Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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You can see fireflies off in the distance on a dark night. But they are too dim to illuminate anything.
Unless you're treating darkness as opaque (its own can of worms), that's not true in the first place. To see an object, the location it is in must be lit, there's no requirement that your own location be lit.
There is a rather large group of players and dms that say, raw you cant see a torch when you are 50 feet away, because it casts bright light 20 feet, dim lin to 40 feet, and it casts no light beyond that. And then they all homebrew something different to fix it.
My idea is to fix the rules for illumination so that raw, this is no longer a problem.
A light source, like a torch, has 3 ramges, how far it casts bright light which illuminates spacez and objects brightly, how far it casts dim light, which illuminates spaces and onjects dimly, and how far the torch itself is visible.
The visible range of the light source indicates how far away the light source is visible, and how far away any space or.creature illumiated by that source is visible.
Sun: bright light = infinite. Visible=infinite
Full moon, dim light=infinite, visible=infinite
Torch: bright=40, dim=20, visible=500
So this says out doors, during the day, you can see the sun, and you can see anything illuminated by the sun as long as you have line of sight. Outdoors, at night, you can see thr moon, and you can see anything illuminated by the moon as long az you have line of sight.
In an enclosed cave with no other light source, you can see a torch and anything illuminated by the torch to 500 ft as long as you have line of sight.
The rule is a way to model 3 levels of lighting easily. Its not a physics simulator. A physicist would read these rules and shake their head. But it creates an easy to use set of rules for players and dms to easily manage a third level of light that is just bright enough to be visible, but not bright enough to illuminate anything itself.
A torch has a visibikity range of 500 feet, so in a dark cave, a torch and anything it illuminates brightly or dimly is visible to 500 ft.
I think you might be overestimating the number of DMs that would rule that you can't see the torch from far away. I, for sure, have argued that the opaque language used leans heavily towards that being RAW, but I wouldn't rule it that way in my games.
In fact, I don't hate your solution of adding a range for visibility at all (and I think renaming—did it even have a name to begin with—the light shed to illumination is a good one).
My text fixes this by separating darkness from heavily obscured.
Thats not the source of the problem.
The source of the problem is that the description for a torch says it casts bright light to 20 feet and dim lim light to 40 feet.
Therefore, raw, it casts no light at all beyond 40 feet. Which means you cant see it.
So i basically take light sources and say the existing bright/dim ranges are how far the source will illuminate things, and add a "visible" or "perceptible" range to say how far away the torch and everything it illuminates is visible.
So if you want to sneak through a dungeon and just look for traps directly in front of you, you would want something that casts bright light to 5 feet, dim to 5, and is visible/perceptible to 5 ft.
But normal sources, like torches and lamps would have a visible range of a few hundred feet or so.
I dont rule that way in my games either, but its definitely a "vibe" ruling when i do it.
But it'd be nice to have rules that you can read and just make sense and you dont have to ponder for a long while before realizing they dont make sense and trying to fugure out how to homebrew a fix.
By separating the light source ranges into "illumination of other things" versus "how far away it is visible, even though its too dim to iluminate anything", i think it solves the 'raw makes no sense" and gives a fairly straightforward ruleset that folks can just use.
No, RAW says nothing of the sort. You cannot see an object that is in darkness, but the torch isn't in darkness, it's brightly lit, and thus visible. The only RAW limits I'm aware of for how far away you can see an illuminated object are in Perception and Encounters, and are measured in miles.
From the page you linked:
"Visibility Outdoors. When traveling outdoors, most characters can see about 2 miles in any direction on a clear day, "
I didnt see anything there about torches in a pitch black cavern...
That's correct. There are no published limits, and thus in theory they can be seen at infinite distance. Unless you decide that darkness is opaque, which produces such a wide range of nonsense that everyone decides it isn't.
"There are no published limits, and thus in theory they can be seen at infinite distance."
But "in theory" isnt the same as "written".
"Unless you decide that darkness is opaque,"
No. What is coming up is thqt if a torch only casts dim light 40 feet, that points to the inverse square law of light, so at some point the light from a torch is too dim to see.
Whereas the 2 mile range on a "clear day" is referncing the sun, which can illuminate an entire planet brightly, effectively has no limitation from distance. The sun is so bright and so far away that inverse square produces the same amount of brightness wverywhere.
I dont know what to tell you. This argument comes up every once in a while and has come up for years. And the rules are badly written, and the final line of defense is usually "the rules arent a ohysics simulator". Which, sure, but a slight tweak and a lot of the silliness goes away
As written, there are no limits and thus the DM decides appropriate limits. The realistic distance at which a light source is visible is extremely situational (it depends on just how dark the darkness actually is, and on things such as whether you're carrying a light source) and also sufficiently large to make the discussion pointless -- in total darkness, under good conditions, a candleflame is visible at a distance of several miles.
I don't think we need to relitigate the discussion of whether RAW darkness is opaque or not here ;).
You've both given me some things to mull over, though. I'll have to rewrite up those thoughts to see them all together to check of coherence, but thank you for the discussion.
Hm.... if you just say that a light source is visible 10 times the distance it casts dim light, then you dont even have to update the equipment list, and the math is easy to do in your head.
You could also then do Half-Obscured and Three-Quarter-Obscured features, like natural fog, is the multiplied by 10. It's also not perfect, but gives a quick consistent answer.
a torch throws dim light 40 feet and is visible to 400 feet. If you're looking at a torch in half-obscured fog, take half the visible distance, meaning a torch is visible to 200 feet in half-obscured fog. In three-quarter obscured fog, its visible to 100 feet.
It's not a physics simulator, BUT its actually very fast and easy to calculate, and it would always be consistent, meaning players can plan for it and plan around it.
Nothing else in the game says in general how far away it can be seen, why should light sources be different? And a mere 10x is absurdly short.
As a side note, if I may, I had brought up the idea of giving a PC the ability to keep advantage if they started the turn hidden a while ago now (many TT wargames do something like this), and I think I got a response that it would be too abusable. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm also unsure how that would interact with my take on Invisibility. Thoughts on that aspect of my homebrew?
To summarize, a hidden creature uses it's Hide Score as a DC for passive perception to notice them sneaking up on them during the turn they leave cover to attack in melee.