Unlike spells that specify a point you can see or spells like Fireball that say you put out your finger and physically blast something, spells like Circle of Death, Stinking Cloud, and Cloudkill simply say the effect emanates "from a point within range."
So do you need to see that point to cast the spell?
Obvious applications would be when you know a group of creatures are in a room but don't want to blast it there or when you want to create a smaller horizontal radius (like with Circle of Death).
Additionally, seems like Circle of Death in particular would simply go through walls or anything else for that matter. Which means one could cast it to affect creatures behind a door or a wall with or without realizing it.
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Blood Frenzy. The quipper has advantage on melee attack rolls against any creature that doesn't have all its hit points.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 1 piercing damage.
I believe the issue is not that you can't see the target point (as those spells do not specify that seeing the point is required as many other spells do), but that a general rule exists that you cannot 'target' through total cover: "A target with total cover can't be targeted directly by an attack or a spell, although some spells can reach such a target by including it in an area of effect. A target has total cover if it is completely concealed by an obstacle...
To target something, you must have a clear path to it, so it can't be behind total cover.
If you place an area of effect at a point that you can't see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction."
In these cases the target you are aiming at is a point in space, but it still has total cover from you when it is in a different room. Then regarding the area of effect: "A spell's effect expands in straight lines from the point of origin. If no unblocked straight line extends from the point of origin to a location within the area of effect, that location isn't included in the spell's area. To block one of these imaginary lines, an obstruction must provide total cover." So that's a no.
Without getting into whether any specific spell can or cannot be cast behind obstacles, I'll just point out that Clairvoyance is perfect for this purpose.
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You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Pg. 204 of the PHB states under Targets subsection A Clear Path to the Target "If you place an area of effect at a point that you can't see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction." This to me means that if you try to cast a spell on an origin you can't see and there is an obstruction it appears on the side of the obstruction that you are on, which would be the near side of the obstruction. Clairvoyance would help in this situation because it lets you see the point without being in the room, but if you cast another spell that requires concentration then it wouldn't work because as soon as you start casting you'd loose concentration on the Clairvoyance spell. Hope this helped.
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Remember this is a game and it's suppose to be fun for everybody. Let's all have fun and kill monsters.
We have established that you don't need to see the target of the spells in question, but that's not really the issue here anyway.
As RegentCorreon explained, total cover between the caster and the target can prevent the spell from reaching the target. There's still the possibility that you are on the other side of a wall from someone, but if there is no ceiling, you could cast the spell on a point in space above them that there is a clear line to and that might still work, but that sounds like a bit of an edge case.
There's the question that Meldroth specifically asked about the spell effect going through the wall to affect someone on the far side The answer is "maybe," but in those cases, the description of the spell would have to indicate that the spell effect goes around corners or goes through objects. Circle of death does not. Stinking cloud and cloudkill wrap around corners, but nothing in the spell description indicates they go through doors, walls, or any total cover.
There is a related edge case for spells that require you to see the target but do not otherwise state that a line of effect is required. It may be possible to cast these on a target the other side of a wall if you can see the target by some means. By a strict reading of this sentence a target you can see does not have total cover, no matter what is between you, "A target has total cover if it is completely concealed by an obstacle." If you can see it it is not concealed., by the definition of "conceal". Jeremy Crawford has clarified in Sage Advice that RAI is that the presence of a solid obstacle between two creatures provides total cover, so a clear pane of glass would be total cover. "A solid obstacle, regardless of material, can provide total cover. A closed window counts." This is not the only time Sage Advice actually contradicts a strict parsing of the written text. Given this Sage Advice clarification it it would be unlikely that casting a spell at a target beyond a solid wall would be permitted, even if you could by some means see the target, the target would still be considered to have total cover due to there being a solid obstacle between caster and target. The spell would have to specify that it could be cast through obstacles.
The evil wizard strode past the charred and blasted bodies of the castle guards. A smoking crater was all that remained of the east wall of the castle that had stood for five hundred years. The cruel spellcaster had swept aside the royal army so easily and now there was nobody left to stop him from killing the king. The monarch looked down helplessly at the wizard from a window high above. The wizard prepared to cast a fireball that would consume the tower in flames and blast it to pieces, surely killing everyone inside.
But then the unthinkable happened. The king closed the glass window. The king now had total cover. The wizard no longer had an uninterrupted path to his target. Evil was defeated once again!
There is a related edge case for spells that require you to see the target but do not otherwise state that a line of effect is required. It may be possible to cast these on a target the other side of a wall if you can see the target by some means. By a strict reading of this sentence a target you can see does not have total cover, no matter what is between you, "A target has total cover if it is completely concealed by an obstacle." If you can see it it is not concealed., by the definition of "conceal".
This is a classic rules-reading mistake: taking a single sentence out of context. If you read the cover rules in their entirety, it's pretty obvious that what counts is a solid obstruction, not how much of your body is visible.
Here's the first sentence of the cover rules: "Walls, trees, creatures, and other obstacles can provide cover during combat, making a target more difficult to harm."
This sentence is from the rules on half cover: "A target has half cover if an obstacle blocks at least half of its body."
Three-quarters cover: "A target has three-quarters cover if about three-quarters of it is covered by an obstacle."
By the time you get to "completely concealed by an obstacle" it's pretty clear from the context what the rules mean by "completely concealed"; no part of your body is sticking out.
I did say it was by a strict reading of just that sentence, and that it had been clarified in Sage Advice that a solid obstacle intervening provides cover, regardless of whether you can see through it. I concluded that ignorer to target through a transparent obstacle a spell would have to state that it could be cast through obstacles.
I used to play DBA and other miniatures war-games with people who were experts at parsing rules word by word. Hairsplitting as a fine art. To those people the wording of one section, eg half and three-quarters cover, do not neccesarilly apply to rules in a different section, full cover. They are set off as separate bullet points, so each would be interpreted by the text in that bullet point. To describe this as a frustrating population to game with would be a monumental understatement.
You did read my full post didn't you? I mean before you did exactly what you called a classic mistake, taking a single part out of context. If you read my post in its entirety it's pretty obvious that I am not arguing for the interpretation that a clear, but solid object would not provide cover.
Only been playing the game since '77. I know damn well what the rules meant.
The evil wizard strode past the charred and blasted bodies of the castle guards. A smoking crater was all that remained of the east wall of the castle that had stood for five hundred years. The cruel spellcaster had swept aside the royal army so easily and now there was nobody left to stop him from killing the king. The monarch looked down helplessly at the wizard from a window high above. The wizard prepared to cast a fireball that would consume the tower in flames and blast it to pieces, surely killing everyone inside.
But then the unthinkable happened. The king closed the glass window. The king now had total cover. The wizard no longer had an uninterrupted path to his target. Evil was defeated once again!
Screaming with fury, the wizard hurls the fireball at the window. A bright streak of light hits the window pane. The king starts to laugh, knowing that he had spared no expense and had bought glass as strong as steel. His laughter has no time to change to a scream of terror as the fireball blossoms and finds its way through every gap and crevice. He shouldn’t have tried to save money with cheap window glazing compound.
So you have a spell like Chill Touch, which says "You create a ghostly, skeletal hand in the space of a creature within range". At no point does it say you need to see the target, nor does it say the spell is like a beam or firebolt that gets released from your hand, it just "appears in the space of a creature within range". So say I'm behind a door, and can obviously hear the guards behind it, based on how loud they are talking I can assume they are indeed within the 120ft range, does the spell work?
You don't need line of sight (or sight at all) but the spell still needs to get from where you cast it (where you are) to the target, and it sounds like the door is in the way of that happening in your example. If you want to try to peek through the keyhole or get down on the ground and see under the door just a little bit, you could probably make a case for doing it that way.
All spells need line of effect (and are therefore blocked by total cover) unless otherwise noted, even if they don't need line of sight. Chill touch doesn't say that it ignores that requirement.
So you have a spell like Chill Touch, which says "You create a ghostly, skeletal hand in the space of a creature within range". At no point does it say you need to see the target, nor does it say the spell is like a beam or firebolt that gets released from your hand, it just "appears in the space of a creature within range". So say I'm behind a door, and can obviously hear the guards behind it, based on how loud they are talking I can assume they are indeed within the 120ft range, does the spell work?
All spells are blocked by total cover during the initial targeting step. Even spells that don't require sight are blocked by total cover. So no, the spell wouldn't work.
Note that what's relevant here is total cover between you and the initial target. That's why you can Misty Step through a window - the initial target is yourself, so the window isn't between you and the initial target. There are some pretty weird weeds you can get into with spell targeting.
I wonder if the whole confusion couldn't have been avoided by not trying to force the teleportation spells and the AoE spells to use the same language/rules. It seems like the only real argument against just saying "if you can't see it, you can't target it; if you can, you can" is that Dimension Door and Teleport wouldn't work right anymore.
Some spells still require you to see targets, whereas others don't. Faerie fire would be of questionable value if you had to be able to see the creatures it affects.
Some spells still require you to see targets, whereas others don't.
Expanding on this a bit: in practice it's only spells that target a finite number of creatures without an attack roll that require sight. Spells that target everything within an area pretty much never require sight or even being aware of a potential target's existence, and attack rolls already account for your lack of vision with disadvantage.
Ah ok, so even if single target spells don't say you know "shoots from your hand", "hurl a mote"(like Fire Bolt) or anything, you still assume the spell has to travel from you to the target, and thus if the target is behind total cover, the spell "line" gets interrupted? So even though Chill Touch which only states that the hand appears in the space, there is still the travel of the magic to that space and then appears as a spectral hand, thus it doesn't work? But then why make a distinction between spells that say "within range" and "that you can see within range" if there needs to be a unobstructed "straight" line from you to the point that you target?
Unlike spells that specify a point you can see or spells like Fireball that say you put out your finger and physically blast something, spells like Circle of Death, Stinking Cloud, and Cloudkill simply say the effect emanates "from a point within range."
So do you need to see that point to cast the spell?
Obvious applications would be when you know a group of creatures are in a room but don't want to blast it there or when you want to create a smaller horizontal radius (like with Circle of Death).
Additionally, seems like Circle of Death in particular would simply go through walls or anything else for that matter. Which means one could cast it to affect creatures behind a door or a wall with or without realizing it.
Blood Frenzy. The quipper has advantage on melee attack rolls against any creature that doesn't have all its hit points.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +5 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 1 piercing damage.
If you need to see the target, the spell's description will say so. Many spells do. The three you referenced do not.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
I believe the issue is not that you can't see the target point (as those spells do not specify that seeing the point is required as many other spells do), but that a general rule exists that you cannot 'target' through total cover: "A target with total cover can't be targeted directly by an attack or a spell, although some spells can reach such a target by including it in an area of effect. A target has total cover if it is completely concealed by an obstacle...
To target something, you must have a clear path to it, so it can't be behind total cover.
If you place an area of effect at a point that you can't see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction."
In these cases the target you are aiming at is a point in space, but it still has total cover from you when it is in a different room. Then regarding the area of effect: "A spell's effect expands in straight lines from the point of origin. If no unblocked straight line extends from the point of origin to a location within the area of effect, that location isn't included in the spell's area. To block one of these imaginary lines, an obstruction must provide total cover." So that's a no.
Without getting into whether any specific spell can or cannot be cast behind obstacles, I'll just point out that Clairvoyance is perfect for this purpose.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Pg. 204 of the PHB states under Targets subsection A Clear Path to the Target "If you place an area of effect at a point that you can't see and an obstruction, such as a wall, is between you and that point, the point of origin comes into being on the near side of that obstruction." This to me means that if you try to cast a spell on an origin you can't see and there is an obstruction it appears on the side of the obstruction that you are on, which would be the near side of the obstruction. Clairvoyance would help in this situation because it lets you see the point without being in the room, but if you cast another spell that requires concentration then it wouldn't work because as soon as you start casting you'd loose concentration on the Clairvoyance spell. Hope this helped.
Remember this is a game and it's suppose to be fun for everybody. Let's all have fun and kill monsters.
I see three things going on in this discussion:
"Not all those who wander are lost"
There is a related edge case for spells that require you to see the target but do not otherwise state that a line of effect is required. It may be possible to cast these on a target the other side of a wall if you can see the target by some means. By a strict reading of this sentence a target you can see does not have total cover, no matter what is between you, "A target has total cover if it is completely concealed by an obstacle." If you can see it it is not concealed., by the definition of "conceal". Jeremy Crawford has clarified in Sage Advice that RAI is that the presence of a solid obstacle between two creatures provides total cover, so a clear pane of glass would be total cover. "A solid obstacle, regardless of material, can provide total cover. A closed window counts." This is not the only time Sage Advice actually contradicts a strict parsing of the written text. Given this Sage Advice clarification it it would be unlikely that casting a spell at a target beyond a solid wall would be permitted, even if you could by some means see the target, the target would still be considered to have total cover due to there being a solid obstacle between caster and target. The spell would have to specify that it could be cast through obstacles.
The evil wizard strode past the charred and blasted bodies of the castle guards. A smoking crater was all that remained of the east wall of the castle that had stood for five hundred years. The cruel spellcaster had swept aside the royal army so easily and now there was nobody left to stop him from killing the king. The monarch looked down helplessly at the wizard from a window high above. The wizard prepared to cast a fireball that would consume the tower in flames and blast it to pieces, surely killing everyone inside.
But then the unthinkable happened. The king closed the glass window. The king now had total cover. The wizard no longer had an uninterrupted path to his target. Evil was defeated once again!
"Not all those who wander are lost"
That’s what Catapult is for!
Professional computer geek
This is a classic rules-reading mistake: taking a single sentence out of context. If you read the cover rules in their entirety, it's pretty obvious that what counts is a solid obstruction, not how much of your body is visible.
Here's the first sentence of the cover rules: "Walls, trees, creatures, and other obstacles can provide cover during combat, making a target more difficult to harm."
This sentence is from the rules on half cover: "A target has half cover if an obstacle blocks at least half of its body."
Three-quarters cover: "A target has three-quarters cover if about three-quarters of it is covered by an obstacle."
By the time you get to "completely concealed by an obstacle" it's pretty clear from the context what the rules mean by "completely concealed"; no part of your body is sticking out.
I did say it was by a strict reading of just that sentence, and that it had been clarified in Sage Advice that a solid obstacle intervening provides cover, regardless of whether you can see through it. I concluded that ignorer to target through a transparent obstacle a spell would have to state that it could be cast through obstacles.
I used to play DBA and other miniatures war-games with people who were experts at parsing rules word by word. Hairsplitting as a fine art. To those people the wording of one section, eg half and three-quarters cover, do not neccesarilly apply to rules in a different section, full cover. They are set off as separate bullet points, so each would be interpreted by the text in that bullet point. To describe this as a frustrating population to game with would be a monumental understatement.
You did read my full post didn't you? I mean before you did exactly what you called a classic mistake, taking a single part out of context. If you read my post in its entirety it's pretty obvious that I am not arguing for the interpretation that a clear, but solid object would not provide cover.
Only been playing the game since '77. I know damn well what the rules meant.
Screaming with fury, the wizard hurls the fireball at the window. A bright streak of light hits the window pane. The king starts to laugh, knowing that he had spared no expense and had bought glass as strong as steel. His laughter has no time to change to a scream of terror as the fireball blossoms and finds its way through every gap and crevice. He shouldn’t have tried to save money with cheap window glazing compound.
So you have a spell like Chill Touch, which says "You create a ghostly, skeletal hand in the space of a creature within range". At no point does it say you need to see the target, nor does it say the spell is like a beam or firebolt that gets released from your hand, it just "appears in the space of a creature within range". So say I'm behind a door, and can obviously hear the guards behind it, based on how loud they are talking I can assume they are indeed within the 120ft range, does the spell work?
You don't need line of sight (or sight at all) but the spell still needs to get from where you cast it (where you are) to the target, and it sounds like the door is in the way of that happening in your example. If you want to try to peek through the keyhole or get down on the ground and see under the door just a little bit, you could probably make a case for doing it that way.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
All spells need line of effect (and are therefore blocked by total cover) unless otherwise noted, even if they don't need line of sight. Chill touch doesn't say that it ignores that requirement.
All spells are blocked by total cover during the initial targeting step. Even spells that don't require sight are blocked by total cover. So no, the spell wouldn't work.
Note that what's relevant here is total cover between you and the initial target. That's why you can Misty Step through a window - the initial target is yourself, so the window isn't between you and the initial target. There are some pretty weird weeds you can get into with spell targeting.
I wonder if the whole confusion couldn't have been avoided by not trying to force the teleportation spells and the AoE spells to use the same language/rules. It seems like the only real argument against just saying "if you can't see it, you can't target it; if you can, you can" is that Dimension Door and Teleport wouldn't work right anymore.
Some spells still require you to see targets, whereas others don't. Faerie fire would be of questionable value if you had to be able to see the creatures it affects.
Expanding on this a bit: in practice it's only spells that target a finite number of creatures without an attack roll that require sight. Spells that target everything within an area pretty much never require sight or even being aware of a potential target's existence, and attack rolls already account for your lack of vision with disadvantage.
Ah ok, so even if single target spells don't say you know "shoots from your hand", "hurl a mote"(like Fire Bolt) or anything, you still assume the spell has to travel from you to the target, and thus if the target is behind total cover, the spell "line" gets interrupted? So even though Chill Touch which only states that the hand appears in the space, there is still the travel of the magic to that space and then appears as a spectral hand, thus it doesn't work?
But then why make a distinction between spells that say "within range" and "that you can see within range" if there needs to be a unobstructed "straight" line from you to the point that you target?