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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Creatures are automatically detected when they take a wide variety of combat actions, including attacking, and once detected, remain detected unless they do something to change that fact. There is no listed combat action that can change your status from "heard" to "unheard".
A character who has never been detected at all cannot be attacked, except by accident.
I mean, I agree, there's nothing that can change your status from 'heard' to 'unheard'. But that's because there is no status 'heard' in the rules. We're into houserules once we start dealing with hearing at all (except for deafness preventing you from hearing at all).
The word 'heard' occurs 5x in the SRD, two of which aren't about perceiving with hearing at all. One is about whether you've heard of something. The other is about the raven being able to mimic any sound it has heard. The three remaining occurrences are in item descriptions, two of which only tell you how far you can hear them (bell, signal whistle). Berserker Axe asks whether a creature can be seen or heard by you.
"Hear" occurs more often, such as bardic inspiration (which can be used on a creature within 60' who can see or hear you, suggesting hearing is not guaranteed at 60'). Most of the uses are in spell descriptions (which do not have mechanics for determining what is heard, but do say things like 'you can see through its eyes and hear through its ears as if you were in its space'... whatever that actually means). There are a bunch of things which ask you to evaluate what can be heard or if something can hear something else, but there's no rules for actually determining that.
In short, the rules never cover hearing besides telling you deafness means you can't hear anything.
The rules actually say you can attack a square. That's not an accident if you 'find' an undetected creature by hitting it that way. It would be insanely lucky. I mean, the DM shouldn't be doing such a thing, since he is omniscient in the context of the game, but a player might. Although I'd be super impressed if one did.
How exactly would you play this with an ongoing effect like Darkness? Say I'm behind a large tree that gives me total cover from the "point of origin". For the duration, is there a tree-shaped area of "normal" (bright or dim, whatever the situation was at the time Darkness was cast) light extending to the edge of the spell? This doesn't really make any sense.
The way Cover works is spelled out in the rules. Total cover means you "cannot be targeted", Half Cover grants +2 bonus to AC and Dexterity saving throws, and Three-Quarters Cover grants+5 bonus to AC and Dexterity saving throws. For Darkness, there's no "targeting" or Saving Throws. So comparing it to Fireball is a non-starter. Fireball is an instantaneous effect that forces a Saving Throw that the rules of Cover can interact with. Darkness does not. It also says it "fills" the sphere. Pockets of normal light caused by cover would not satisfy the wording of the spell.
I'd love to know if you actually would rule this way in your game (that cover provides pockets of normal light within the Darkness spell radius).
I think the way he's imagining this is that Darkness 'shines' like a light point source does. If a light point source was behind a tree, the tree would cast a shadow. So there's an.. anti-shadow? ... behind the tree, basically.
And that does comport with the rules for emanations (which Darkness is). It extends in straight lines, and doesn't extend through total cover. The thing about that is, we evaluate this on whole square facings. Darkness emanates around a person, for example, because a person does not provide Total Cover. So a low wall probably doesn't block it, because it's not Total Cover. That, makes less sense than the tree explanation above - why does something have to fill a square (... cube?) face completely to block it?
Now, how you square the emanation rules with the spell description that says you have to completely enclose it to stop it from spreading is up to you. That sounds like an exception to the normal emanation rules. I guess the question is... can you make a bullseye darkness lantern?
But you aren't using the words in a RAW way. You're extrapolating in a way that may seem sensible to you, but isn't by any means inherent in the text.
Take your "spreads" argument, for example. You say "magical Darkness spreads. It's a 'physical' thing (in the same sense light is a physical thing)..."
However B does not follow A in this case. You say it must be physical, because it says it "spreads". That's not true at all. "Panic spread through the crowd as the sounds of the approaching hoard grew louder." "The rumor of the king's corruption spread through the city as shopkeeper told patron told friend told family." Both non-physical things, both "spreading". The wording of "spreads" in the Darkness spell does not give it unique characteristics beyond what the rules say. It says it "spreads" because it can be cast on an object that can be covered to block the Darkness effect. The spell could simply say "darkness fills the sphere, and covering the object the spell was cast on removes the effect," but the game is built on narrative flavor, and saying it "spreads" from the object gives a bit more of a logical sense that covering the object blocks the darkness. It does NOT give it the property of being an actual, physical thing. That's an assumption that isn't bore out by the rules.
See my above examples about "rumors" and "panic". And yes, it isn't an Illusion, because usually illusion spells have a way to determine that they "aren't real". It is REAL darkness. It's just the same as mundane Darkness but with a few magical boosts (can't be illuminated by spells Level 2 and lower, Darkvision cannot see through it). There's no reason in the text to believe it behaves differently than mundane Darkness except for what is specifically called out.
Again, you're arguing that B must logically follow A, simply because, but there's a leap in the logic. You argue that because it doesn't specify "objects", and now corrected to "objects and creatures" because of my statement, then the Darkness must be an real physical thing that can be illuminated (or not). But that's just simply not true. Your version leaves open unclear effects. If the spell specified "creatures and objects cannot be illuminated" only, people might say "well, but what about the space between them? The air?" It doesn't make sense to specify all the possible things that aren't illuminated when simply saying light cannot illuminate the Darkness is a very simple and encompassing statement that we all easily understand because that's just common English vernacular.
You argue that Truesight doesn't require light to work "because it's magic", but there's no real indication that that is true. For one, Truesight doesn't work if you have the blinded condition. And it doesn't allow you to see through things like a Fog Cloud. Again, you're stating "B follows A" but it simply doesn't. You are taking logical leaps without any logical path between them.
Admittedly, I had a better argument regarding Fog Cloud and foliage for 5e, where the Line of Sight rules stated: "If at least one such line 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." Thus I would argue that we would need to determine if an effect "blocks vision", and we know Darkness (magical and mundane) does not, because we can see things through Darkness (I can see the lighthouse 10 miles away, even though I'm sitting in pitch darkness. I can see the stars even though I'm nowhere near a source of light. Etc). The seem to have taken that language out of 5.5e (I can't be certain, because I only have access to the Basic Rules), and so there is a stronger argument for there being no real difference mechanically between a Fog Cloud and Darkness because both create a heavily obscured area.
EXCEPT!
You bring up a great example yourself: foliage. "A Heavily Obscured area—such as an area with Darkness, heavy fog, or dense foliage—is opaque. You have the Blinded condition (see the Rules Glossary) when trying to see something there."
Now the question for you would be: if a Rogue takes the Hide action to gain the Invisible condition within a bit of dense foliage (a bush, up in a tree, etc) because the foliage makes the area Heavily Obscured, would you argue that the Rogue CANNOT see out of the foliage at all to ambush prey? Basically, is hiding up in trees or in bushes or dense grass in your games basically useless, because you become blind when you are in them?
I do rule it that way. That is, RAW, how it works, after all. And it's not so much as "pockets" of light as it is "the darkness is broken in that direction." An area of Total Cover doesn't create a single 5' pocket behind it that the Darkness then fills afterwards.
Granted, I run the vast majority of my games on Foundry, and it's very easy to keep track of such things on there as it can just do it for you. Here's an example:
Edit: D&D beyond does not like my image instertion, so here's a link: https://imgur.com/a/s3pZJgS
If we're allowing metaphorical word usage, then the rules can mean anything, because it's all metaphor, and metaphor can be interpreted. That way lies madness. I mean, "'darkness' could mean evil, so the spell creates a 15' radius sphere that detects as evil." This is not how game rules are written.
Regardless, the usage in Darkness is clearly not metaphor, because it's spreading through space, explicitly. "...magical Darkness spreads from a point within range and fills a 15-foot-radius Sphere." So no, this isn't an assumption. It's the explicit context of the sentence. You're just abjectly wrong here, and your argument is just sophism.
Examples refuted. We have context.
My point is that things which only change how things look are illusion. Darkness is not just changing how something looks. (And not all illusions can be disbelieved. Colorspray, Hypnotic Pattern, Blur, Mirror Image - none of these can be disbelieved, and that's just off the top of my head).
There's no such thing as "real darkness". Darkness is an absence of light. It is not a thing that can be real or not real.
Also, I refer entirely to specific things the spell calls out, so I'm not sure how your argument is supposed to refute me. Every word of the spell is part of how it works.
I think you just recreated my argument. if it blocks the air from being illuminated, then you can't see through it. Period. My whole argument was it stops the entire 15' radius sphere from being illuminated. That necessarily entails that no light can pass through its area, because that's what illumination is. (I'm arguing A implies B because it's tautological that if everything in the sphere can't be illuminated, you can't see through it, by definition of illumination. If only some things can't be illuminated, the spell needs to specify what those things are. It doesn't, therefore there's no limit to what can't be illuminated.)
Like, I literally cannot understand what you think you're arguing for at this point. Make this concrete. Go back to my example with the campfire. Answer my questions about what different things look like. And then explain what it means for the air to be incapable of being illuminated, but you can see through it, because I literally cannot imagine what those two statements in conjunction mean.
Truesight doesn't say it sees through a Fog Cloud, so it doesn't.
Truesight does exactly what it says it does. It says it sees through magical Darkness, so it does. It works however it needs to work to make that true. (But Truesight does not and cannot cause the magical Darkness to be illuminated - because it affects the person with Truesight, not the Darkness. The Darkness itself is unchanged, and thus still blocks all illumination. That fact means Truesight is working in some way that doesn't require light, even if it's magically mediated through the eyes.)
Saying things like "you're stating "B follows A" but it simply doesn't." is incomprehensible, btw. What is B and what is A? Because as far as I can tell, the only possible A and B here are A: the rules say Truesight sees through magical Darkness, B: Truesight sees through magical Darkness. And that A necessarily implies that B.
I don't need rules to tell me how this works. Things like foliage or a fine screen can be seen through when you're close to them, but not from far away.
(Of course, I would also say that foliage is not necessarily heavily obscuring, either. Within reasonable distances, there should be some perception difficulty to actually see someone in it, regardless of whether they've Hidden or not, because that is also how foliage actually works.)
That's different than a fog cloud, or magical Darkness, both of which are fully opaque media that occupy the air, and thus can neither be seen into, nor out of, nor through. (And the Darkness spell explicitly says this when it says the magical Darkness fills the sphere, and that the magical Darkness cannot be illuminated.)
But your position entails that although the rogue can't be seen, but the guy 5' behind the rogue and outside the foliage (but has foliage and the rogue between you and him) CAN be trivially seen, even though the rogue cannot. You just look straight through the rogue and the leaves as if they weren't there. And that is absolute nonsense. That guy has just as much concealment from the foliage as the rogue does.
Attacking a square that you have no reason to believe contains an enemy, because you haven't yet detected them, qualifies as an accident.
RAW, the rogue can't see. In play, I would treat someone at the edge of an heavily obscured area as lightly obscured (and thus able to see normally, and be seen with penalties).