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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Something that came up a while ago during a campaign with a particularly hostile DM I used to have: one player had been swallowed by another creature, which gave them Total Cover against the outside, as well as the Restrained and Blinded condition, which meant they had disadvantage on their attacks against the creature that had swallowed them.
I argued that because they were inside their stomach, the creature couldn't possibly see them, and therefore the swallowed player had advantage from being an Unseen Attacker, which the DM refused to acknowledge. The DM does whatever they want within their games, but by the rules, they should have had advantage, right?
Ignoring the biological effects of being inside a creature, there is no freedom of movement for the attacker. Disadvantage make sense as they do not have the space to swing a weapon, they can basically just stab with out the use of leverage to get a good swing in. Bludgeon damage type weapons would not work very well either.
Basically the swallowed rules are pretty basic and not realistic. But then, the idea that a monster would swallow a creature that is still alive is also not very realistic - insides are generally very squishy & vulnerable, so creatures should not want to swallow anything that could move in there and potentially hurt them.
Realistic swallowing rules would be something like:
- Melee attacks automatically hit, bludgeoning weapons deal no damage, slashing weapons do half damage, and piercing weapons do full damage.
- Ranged attacks are at disadvantage.
- The swallowed creature cannot breath, casting spells with V component or talking cause the creature to start suffocating.
- At the end of each turn the swallowed creature must make a DC 15 Strength saving throw or drop the weapon it is holding as the internal musculature pushes the creature deeper into the monster. If the creature is holding a Light weapon they have Advantage on this save.
I think there's a misunderstanding. I meant that being an Unseen Attacker should be considered a source of advantage. Being Blinded and Restrained still gives disadvantage, so attacks should be straight rolls, but not with disadvantage.
While I see the reasoning, no. Your DM is correct.
I could make an argument to justify it within the abstract rule framework, but I'm not going to try. This is an exceptional condition. You have disadvantage to represent the difficulty of attacking at all. If you had advantage from being unseen, which you always would be under the circumstances, then it could be mentioned in the rules about being swallowed. It's not, so you don't.
I mean, I think you could rule it that they are unseen and thus should get advantage RAW, but I don't think that is a forgone conclusion.
Bringing some logic into this (dangerous when we're talking about D&D rules, I know), the rules for Unseen Attacker represent the inability of a target to prepare for/react to an attack because they cannot see the source of the attack. Harder to dodge an arrow flying at you when you have no idea what direction it is coming from.
However, this would not be true from within a creature. The creature knows you are there (it swallowed you). There's no real advantage from Unseen Attacker because they do know where you are. I've seen others suggest before that creatures should have Blindsight to things within them (specifically creatures who can swallow would still be RAW depicted as being able to perceive your presence), and I agree with that. Because there are no "vulnerability" rules for when you are swallowed by a creature (i.e. "The Froghemouth is vulnerable to piercing and slashing damage from creatures within its stomach") we can assume the outside is just as tough and difficult to pierce as the inside. Otherwise the creature probably wouldn't be swallowing fully armored adventurers.
Is it a bit silly? Yeah. It makes it hard to play out that power fantasy of diving down the gullet of a massive creature and then slashing its insides for massive damage. But I think we can use Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. going inside the Abilisk as an example. He dives in thinking he can do more damage from the inside, because he cannot pierce its hide from the outside. He turns out to be incorrect.
So while you are DMing, if you ruled the creature inside another would be unseen and thus make straight roles would be fine, your DM didn't do anything wrong with the way they ruled.
Assuming that this is a RAW discussion, here is the rule:
But that makes zero sense in this case. The creature knows exactly where you are and basically what you are doing. In effect as the character is inside, it gives the creature blindsight within themselves.
That RAW sentence is not valid against blindsight. There are no rules about being inside another creature. All the rules are geared toward what is external to a creature, not internal.
This is the general rule of Unseen Attackers and Targets:
A general rule applies all the time unless a specific rule says otherwise. That's how all general rules work. There is no stat block from a monster that has a swallow action that mentions anything that contradicts this general rule, so it applies.
No, they don't get blindsight out of nowhere, that makes even less sense. Even if the monster somehow has super sensitive touch inside their stomach (ew) to the point that they can tell exactly what you're doing in there, what are they going to do about it? It's not like they can shift their internal organs... And since you're surrounded by their insides, it's not like you can miss at all. No matter where you thrust, punch or swing, you're guaranteed to hit something. That's certainly an advantage in itself.
Furthermore, swallow actions also mention that the swallowed creatures have Total Cover against the outside, and blindsight doesn't get past Total Cover. And more importantly, swallow actions don't mention that the creature has blindsight inside themselves, so they don't. If they were intended to have it, it would be written in there, and it's not.
The advantage of Unseen Attackers is about sight. When you have Tremorsense, you also know where the enemy is. Still doesn't count as vision, still makes them an unseen attacker. Same when they are in a Fog Cloud, whether you are in it with them or not.
It doesn't matter if you know where they are and what they're doing. You can't see them, that gives them an advantage. That's what this rule is intended to do.
Again, general rules apply all the time, unless something says otherwise.
Yes that is true, but your logic for this instance is biased to your view. You are taking a rule that is based on the external and applying it to something that has no rules. If you want to take a rule that is based on something that is away from the target, and apply it internally, then you need to examine what is sight.
What does sight mean? Your body takes an image and translate it to electrical impulses that are carried by nerves that are then deciphered by the brain. What is touch, electrical impulses that are carried by nerves that are then deciphered by the brain.
Therefore, the creatures body still can see the character inside their body because their nerves are giving the electrical impulses to the brain.
This would be partially similar to knowing there is a stone in your shoe or something is stuck on your back or a splinter in your finger/body. You can still see something attached even if your eyes do not see it.
In this case your yes the general rule still applies and the creature can see what they have swallowed. So no advantage.
You're using real world physics to make your point, that's an even bigger sin than any argument made in this thread. No creature, real or not, can see their own insides. That's the most nonsensical claim I've seen here so far.
No worse then applying rules for something that is 100% not covered and in no way or form applies to how they were written. You are definitely very biased the way you answer the rebuttals.
I am well aware of it. As I said: "I see the reasoning"
I just reject it.
As I say so often in rules discussions: Things do what they say. Any rules interpretation that causes something to be self-negating must inherently be incorrect. The swallow mechanic says you have disadvantage. You are introducing a situation that is inherent to be being swallowed to argue that you do not, in fact have disadvantage. That's self-negation.
Furthermore, all rules about imposing advantage and disadvantage are written for normal conditions. Being swallowed is very far from normal conditions. The GM is expected to adjudicate appropriately.
D&D is not, and cannot be, a game that can be adjudicated purely mechanistically, and that's what you're trying to do.
While it's possible wording is inconsistent, the RAW on a purple worm says that the swallowed victim "has Total Cover against attacks and other effects outside the worm". As the worm is not in fact outside the worm, the swallowed victim does not have total cover against the worm and is thus not unseen (in fact, technically the worm can attack things in its own stomach).
Applying the rules where they apply is not "reasoning", it's playing the game.
No, it doesn't. That's what you want it to say, but the game is not designed based on what you want. The swallow mechanic says you have the Restrained and Blinded condition. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't say you have disadvantage, no matter how much you want it to. If it was meant to give disadvantage no matter what, the description would say so. It doesn't, because it's not intended to.
Nothing is more biased than saying "This rule doesn't apply because I don't think it should in this context". That's your opinion. The rules do what they say they do, and nothing else. Asserting that is not a bias. That's literally how game design works.
The worst part of it is that the logic you're using to justify that opinion is even more nonsensical than the mechanic is in the first place. Tell me, can you determine how many chunks of food you have in your stomach right now? Where they are located exactly, and what their shape is? Of course you can't, no creature in existence has tactile receptors inside their stomach. If Tremorsense doesn't count as a form of sight and doesn't negate the advantage from being unseen, then being swallowed shouldn't either.
I don't disagree on that, but players come to a table to play D&D. They come to play with a specific set or rules so that when they decide to do something, they can reasonably predict how the surrounding world is going to react to it. If you start making up new rules or ignoring existing ones every time there's a slightest change in the conditions, your game becomes unpredictable and frustrating instead of fun. You play D&D or you don't, but that's something you decide and agree on with the players before the game, not right in the middle of it.
And by your logic, Foresight wouldn't give advantage either, just because the Foresight spell wasn't designed with the swallow mechanic in mind. That's preposterous.
This actually doesn't matter at all in D&D. There are a great many situations where a creature is unseen, but they are also not hidden -- the enemy can hear them perfectly well to the point where the enemy knows exactly where that creature is located. In such situations, the Unseen Attacker rule still applies if the attacker remains unseen during the attack even though the enemy knows where the attacker is located. In the situation presented in the OP, the enemy might be using its sense of touch instead of hearing to locate the creature, but the same concept applies.
Keep in mind that while Total Cover can cause a creature to be Unseen, being Unseen is not dependent on having Total Cover -- those are totally separate concepts. Being Unseen is only dependent on being unseen. By default, creatures cannot see things that are within their own stomach.
No rule in the game says anything of the sort. A DM can certainly decide that creatures cannot see within their own stomachs, but that's no different from anything else the DM can rule on.
Fair enough. At some point common sense on such things must prevail and that is the purview of the DM I agree. However, in this case I think that it's pretty straightforward for a DM to rule that the inside of a non-translucent creature's stomach constitutes a Heavily Obscured Area, at which point we can make a RAW-based ruling with that information. But perhaps another DM might rule otherwise for some reason. Who knows.