Does not include any verbiage about advantage/disadvantage being negated if the target can somehow see (i.e. it's the same problem invisibility had in 2014).
Does not explicitly state that abilities requiring sight cannot be used, though that's arguably implicit in the "cannot see" header.
Does not actually say that you cannot see through cover. This usually doesn't matter due to line of effect rules, but matters for abilities such as misty step.
Because it causes observers to be blinded, anyone with condition immunity (blinded) is in fact immune to all forms of heavily obscured, which is probably not the intent.
If you look for someone in a heavily obscured area, you are suddenly unable to see anything (you're not blinded to the creature in the area... you're just blinded). Conversely, if you aren't looking for them, you can see them without penalty.
The requirements of 'no line of sight' and 'obscured or 3/4 or better cover' are largely redundant, and where not redundant (3/4 cover does not break line of sight, nor does transparent cover) are contradictory.
If you lose the prerequisites for hiding, are you no longer hidden? It looks like the intent is for a hidden creature to be able to jump out of hiding and gain the benefits (see for example tiger) but it's probably not the intent that you can just walk out from cover and remain hidden indefinitely.
This is one of two rules (the other being invisible) that talks about discerning concealed creatures. Unknown if this is intended to be the same as invisible.
None of these are particularly hard to clean up, and with the exception of hiding the intent is fairly obvious, but the rest of it could use an editing pass.
Could solve the above problems by giving some sort of immunity to blinded. Doesn't do so.
If you have Blindsight, you can see within a specific range without relying on physical sight.. Within that range, you can see anything that isn’t behind Total Cover even if you have the Blinded condition or are in Darkness.
If you have Blindsight, you can see within a specific range without relying on physical sight.. Within that range, you can see anything that isn’t behind Total Cover even if you have the Blinded condition or are in Darkness.
Yes, but that does not give immunity to blinded and thus does not negate the "attacks affected" part of the Blinded status effect.
Does not require opaque cover. If you're behind a transparent wall (such as a wall of force), you can hide.
To try to conceal yourself you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight.
That has the problem that (a) 3/4 cover does not break line of sight so why are they mentioning it, and (b) why do they bother with any other requirements.
Does not actually say that you cannot see through cover. This usually doesn't matter due to line of effect rules, but matters for abilities such as misty step.
I don't think that there's any problem with this. Whether or not you can see through a particular obstacle will depend on what it is. You don't need a rule to specify whether or not you can see through a tree trunk, or whatever it is -- that's handled on a case-by-case basis. If you are able to see through a glass window then you can teleport to locations that you can see through that window with misty step, and I think that's intentional.
Because it causes observers to be blinded, anyone with condition immunity (blinded) is in fact immune to all forms of heavily obscured, which is probably not the intent.
This one is especially bad. It's even worse than you are saying. It's the area that's heavily obscured and opaque. How does that make me have the blinded condition at all?
So, if I am standing in a perfectly clear and well-lit space and I am attempting to look into a nearby fog cloud because I think that I dropped something in there and I am looking for it . . . and now a person standing next to me who is also in the perfectly clear and well-lit space decides to attack me -- he now has advantage because I have the blinded condition? That's incredibly baffling.
Does not require opaque cover. If you're behind a transparent wall (such as a wall of force), you can hide.
If you lose the prerequisites for hiding, are you no longer hidden? It looks like the intent is for a hidden creature to be able to jump out of hiding and gain the benefits (see for example tiger) but it's probably not the intent that you can just walk out from cover and remain hidden indefinitely.
The new Hide rules are an absolute Cluster.
Are you suggesting that the intended idea is that the "game" checks for whether or not you are Hidden at specific moments, such as at the beginning of your turn and at the end of your turn or something? For example, is there an assumption that an enemy can only "find" you on that enemy's turn and not on your turn? And that if he didn't see you on his turn then you can take your entire turn without him seeing you regardless of what you are doing? That would be a massive design change, and I don't actually see anything like that written anywhere.
But, in addition to this tiger example, someone in another thread mentioned the Rogue Thief Supreme Sneak ability, where the wording seems to suggest that your location at the end of your turn is somehow the relevant test for whether or not you remain hidden.
Super baffling. It feels like they need to completely start over when it comes to Hiding, it doesn't even seem fixable by simple errata at this point.
Does not require opaque cover. If you're behind a transparent wall (such as a wall of force), you can hide.
To try to conceal yourself you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight.
That has the problem that (a) 3/4 cover does not break line of sight so why are they mentioning it, and (b) why do they bother with any other requirements.
Since seeing the new rules I've been under the impression that the entire reason why the three-quarters cover bit was added to the Hide action was because that should make it possible to "pop out" from behind cover to quickly execute a ranged attack while still hidden. Because previously there were lengthy debates about whether or not you could simply position yourself behind cover without hiding in order to gain the benefits of the Unseen Attackers rule, but the argument was that as soon as you pop out to make your attack in that case you are no longer Unseen. To me, this was a positive change because it gives an incentive to Hide rather than just trying to be Unseen behind total cover. The problem is, it's not exactly written like that and it feels like someone along the way in the development cycle didn't fully understand why the three-quarters cover bit was added, so it got lumped in with the prerequisites for attempting to hide -- which really, the prerequisites are just trying to say that you need to be Unseen in order to attempt to Hide.
Something resembling guidelines for when this is intended to be used would be welcome. In particular, does it interact with hiding?
In my opinion, Passive Perception has changed pretty dramatically in 2024. I think that it has been intentionally removed from any interaction with Hiding and that was replaced by the DC 15 requirement.
But what happened is that a lot of other related mechanics were removed also. Mechanics such as group checks and (all other) passive checks in general are just gone now. Ability score contests seem to be eliminated also, which is how passive perception was used in the surprise and hiding rules in 2014. In fact, in the entire "Playing the Game" section of the rules, passive perception is never mentioned. But passive perception does make a minor appearance later on in the rules, and it still appears in monster stat blocks, but it's unclear why. The character creation section has a small description about how to calculate your passive perception and the same information appears in the Glossary, but that's pretty much it.
For example, there used to be a subsection in Chapter 8 Adventuring that discussed "Activity While Traveling" where you could designate your activity to be that you were "Noticing Threats". OR, you could say that you were doing some other activity such as Navigating, Mapping, Tracking or Foraging. BUT if you did that . . .
"Characters who turn their attention to other tasks as the group travels are not focused on watching for danger. These characters don’t contribute their passive Wisdom (Perception) scores to the group’s chance of noticing hidden threats."
This implied that once upon a time there was once a mechanism for determining group surprise before the final release of the 2014 rules. And that characters doing such tasks would essentially have a Passive Perception score of 0 and would therefore always be surprised by any monster who was attempting to be stealthy. I'm not sure if anyone actually played that way, but those rules were there.
Well, in 2024, all of this has been essentially eliminated. There no longer even seems to be a concept of "Noticing Threats" any longer in the rules -- for example, the surprise mechanic and the prerequisites for being surprised have been completely changed. It seems that Passive Perception is no longer a part of that equation any longer.
The rules say that passive perception is used to notice "something". But notice what exactly? Can this include noticing threats?
The Search action mentions that Perception should be used to detect a "concealed creature or object" and the Perception skill is described as "using a combination of senses, notice something that's easy to miss". The 2024 Perception skill has a hyperlink back to the 2014 description of it (I'm not sure if that's intended or not) which says all of this:
"Your Wisdom (Perception) check lets you spot, hear, or otherwise detect the presence of something. It measures your general awareness of your surroundings and the keenness of your senses. For example, you might try to hear a conversation through a closed door, eavesdrop under an open window, or hear monsters moving stealthily in the forest. Or you might try to spot things that are obscured or easy to miss, whether they are orcs lying in ambush on a road, thugs hiding in the shadows of an alley, or candlelight under a closed secret door."
So, if active perception checks can detect all of these things, including hidden threats, can a passive perception check also do this? I don't see why not, but it's not really clear. And with the DC 15 requirement to hide, a lot of passive perception scores become meaningless in that context anyway. For example, why do all of these monsters have stat blocks with passive perception scores below 15? What is the purpose of those? Who knows.
To make a long story short, I agree that it has become pretty unclear what to do with Passive Perception.
Are you suggesting that the intended idea is that the "game" checks for whether or not you are Hidden at specific moments, such as at the beginning of your turn and at the end of your turn or something?
"At the end of any turn, if an enemy has clear line of sight on you, you are no longer hiding" (or words to similar effect) probably accomplishes what they were trying to do. It means that you can jump out of cover and attack someone from stealth, or dart from bush to bush without being revealed, or lie in wait by a doorway and ambush people who come through the door, and if someone guesses where you are and runs adjacent to you they'll probably have disadvantage on their attack (but they might just go running past you without seeing you), but you aren't able to just turn permanently unseen.
If you have Blindsight, you can see within a specific range without relying on physical sight.. Within that range, you can see anything that isn’t behind Total Cover even if you have the Blinded condition or are in Darkness.
Yes, but that does not give immunity to blinded and thus does not negate the "attacks affected" part of the Blinded status effect.
Yeah you evidently shouldn't have any adverse effect if they can still see while Blinded.
While you have the Blinded condition, you can’t see and automatically fail any ability check that requires sight. Unless some ability specifies otherwise, treat all targets as unseen.
An area of Darkness is Heavily Obscured. See also “Heavily Obscured” and chapter 1 (“Exploration”). Unlike most forms of heavy obscurement, mundane darkness is not opaque.
The contents of a heavily obscured area cannot be seen; unless some ability specifies otherwise, treat all targets in a heavily obscured area as unseen. Most heavy obscurement is also opaque, making it impossible to see through or out of the area.
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while outside of any enemy's line of sight; this normally requires you to be Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
(other paragraphs unchanged... they're problematic but I don't know quite what they're meant to say).
An invisible creature is not automatically seen, but may be seen with special senses, or in any other way specified by the ability that granted the condition. If no ability allows seeing them, treat them as unseen.
I think blinded is conditional. I.e. if you can't see you have the blinded condition. If somehow you can see you wouldn't be blinded any longer. The key is you have to look into the heavily obscureded area to be blinded. I believe most of the ways to avoid this don't fall into looking into a heavily obscureded area.
So basically I think the idea is see invisibility would not help you see a creature in a heavily obscureded area as it deals with the invisible condition not the blinded condition.
The key is when looking into a heavily obscureded area you are blinded. With blindsight you can see within range, so you are not blinded within range. You are blinded outside of that range.
"You have the Blinded condition while trying to see something in a Heavily Obscured space."
I think folks are intentionally trying to twist this up to say that the creature has the blinded condition when looking at something in a NOT heavily obscured space just because there is a heavily obscured space they could look at if they wanted to ...
It seems pretty clear that you have the blinded condition ONLY when trying to see whatever it might be in a heavily obscured space.
Is it badly worded? Yes.Could it be worded better. Absolutely. Are all the vision rules still a total mess. Yes.
However, does this rule mean that you are blinded even when NOT looking into a heavily obscured space but there happens to be one you could look at? No. In this case the Blinded condition ends when you look at a different location.
I still don't understand why people take the condition rules so literally and piecemeal. You don't have to be actually blind for the writers to be able to say "you're effectively suffering from the blinded condition when trying to see something that can't be seen." Found a way to see? Then disregard the blindness, you've "countered" the condition. Ignore the whole thing for as long as you're able to work around it.
"You have the Blinded condition while trying to see something in a Heavily Obscured space."
I think folks are intentionally trying to twist this up to say that the creature has the blinded condition when looking at something in a NOT heavily obscured space just because there is a heavily obscured space they could look at if they wanted to ...
It seems pretty clear that you have the blinded condition ONLY when trying to see whatever it might be in a heavily obscured space.
View is not from top down, it's from a creature. Vision goes out from your eyes, hence why we often refer it as line of sight.
You can't try to see something NOT in heavily obscured area by not trying to first see in it if your line of sight must traverse something said to be opaque.
"I'm not blinded since i'm not trying to see in theDarkness" is to me twisting up. Before you can try to see beyond Darkness, you must first see in it and if Darkvision can’t see through it, i don't know how one would think normal vision would.
The rule for Heavily Obscured areas is a separate rule and a separate concept from the Line of Sight rule, which in 2014 existed in the DMG and did not list Darkness as an example of something that could block line of sight.
The rule for Heavily Obscured areas is a separate rule and a separate concept from the Line of Sight rule, which in 2014 existed in the DMG and did not list Darkness as an example of something that could block line of sight.
Darkness creates magical darkness that Darkvision can’t see through it, explain how normal vision could?
The rule for Heavily Obscured areas is a separate rule and a separate concept from the Line of Sight rule, which in 2014 existed in the DMG and did not list Darkness as an example of something that could block line of sight.
Darkness creates magical darkness that Darkvision can’t see through it, explain how normal vision could?
The specific wording on heavy obscurement specifically says when you are trying to see something in a heavily obscured area you have blinded. Technically looking from the heavily obscured area to an area of complete light doesn't impose any limitations.
The specific wording on heavy obscurement specifically says when you are trying to see something in a heavily obscured area you have blinded. Technically looking from the heavily obscured area to an area of complete light doesn't impose any limitations.
Unless it does. See the rules for line of sight in the DMG.
Most effects that are listed as heavily obscured should also be considered opaque, and therefore block vision through or out of them. Mundane darkness is not opaque. Magical darkness has traditionally been treated as opaque but there's arguments for treating it as transparent.
The specific wording on heavy obscurement specifically says when you are trying to see something in a heavily obscured area you have blinded. Technically looking from the heavily obscured area to an area of complete light doesn't impose any limitations.
Unless it does. See the rules for line of sight in the DMG.
Most effects that are listed as heavily obscured should also be considered opaque, and therefore block vision through or out of them. Mundane darkness is not opaque. Magical darkness has traditionally been treated as opaque but there's arguments for treating it as transparent.
Technically the DMG is not available yet. So while you might be able to make an argument from 2014. I think I'll need to wait for the new dmg to see what is changed.
In addition to not having to find an area of Darkness to lurk in, one of the nice benefits of casting Darkness on yourself (an object that you pick up and carry with you) is that you don't have to worry about your enemy having Darkvision. You'll know that even if he has Darkvision he wouldn't be able to see you while you are within this area because the Darkness spell description doesn't allow it.
If I have normal senses and I am located within magical Darkness and he has Darkvision and he is located outside of the magical Darkness, we would both be able to see him and yet neither of us would be able to see me because neither of us can "see through" the magical Darkness when trying to see something within the magical Darkness.
In addition to not having to find an area of Darkness to lurk in, one of the nice benefits of casting Darkness on yourself (an object that you pick up and carry with you) is that you don't have to worry about your enemy having Darkvision. You'll know that even if he has Darkvision he wouldn't be able to see you while you are within this area because the Darkness spell description doesn't allow it.
If I have normal senses and I am located within magical Darkness and he has Darkvision and he is located outside of the magical Darkness, we would both be able to see him and yet neither of us would be able to see me because neither of us can "see through" the magical Darkness when trying to see something within the magical Darkness.
Of course any person familiar with the spell would know your location as you would be the center of the effect. Making it a lot harder to hide from area of effects
Technically the DMG is not available yet. So while you might be able to make an argument from 2014. I think I'll need to wait for the new dmg to see what is changed.
As written, darkness is opaque to darkvision ("Darkvision can’t see through it") and silent on whether it's transparent to normal sight. Most other obscuring effects are silent on opacity but it generally doesn't make sense for them to be transparent. The authors have never demonstrated any understanding of the difference, so I doubt we'll get a clearer statement.
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There are actually more issues with the 2024 rules than have come up in prior discussions. Here's the full list I can come up with:
Blinded
Blindsight
Cover
Heavily Obscured
Hide
Invisible
Passive Perception
Search
None of these are particularly hard to clean up, and with the exception of hiding the intent is fairly obvious, but the rest of it could use an editing pass.
To try to conceal yourself you must be out of any enemy’s line of sight.
If you have Blindsight, you can see within a specific range without relying on physical sight.. Within that range, you can see anything that isn’t behind Total Cover even if you have the Blinded condition or are in Darkness.
Yes, but that does not give immunity to blinded and thus does not negate the "attacks affected" part of the Blinded status effect.
That has the problem that (a) 3/4 cover does not break line of sight so why are they mentioning it, and (b) why do they bother with any other requirements.
I don't think that there's any problem with this. Whether or not you can see through a particular obstacle will depend on what it is. You don't need a rule to specify whether or not you can see through a tree trunk, or whatever it is -- that's handled on a case-by-case basis. If you are able to see through a glass window then you can teleport to locations that you can see through that window with misty step, and I think that's intentional.
This one is especially bad. It's even worse than you are saying. It's the area that's heavily obscured and opaque. How does that make me have the blinded condition at all?
So, if I am standing in a perfectly clear and well-lit space and I am attempting to look into a nearby fog cloud because I think that I dropped something in there and I am looking for it . . . and now a person standing next to me who is also in the perfectly clear and well-lit space decides to attack me -- he now has advantage because I have the blinded condition? That's incredibly baffling.
The new Hide rules are an absolute Cluster.
Are you suggesting that the intended idea is that the "game" checks for whether or not you are Hidden at specific moments, such as at the beginning of your turn and at the end of your turn or something? For example, is there an assumption that an enemy can only "find" you on that enemy's turn and not on your turn? And that if he didn't see you on his turn then you can take your entire turn without him seeing you regardless of what you are doing? That would be a massive design change, and I don't actually see anything like that written anywhere.
But, in addition to this tiger example, someone in another thread mentioned the Rogue Thief Supreme Sneak ability, where the wording seems to suggest that your location at the end of your turn is somehow the relevant test for whether or not you remain hidden.
Super baffling. It feels like they need to completely start over when it comes to Hiding, it doesn't even seem fixable by simple errata at this point.
Since seeing the new rules I've been under the impression that the entire reason why the three-quarters cover bit was added to the Hide action was because that should make it possible to "pop out" from behind cover to quickly execute a ranged attack while still hidden. Because previously there were lengthy debates about whether or not you could simply position yourself behind cover without hiding in order to gain the benefits of the Unseen Attackers rule, but the argument was that as soon as you pop out to make your attack in that case you are no longer Unseen. To me, this was a positive change because it gives an incentive to Hide rather than just trying to be Unseen behind total cover. The problem is, it's not exactly written like that and it feels like someone along the way in the development cycle didn't fully understand why the three-quarters cover bit was added, so it got lumped in with the prerequisites for attempting to hide -- which really, the prerequisites are just trying to say that you need to be Unseen in order to attempt to Hide.
In my opinion, Passive Perception has changed pretty dramatically in 2024. I think that it has been intentionally removed from any interaction with Hiding and that was replaced by the DC 15 requirement.
But what happened is that a lot of other related mechanics were removed also. Mechanics such as group checks and (all other) passive checks in general are just gone now. Ability score contests seem to be eliminated also, which is how passive perception was used in the surprise and hiding rules in 2014. In fact, in the entire "Playing the Game" section of the rules, passive perception is never mentioned. But passive perception does make a minor appearance later on in the rules, and it still appears in monster stat blocks, but it's unclear why. The character creation section has a small description about how to calculate your passive perception and the same information appears in the Glossary, but that's pretty much it.
For example, there used to be a subsection in Chapter 8 Adventuring that discussed "Activity While Traveling" where you could designate your activity to be that you were "Noticing Threats". OR, you could say that you were doing some other activity such as Navigating, Mapping, Tracking or Foraging. BUT if you did that . . .
"Characters who turn their attention to other tasks as the group travels are not focused on watching for danger. These characters don’t contribute their passive Wisdom (Perception) scores to the group’s chance of noticing hidden threats."
This implied that once upon a time there was once a mechanism for determining group surprise before the final release of the 2014 rules. And that characters doing such tasks would essentially have a Passive Perception score of 0 and would therefore always be surprised by any monster who was attempting to be stealthy. I'm not sure if anyone actually played that way, but those rules were there.
Well, in 2024, all of this has been essentially eliminated. There no longer even seems to be a concept of "Noticing Threats" any longer in the rules -- for example, the surprise mechanic and the prerequisites for being surprised have been completely changed. It seems that Passive Perception is no longer a part of that equation any longer.
The rules say that passive perception is used to notice "something". But notice what exactly? Can this include noticing threats?
The Search action mentions that Perception should be used to detect a "concealed creature or object" and the Perception skill is described as "using a combination of senses, notice something that's easy to miss". The 2024 Perception skill has a hyperlink back to the 2014 description of it (I'm not sure if that's intended or not) which says all of this:
"Your Wisdom (Perception) check lets you spot, hear, or otherwise detect the presence of something. It measures your general awareness of your surroundings and the keenness of your senses. For example, you might try to hear a conversation through a closed door, eavesdrop under an open window, or hear monsters moving stealthily in the forest. Or you might try to spot things that are obscured or easy to miss, whether they are orcs lying in ambush on a road, thugs hiding in the shadows of an alley, or candlelight under a closed secret door."
So, if active perception checks can detect all of these things, including hidden threats, can a passive perception check also do this? I don't see why not, but it's not really clear. And with the DC 15 requirement to hide, a lot of passive perception scores become meaningless in that context anyway. For example, why do all of these monsters have stat blocks with passive perception scores below 15? What is the purpose of those? Who knows.
To make a long story short, I agree that it has become pretty unclear what to do with Passive Perception.
"At the end of any turn, if an enemy has clear line of sight on you, you are no longer hiding" (or words to similar effect) probably accomplishes what they were trying to do. It means that you can jump out of cover and attack someone from stealth, or dart from bush to bush without being revealed, or lie in wait by a doorway and ambush people who come through the door, and if someone guesses where you are and runs adjacent to you they'll probably have disadvantage on their attack (but they might just go running past you without seeing you), but you aren't able to just turn permanently unseen.
Yeah you evidently shouldn't have any adverse effect if they can still see while Blinded.
So, an experiment with cleaning up the bad wording (not going to try and resolve hiding because I don't know what it's supposed to do)
Blinded
While you have the Blinded condition, you can’t see and automatically fail any ability check that requires sight. Unless some ability specifies otherwise, treat all targets as unseen.
Blindsight
(no changes required if blinded is changed as above)
Cover
Add "A target behind opaque total cover is unseen, unless some ability states otherwise".
Darkness
An area of Darkness is Heavily Obscured. See also “Heavily Obscured” and chapter 1 (“Exploration”). Unlike most forms of heavy obscurement, mundane darkness is not opaque.
Heavily Obscured
The contents of a heavily obscured area cannot be seen; unless some ability specifies otherwise, treat all targets in a heavily obscured area as unseen. Most heavy obscurement is also opaque, making it impossible to see through or out of the area.
Hide
With the Hide action, you try to conceal yourself. To do so, you must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check while outside of any enemy's line of sight; this normally requires you to be Heavily Obscured or behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover; if you can see a creature, you can discern whether it can see you.
(other paragraphs unchanged... they're problematic but I don't know quite what they're meant to say).
Invisible
An invisible creature is not automatically seen, but may be seen with special senses, or in any other way specified by the ability that granted the condition. If no ability allows seeing them, treat them as unseen.
Passive Perception
(still don't know what this is intended to do)
Search
(probably no change)
Unseen
An target that can not or has not been seen by a given creature is treated as unseen by that creature, with the following effects
I think blinded is conditional. I.e. if you can't see you have the blinded condition. If somehow you can see you wouldn't be blinded any longer. The key is you have to look into the heavily obscureded area to be blinded. I believe most of the ways to avoid this don't fall into looking into a heavily obscureded area.
So basically I think the idea is see invisibility would not help you see a creature in a heavily obscureded area as it deals with the invisible condition not the blinded condition.
The key is when looking into a heavily obscureded area you are blinded. With blindsight you can see within range, so you are not blinded within range. You are blinded outside of that range.
The rule states ...
"You have the Blinded condition while trying to see something in a Heavily Obscured space."
I think folks are intentionally trying to twist this up to say that the creature has the blinded condition when looking at something in a NOT heavily obscured space just because there is a heavily obscured space they could look at if they wanted to ...
It seems pretty clear that you have the blinded condition ONLY when trying to see whatever it might be in a heavily obscured space.
Is it badly worded? Yes.Could it be worded better. Absolutely. Are all the vision rules still a total mess. Yes.
However, does this rule mean that you are blinded even when NOT looking into a heavily obscured space but there happens to be one you could look at? No. In this case the Blinded condition ends when you look at a different location.
I still don't understand why people take the condition rules so literally and piecemeal. You don't have to be actually blind for the writers to be able to say "you're effectively suffering from the blinded condition when trying to see something that can't be seen." Found a way to see? Then disregard the blindness, you've "countered" the condition. Ignore the whole thing for as long as you're able to work around it.
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View is not from top down, it's from a creature. Vision goes out from your eyes, hence why we often refer it as line of sight.
You can't try to see something NOT in heavily obscured area by not trying to first see in it if your line of sight must traverse something said to be opaque.
"I'm not blinded since i'm not trying to see in the Darkness" is to me twisting up. Before you can try to see beyond Darkness, you must first see in it and if Darkvision can’t see through it, i don't know how one would think normal vision would.
The rule for Heavily Obscured areas is a separate rule and a separate concept from the Line of Sight rule, which in 2014 existed in the DMG and did not list Darkness as an example of something that could block line of sight.
Darkness creates magical darkness that Darkvision can’t see through it, explain how normal vision could?
The specific wording on heavy obscurement specifically says when you are trying to see something in a heavily obscured area you have blinded. Technically looking from the heavily obscured area to an area of complete light doesn't impose any limitations.
Unless it does. See the rules for line of sight in the DMG.
Most effects that are listed as heavily obscured should also be considered opaque, and therefore block vision through or out of them. Mundane darkness is not opaque. Magical darkness has traditionally been treated as opaque but there's arguments for treating it as transparent.
Technically the DMG is not available yet. So while you might be able to make an argument from 2014. I think I'll need to wait for the new dmg to see what is changed.
In addition to not having to find an area of Darkness to lurk in, one of the nice benefits of casting Darkness on yourself (an object that you pick up and carry with you) is that you don't have to worry about your enemy having Darkvision. You'll know that even if he has Darkvision he wouldn't be able to see you while you are within this area because the Darkness spell description doesn't allow it.
If I have normal senses and I am located within magical Darkness and he has Darkvision and he is located outside of the magical Darkness, we would both be able to see him and yet neither of us would be able to see me because neither of us can "see through" the magical Darkness when trying to see something within the magical Darkness.
Of course any person familiar with the spell would know your location as you would be the center of the effect. Making it a lot harder to hide from area of effects
As written, darkness is opaque to darkvision ("Darkvision can’t see through it") and silent on whether it's transparent to normal sight. Most other obscuring effects are silent on opacity but it generally doesn't make sense for them to be transparent. The authors have never demonstrated any understanding of the difference, so I doubt we'll get a clearer statement.