Mad Hamish
First Post
Me too.. because to hit something you have to perceive it, and to perceive it's existence, you have to do a perception check.
That just makes logical sense to me, if you're blinded, you'd get the debuff against you too.
There are a couple of factors here
a) You're getting confused between 'terms of art' and the general meanings of words
if a word in D&D has a game definition it doesn't mean anything more or less than that in the game. The Immobilised condition doesn't do anything more than the condition description says, blinded doesn't do anything more than the description says etc.
b) You've got to be careful about what common sense seeming stuff applies to D&D
lots of people use common sense arguments to say 'a martial powered character couldn't do that' and nerf a heap of classes which causes imbalances. It gets especially bad when combined with a)
As to the idea that you have to see somebody to affect them many a person has been hit by blind fire in the real world and, unlike Shadowrun, there's nothing explicite in the D&D magic system stating that you have to be able to perceive a target directly.