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 out of the magical Darkness of the Darkness spell."
I'm burning all my DND books.....
If you're right, why does everyone build their warlocks with the Darkness spell AND Devil's Sight????
Now you see why I always have a headache. I just have a blanket rule that you can’t see in or out in the Darkness spell or Fog Cloud. Devil’s sight and Truesight are the only exceptions. Blindsight and Tremorsense are something else entirely.
Hiya! You can call me Link. Here’s a bit about me:
Roomba Knight, Architect of the Cataclysm, Foxy Lunar Archpriest. Dubbed The Fluffy Bowman by Golden. He/They
Theatre Kid, Ravenclaw, bookworm, DM, Lego fanatic, flautist, mythology nerd, pedantic about spelling. I also love foxes, cats, otters, and red pandas!
I love Korean Mythology. If you want to ask me about something, send me a PM!
Is e e eirmseachd nas fhaide na tomhas an ulaidh as motha a th’ aig duine!" You can see out of the magical Darkness of the Darkness spell."
https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/2619080-darkness
"Darkvision can’t see through it, and nonmagical light can’t illuminate it."
Assumption: you just have normal visoon or darvision.
If you are inside the Darkness spell, natural light cant illuminate it, and darkvisison cant turn darkness to dim light.
A torch just outside the sphere of darkness cannot penetrate the sphere. Inside the sphere it is still dark.
That means any light just outside the sphere cannot penetrate the sphere. That would mean light reflected off things and creatures too. Which would mean the light that was reflected off creatures and coming towards your eyes so you could SEE them, would be stopped by the darkness spell, so that you are blind to anything outside the sphere.
Why would you say "You can see out of the magical Darkness of the Darkness spell."???
If light from outside cannot get in, you cannot see if you are in the aoe.
Exactly!!! That’s what I’ve been saying all along.
Hiya! You can call me Link. Here’s a bit about me:
Roomba Knight, Architect of the Cataclysm, Foxy Lunar Archpriest. Dubbed The Fluffy Bowman by Golden. He/They
Theatre Kid, Ravenclaw, bookworm, DM, Lego fanatic, flautist, mythology nerd, pedantic about spelling. I also love foxes, cats, otters, and red pandas!
I love Korean Mythology. If you want to ask me about something, send me a PM!
Is e e eirmseachd nas fhaide na tomhas an ulaidh as motha a th’ aig duine!https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/2619061-silence
"For the duration, no sound can be created within or pass through a 20-foot-radius"
No sound outside the sphere can get into the sphere. If you are in the aoe, you cannot hear the goblin talking just outside it. Sound cannot pass through the aoe.
Just like light cannot pass through magical darkness, so if you are in magical darkness, you cannot see things outside it.
Saying " You can see out of the magical Darkness of the Darkness spell." Would be like saying if you are in the Silence aoe, you cant hear anything inside it, but you can hear the goblin down the hall?
That makes no sense!
Hiya! You can call me Link. Here’s a bit about me:
Roomba Knight, Architect of the Cataclysm, Foxy Lunar Archpriest. Dubbed The Fluffy Bowman by Golden. He/They
Theatre Kid, Ravenclaw, bookworm, DM, Lego fanatic, flautist, mythology nerd, pedantic about spelling. I also love foxes, cats, otters, and red pandas!
I love Korean Mythology. If you want to ask me about something, send me a PM!
Is e e eirmseachd nas fhaide na tomhas an ulaidh as motha a th’ aig duine!How i adjudicate vision always from the creature's eyes out, and not a top down satellite view. So wherever you are, if your Line of Sight traverse an opaque Heavily Obscured area that obscure vision like heavy fog, you can't see further.
Imagine a Wizard at location A, and an archer at location Z. The wizard casts Fog Cloud at location B, which is any place between the two. The Fog Cloud could cover one, both - or neither - character.
If doesn't matter. Because any line of sight between the two goes through squares covered by Fog Cloud. You cannot skip those squares. You are looking INTO those squares, and that square and anything beyond it is heavily obscured.
Now, sadly it's true that, the way that works out, ultimately, is that combat can proceed with no one having disadvantage. Which is stupid. And the way to handle that is to simply state that both have disadvantage hitting the other.
Then, of course, the archer pokes his head out, shoots the wizard, and retreats into the fog. But that's another discussion.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Oh, hey! A pseudo-Darkness thread!
My favorite!
So when "Heavily Obscured" says that you "have the blinded condition when trying to see something in a Heavily Obscured space", the "in" is what gets a lot of people tripped up.
This sentence could either mean "You have the blinded condition when you yourself are in a Heavily Obscured space" OR "You have the blinded condition when you the thing you are trying to see is within a Heavily Obscured space."
Personally I like the latter, because it makes more sense to me. However it does make things like "Fog Cloud" seem odd too. However, this is where the DM comes in, as well as the weird way that WotC sometimes does not put all of the rules that pertain to a thing in the rules for that thing. See [Tooltip Not Found] and the "extra-dimensional space" argument, for instance (if you don't know, the spell doesn't say it creates an extra-dimensional space, however the rules text for [I believe] the Handy Haversack item does describe the space created by the Bag of Holding specifically to be extra-dimensional. Weird, I know.).
So dense fog specifically is called out in the rules for Line of Sight as being something that would block line of sight. It is called an "effect that blocks vision". Darkness, either mundane or magical, is not listed here, though it is not attempting to be an exhaustive list of things that block line of sight. Therefore, because the rules specifically say that dense fog blocks line of sight, then we know that any time your vision would need to pass through an area that has dense fog to see something, you cannot see it. No line of sight.
So yes, for fog cloud, if you are in it you cannot see out, and the enemy can't see in, so it is offsetting Advantage and Disadvantage so there would be a straight roll for something like a ranged bow attack.
For Darkness, we KNOW that darkness in D&D does not block line of sight, because you are able to: 1) see the stars at night (line of sight is not blocked to the stars, even when the area between you and them are filled with darkness), 2) see a campfire burning from 100 yards away at night, even though the illumination of the campfire does not reach you, so you are still within darkness. We can think about this logically a bit, too. If I am standing on one side of a football stadium in a room and the room is lit, but it is completely dark outside (and assuming none of the stadium lights are on) it will be probably impossible for me to see someone in the darkness on the field. However if someone else is in a lit room on the other side of the stadium, I'll be able to see them standing in the room (given my eyesight is good enough to see that far). To do this I must be looking THROUGH darkness, to the lit room on the other side. So darkness does not block line of sight.
Magical Darkness is the same, because the ONLY stated difference between regular darkness and magical darkness is the "Darkvision cannot see through it" line, and the fact that it cannot be illuminated by nonmagical light. Now people will use the "cannot be illuminated by non-magical light" as some kind of "see, like cannot penetrate the barrier of the magical darkness and therefore the light cannot reach your eyes from things outside of the sphere of magical darkness, and so you cannot see outside of it because you need to see the light reflecting off of a surface to see it." And that would be true if we ignore that in D&D 5e and 5.5e, Illuminate isn't a physics term, it is a game term. In D&D 5e and 5.5e, there are different levels of illumination.
Light
The presence or absence of light determines the category of illumination in an area, as defined below.
Bright Light. Bright Light lets most creatures see normally. Even gloomy days provide Bright Light, as do torches, lanterns, fires, and other sources of illumination within a specific radius.
Dim Light. Dim Light, also called shadows, creates a Lightly Obscured area. An area of Dim Light is usually a boundary between Bright Light and surrounding Darkness. The soft light of twilight and dawn also counts as Dim Light. A full moon might bathe the land in Dim Light.
Darkness. Darkness creates a Heavily Obscured area. Characters face Darkness outdoors at night (even most moonlit nights), within the confines of an unlit dungeon, or in an area of magical Darkness.
So when the Darkness spell says "nonmagical light cannot illuminate it", it isn't talking about some physics property where light waves cannot pierce the sphere of magical darkness after reflecting off of a surface, thereby making it impossible to see something outside of the sphere. It is talking about the game term of illumination, saying that any light that is nonmagical cannot turn darkness to dim light, or dim light to bright light. THAT is what "cannot illuminate it" means.
We can even see that you should be able to see through Darkness if you are within it because the rule above states "Characters face Darkness outdoors at night (even most moonlit nights)..." But we know we can see the light from a lighthouse from far away, through the darkness. We can see a campfire or a torch from far away through darkness, even when it isn't illuminating our space. We can see the stars. Etc.
The way I read the rules, the way it makes sense to me, is that the Darkness spell is a buff for the people inside it. You would cast Darkness on your party when you are trying to sneak somewhere, obscuring the view of your group from the outside, but not from inside. The fact that you can block the spell effect if it is on an object by covering it with something (like covering a rock with a bowl) suggests that it might be advantageous for you to be able to have the ability to suddenly release the darkness on your location. If you cast the spell on a rock and then threw it towards your enemies because them being inside the darkness was bad for them, then they could simply cover the rock with something and end the spell, which seems like an odd thing to have for a spell meant to be used "offensively".
At any rate, you cannot see out of a fog cloud NOT because it makes the area heavily obscured, but because the rules describe an area of dense fog as blocking line of sight.
The Fog Cloud spell doesn't create Darkness that interact with Light or Darkvision, so it should stay away.
If you can be in a place that has absolutely zero light pollution and lacks any sort of cloud cover in the middle of the night, you will realize that darkness is basically an absence of light and does nothing to obscure anything. The stars and moon are bright enough to illuminate the area the same as the twilight time before/after sunset/sunrise. It is more then bright enough to see. You can read a book it is so bright. However, shadows are even darker and you can see nothing in a shadow. And shadows are everywhere as the moon/starlight is not bight like the sun so it can minimize shadows. So even tall blades of grass can cause a dark shadow.
Darkness does not block LOS as you mentioned, all darkness is the absence of light, therefore light can illuminate it very easily.
Not sure if I understood this post, but Devil's Sight allows seeing through Darkness, not other Heavily Obscured types (e.g. the ones from Stinking Cloud or Fog Cloud). The same for Truesight.
Any discourse around the fact that Darkvision "can't see through" Darkness (the spell), but it doesn't say anything about normal vision? I imagine you could argue that creatures with darkvision also have normal vision...
Oh, yes, absolutely. Great catch.
I feel like (with many things in this game) this confusion can be fixed/reduced with better word choice.
Replace: "Darkvision can’t see through it, and nonmagical light can’t illuminate it."
With: "Darkvision can’t see inside it, and nonmagical light can’t illuminate the space within it."
The replaced/added words emphasize this is based more on what's inside of the sphere and as opposed to things that might pass through it, such as light. Light travels through the area with no trouble, it just can't illuminate that which is inside of the sphere.
Oddly though, thinking this interpretation through is still kind of annoying. If light can pass through the sphere then creatures and objects within the sphere could be silhouetted against a brighter background such as a source of light on the other side... which realistically would be more than enough to target them with an attack or spell, but due to them being Heavily Obscured you effectively have the Blinded condition regarding any effect that requires you to see a target in the sphere.
So it's probably best to just abandon physics and expectations of reality altogether.
Ok. So. The problem as i see it, if i understand the madness, is that natural darkness in dnd rules turns a square into Heavily Obscured. And Heavily Obscured cannot be seen through.
So, in dnd rules, followed to the letter, two humans are on a flat, grassy field on a moonless, cloudy, night. They are standing 70 feet apart. There is absolutely no sources of light anywhere. The entire field is dark.
One of the humans lights a regular torch. The torch casts bright light for 20 feet, dim light another 20 feet.
According to these rules, to the letter, the squares that are 50 and 55 feet from the torch are in natural darkness and therefor Heavily Obscured, and according to this garbage rule:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/phb-2024/playing-the-game#ObscuredAreas
"A Heavily Obscured area—such as an area with Darkness, heavy fog, or dense foliage—is opaque."
The rules would say the human in the dark canno see the torch 70 feet away because the torchlight does not reach that far, and even if it did, the square is heavily obscured and therefore... opaque???
This cannot be right.
That would mean if a party is traveling around at night, they are in a bubble of 120 feet of vision, max. Even with devilsight. Everything past 120ft is dark. If they crest a hill at night, and a town is at the bottom of the hill a thousand feet away, the darkness is opaque and blocks the light from the town, the street lights, torches, etc, and the players cant ssee the town at all.
That cant be what the rules are saying.
The rules need to separate dark from heavily-obscured/opaque.
The rule above saying all heavily obscured areas are opaque has to be a glitch.
Technically...no.
Where it says "A Heavily Obscured area—such as an area with Darkness, heavy fog, or dense foliage—is opaque." is flavor text. That is not the rule. The rule with Heavily Obscured is "You have the Blinded condition (see the Rules Glossary) when trying to see something there." Nothing about this rule says you cannot see through it. It only says that you have the blinded condition when you are looking INTO a Heavily Obscured area. If the thing you are looking at is in a heavily obscured area, you have the blinded condition when trying to see it.
It doesn't say anything that you cannot see through the area.
The thing that stops you from being able to see through an area with fog, dense foliage, etc is the rules for Line of Sight.
Line of Sight
To determine whether there is line of sight between two spaces, pick a corner of one space and trace an imaginary line from that corner to any part of another space. If you can trace a line that doesn’t pass through or touch an object or effect that blocks vision—such as a stone wall, a thick curtain, or a dense cloud of fog—then there is line of sight.
So as long as something doesn't have an effect that blocks your vision, like a wall, dense fog, dense foliage, etc, then you can see through areas that are Heavily Obscured, you just have the blinded condition when trying to see something that is in the area that is heavily obscured.
So when dealing with something like fog, there are multiple rules at play: the rules for Heavily Obscured AND the rules for Line of Sight. When dealing with darkness, we only have the rules for Heavily Obscured, because darkness itself does not block your line of sight.
Look at the examples given in the rules for a heavily obscured area. "Darkness, heavy fog, or dense foliage—is opaque." However we KNOW that these things are not technically opaque to the dictionary definition, because they do allow some light through. The area under dense foliage in the forest is DARKER for sure. Many shadows and whatnot. However it is not pitch black. Which means it doesn't meet the dictionary definition of opaque, because some light does come through to the forest floor. Also true for dense fog. Dense fog is hard to see through, but it is not pitch black. It still lets light through, so it isn't the dictionary definition of opaque. So we can look at the word "opaque" in D&D to mean something different, or is mostly just extra flavoring, because it obviously A) doesn't have rules significance tied to it, and B) doesn't give examples of things that are actually opaque.
Heavily Obscured says that you are only blinded when trying to see thing "in" those obscured spaces. It mentions that it is opaque in the section of the rules you quoted, but the actual mechanics seem to only use that to justify the rule glossary entry. I think you are free to apply actual opaqueness for seeing through it as you see fit.
I still say that is a bad ruling.
1. It would have been easier just to have a glossary definition for magical darkness.
2. By how it is written it does not make sense as a devils Darkvision has an addendum can see into magical darkness. This would mean 1 it still can't see into the darkness spell as it blocks darkvision and its still just darkvision and the spells blocking of darkvision has nothing to do with it being magical and 2 its ability to see into magical darkness does nothing because all darkvision can.
I'm willing to roll with well that was their intent, but just make all magical darkness block darkvision as a inherent part of it being magical. Then devils sight seeing into even magical darkness now makes sense.