting down a door, you can roll Athlethics for initiative, or if you’re a Cleric pre-casting Shield, you can roll Religion.
This is all pretty simple, straight-forward, and elegant until you get to someone who is sneaking at initiative, because Avoid Notice – PF2’s formal name for the ‘sneaking around’ Action in exploration mode – interacts with everyone else’s Perception DC (PF2’s proxy for Passive Perception). Checks, attacks, and skill rolls in PF2 are always done against a DC; the system never does contested rolls for these. This means trying to avoid being detected by someone is always done by rolling a Stealth check against the Perception DCs of anyone around who might be able to reasonably notice them. So, if you roll Stealth for initiative, and you beat all of the enemies’ Perception DCs, none of them should notice you. None of them should know you exist.
But initiative is a contested roll. It’s the only contested roll in the game, RAW. And, as mentioned, the default ability for rolling initiative in PF2 is Perception. Why? Because it’s supposed to represent you noticing that the other creatures in the room are about to throw hands. And now we have a Perception roll contesting a Stealth roll.
This is where things fall apart. This opens the door to the hiding character beating their opponent’s Perception DC – and so, being unnoticed – while the opponent rolls higher on initiative. What are you supposed to do in this case, where the hider has successfully hidden, but the perceiver succeeds in noticing?
Much to my perpetual bemusement and frustration, GM Core suggests that the opponent just… knows someone is out there.
GM Core pg. 25: To determine whether someone is undetected by other participants in the encounter, you still compare their Stealth check for initiative to the Perception DC of their enemies. They’re undetected by anyone whose DC they meet or exceed. So what do you do if someone rolls better than everyone else on initiative, but all their foes beat their Perception DC? Well, all the enemies are undetected, but not unnoticed. That means the participant who rolled high still knows someone is around and can start moving about, Seeking, and otherwise preparing to fight.
So, why does it do this?
Well, biggest reason is probably that PF2 doesn’t have surprise rounds. Instead, it uses its regular stealth system to handle this.
The in-text reason is subtle, and likely won’t be picked up by someone who isn’t familiar with the game’s stealth rules. Pathfinder 2e has five different awareness/perception states for creatures: Noticed, Concealed, Hidden, Undetected, and Unnoticed. These states are relative to the viewer+viewed pair. The first three are fairly straight forward and intuitive: Noticed creatures are in plain sight, unobscured, and viewed by the viewer; Concealed creatures are seen, and their location is known, but there is something obscuring the viewer’s view, making their position seem a little “fuzzy”; and Hidden creatures are not seen by the viewer, but their location is known. The Undetected and Unnoticed states, though, are often a bit of a stumbling block, because, by name, they appear to be synonymous. They’re actually significantly different, though. An Undetected creature is one that the viewer knows to exist, but that they do not know the location of, while an Unnoticed creature is one that they don’t know exists at all.
If you review the quoted block of text above, you’ll probably pick up on the fact that the authors are very careful to say that the character that succeeds on their Stealth roll is undetected, is careful about the use of unnoticed, and goes out of their way to avoid other synonyms. Beating the enemy’s Perception DC on initiative rolls makes you Undetected, and not Unnoticed.
But that’s not how people use it anywhere else in the game. Outside of initiative, if you roll Stealth and beat the other creature’s Perception DC, you’re usually going to be Unnoticed. If you beat the guard’s Perception DC, you’re going to be allowed to sneak on by without them paying you any attention.
So, why does it work this way with initiative? The books don’t say definitively, but I’m pretty sure it’s because if you tell your players to roll initiative when you haven’t told them that there’s anything around, they will assume there’s something hiding in the shadows. Most GMs don’t just randomly throw players into initiative, and most players don’t want to be thrown into initiative with no payoff. Hidden enemies are Undetected by default, because players can’t ignore the metacontext of the encounter (nor should they).
But GM Core presents this as a symmetrical situation, and it shouldn’t be. The stealth initiative rules are set up this way for good meta reasons, but the GM should be working to a higher standard vis-a-vis metagaming. There are no in-fiction reasons why these Stealth rolls should have different outcomes from any others.
So, how should this play out?
First of all, in the majority of cases, at least one player is going to either fail their Stealth roll and be perceived, or they’re going to opt to roll with some other skill or ability, so it’ll be a moot case. The NPCs will have a reason to investigate the shadows. But if the whole party rolls Stealth for initiative, and the whole party beats the first NPC’s Perception DC, but fails to beat their initiative roll, I think that NPC should pass on its turn. I will generally roleplay whatever it is that they were doing for 3 Actions, and then pass the baton off to the next character. Eventually, we’ll either get to an NPC whose Perception DC was high enough to actually notice that something’s afoot, or we’ll reach a PC, who will probably make sure all of the NPCs are in the know.
This provides opportunities for the players to passively observe their targets for a moment without being in the reactive state of “Oh Shit, It’s My Turn”, and also rewards players with a little extra reward for having tried something as a unit and unanimously succeeding. Plus, it side-steps the invalidating and disappointing feeling of having a ‘win’ stolen away, which is what succeeding on your Stealth roll but having your enemy know you’re there anyway does.