I seriously recommend taking a step back and examining your stealth system. It's awkward. It has rules holes. Please think before you write.You Lost me stop instinctively arguing and listen because I am definitely right and you are definitely wrong. Stealth is the pre-awareness game. The stealth game begins before the defenders are aware it is occurring. The game ends when the defenders are aware it is occuring. You keep placing the action on the defenders side and that is wrong because once the defenders are declaring actions the game is over.
OK, now you have created a brand new and equally insane problem. The PC runs out in the courtyard to hide, Guard A says "look for him!". Guard A and B now look for the PC. Apparently the stealth game is over(???) despite the fact that the PC has yet to be found. If your system doesn't handle hiding in the middle of combat it is not a good system.Even if the two people you are sneaking past are deaf and mute and literally incapable of communicating the existence of more than once person's sight lines are harder to avoid than one person's sight line. Action you take to avoid person 1 makes it possible that you reveal yourself to person 2 so they attack the same hp. Both of their existence makes stealthing harder on you. "But why isn't it even harder when both of them are working together to find you?" I hear you say but that question makes no sense in context and that's what you need to realize. No one is working together to find you. No one is doing anything at you. You are undetected. When the stealth game is happening you are not there in the eyes of the defender. The Hobgoblins exist and will react when they see you but until you run out of stealth hp they do not see you. The cooperative nature of the guards when they know something is happening doesn't matter in the state where they definitionally don't know something is happening.
It really does because they do get to make choices. Being on watch is a thing. Looking for people you are tracking is a thing. I didn't argue against that because I assumed your system wasn't so crazy that people knowing your general vicinity make it crash and burn.It doesn't matter because neither is allowed to make choices. They are both static defenses and they have to be that way if the game is to work. Imagine this from the opposite side. If the PC's have made camp and set someone on watch the stealth game will function if an enemy Warg makes stealth checks against a PC but it will absolutely not function if you tell the PC "You are being stealthed by something you can't see yet, what do you do". That sentence is the end of the stealth game, not the start of it. To summarize; The defenders in the stealth game can NEVER make choices in it if the game is to work.
That is actually completely unlike the current circumstances, and the fact that you think they're similar betrays the fact that you don't even understand your own system.I understand that I haven't written a complete rules system here. I never said if people get notice penalties when they are sleeping or bonuses if they're "On Patrol" or "Alerted" or whatever. It is definitely true that I have not written out an entire working subsystem with all details covered but when we're just talking about getting the basic concept of a thing across that shouldn't be required yet. It's as if I described d20's basic attack and damage rolls to you and you've declared them nonfunctional because I didn't describe what happens if you attack from higher ground, or if you attack someone's eyes.
Please write out your quantum stealth system. Please make sure it has some way of not exploding when someone uses an active spot check or knows the general vicinity where to look, and please demonstrate how two people will both know your location simultaneously when your stealth HP hits zero despite refusing to communicate at all. And don't forget it should have some benefit over static values, because that is what got the whole conversation started.