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).