D&D 5E How strict are you with vision and illumination rules?

[Ed Laprade]

In scenarios where there isn’t any ambient light, if they don’t all have darkvision, I ask who is doing what for light. As long as someone’s got a means of illumination, it just is and I leave it at that. Particularly in my larger open table that has a shorter play time, I don't want to get bogged down in logistics.

Yeah, pretty much this. With my current group (when I get to run) all but one of the characters had darkvision, so I gave the Human a helmet that granted it asap. Now I just don't worry about lighting at all, as its more trouble than its worth. IMO YMMV.

 

[Satyrn]

How are you normally handling this aspect of the game, do you always enforce the rules strictly or do you handwave something?

My table does the same as you describe - as long as there's a light, we can see. The other side of large caverns may not be Illuminated, but that's handled by DM discretion, and really just used to show that yes, it's a big cavern.

As an aside: My DM's growing desire to track resource expenditure (torches, food, water, etc) seems to get foiled at every turn by magic. He grumbles about goodberry at nearly every session. My moon druid is also the party's torch with produce flame (and there's only one other character without darkvision or devil's sight).

 

[jgsugden]

I ignore the rules because I made my own. In my game, there are a lot of types of vision.

Low Light - Double the range of dim light around a light source, within the normal range of dim is treated as normal light.
Darkvision - You produce light in the specified radius that only you can see. It is black and white vision.
Infravision - You see heat and infrared light - no range limit. You can spot a deer moving in the valley from far away, but bright light negates it within the radius of the light.
Ultravision - You can see ultraviolet light. This is used by wizards and other arcane folks in their secret messages, primarily.
Devilsight - See in any darkness.

The type of vision a monster (or PC) has is based upon their evolution as a species.

LLV is the domain of the dusk and dawn hunters. Many animals have it.
Infravision is for meat hunters that live in the dark... but mostly on the surface.
Darkvision is more common for creatures that live unde rthe ground for most of their lives.
etc...

When it comes to adjudicating the light, I wing it most of the time rather than worrying about the fine details.
Sonar - See with sound.
Tremorsense - "See" contacts with the ground around you in the specified radius if you are touching the ground.
Truesight - You gain all vision types, plus the ability see through illusions, etc...

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I generally run on the basis that the party will take care of light sources, and so I'll check who is holding a light source when it comes to combat or other situations where it is important. Even when the entire party has darkvision they're pretty good at mentioning whether they have a light out or not.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

This is obviously a simplification to remove one layer of tactics and management for my kids. It would be nice later on, when they are more experienced with the game, to restore the full rules on this.

How are you normally handling this aspect of the game, do you always enforce the rules strictly or do you handwave something?

I go to for a strict ruling. I want to know light sources and ranges. If there is, for example, weapon fire from the darkness then I tell the players, "You can't see where its coming from." I also enforce the disadvantage on WIS\Perception for characters with darkvisison (which so many tables ignore, either accidentally or deliberately).

It is important to remember that being in the darkness makes you unseen (AKA concealed) but does not necessarily make you hidden. Unseen and hidden are two different things - something many people don't understand (mainly because the rulebooks explain it really badly .

Unseen means someone can't see you but knows where you are. For example, you are in darkness or you are invisible (but leaving tracks and/or making noise). They can attack you, but at disadvantage.

Hidden means someone does not know where you are, or even that you are there at all. They may know you are there, but not know your location with any accuracy (The thief is somewhere in that half of the warehouse!"). If they try to attack you they have to first guess at your location, and even then they are attacking at disadvantage.

Just being unseen usually does not make you hidden - you have to actually take some actions to conceal your presence - but being unseen is usually a prerequisite for attempting to hide. For example, you are in darkness or invisible and have taken steps to conceal your presence (by muffling your breathing, walking slowly and carefully, silencing noisy equipment - which is usually modelled in the game by making a DEX\Stealth roll).

Note that it is also possible to be hidden but not unseen, though this is rare. This is usually known the terms "disguised" and "camouflaged".

 

[5ekyu]

A while back i posted a thread about the illum rules to mostly the same conclusion... Most feel the book rules are fine as long as they dont use them and let things like glowy moss or "it says torch on my sheet somewhere" means we can see.

Foe me the actual rules seem to be way too strict... Outdoors at night unless you have an exceptionalky brilliant full moon, not just any regular full moon, you are blinded without a light source.

The key is, without handwaves, there are a lot of thing in the game to let that become a tactically exploitable average full moon blinding.

Most pcs would love to be able to blind half their enemies, but have the actual lighting rules do that runs into gm handwaves.

In my game, i dropped blinded to the impenetrable darkness, like magical.

I have darkness be mostly what dim light is now.

I have dim light be no penalties but it does help hiding.

I also shift darkvision to give advantage in dim light perception... and treat darkness as dim ... Moving it to a beneficial trait instead of a "normalized while others shafted" trait.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The main problem with the book rules is that, like a lot of other things, they massively underestimate the non-magical capabilities of a normal human, somehow while simultaneously ignoring the drawbacks of the situation. Moonlit night? Humans are apparently completely blind. However completely blind humans can run around at full speed.

It just... seems better to avoid that whole mess of beans when you can.

 

[Satyrn]

The main problem with the book rules is that, like a lot of other things, they massively underestimate the non-magical capabilities of a normal human, somehow while simultaneously ignoring the drawbacks of the situation. Moonlit night? Humans are apparently completely blind. However completely blind humans can run around at full speed.

It just... seems better to avoid that whole mess of beans when you can.

I'd say that if a DM who ruled that an area illuminated by the moon was in darknes, the DM ruled wrong.

But I don't recall these rules well. Does the book list moonlight as not providing at least dim light? Or are you suggesting that a human in dim light is essentially blind?

I also think it's up to the DM to provide consequences when a character tries something he can technically do, but is fraught with risk. We can run at full speed in complete darkness, after all, but Bad Things will almost certainly happen.

I think it needs to be up to the DM what the bad thing is and how likely it is to happen, based on the circumstances (running in the dark on a football field is different than running in the dark through a farmer's field), At best the rules can provide some advice . . .


. . . and perhaps there should be a sidebar on every page of the rule books called "Making the Rulings" that offers bits of advice to the DM and players about running the rules in context of the game, along with a constant reminder that the game can actually cover nearly every situation, but only when the DM makes rulings.

 

[iserith]

In a recent session, illumination came up in a fun way. The PCs were exploring what amounted to an extra-dimensional insane asylum populated by inmates with strange powers. They entered a long, somewhat wide corridor. Their halfling henchman, Boy Tuesday, was holding the party's light source, a torch. In the corridor there were a number of doors and at either end of the corridor were windows looking out onto the Windswept Depths of Pandemonium, vibrating from the eternal wind. A few dretches lurked here which moved to attack the PCs.

The PCs engaged. One of the dretches smashed a window and the howling, maddening wind of Pandemonium came rushing into the corridor. Similar to a gust of wind spell, it extinguished Boy Tuesday's torch and start pushing dretches and PCs around. The barbarian and the bard were struck with indefinite madness, gaining new flaws. The (dwarf) bard and (half-elf) fighter were able to see because of darkvision, but the rest of the PCs and Boy Tuesday were cast in darkness, which I was able to produce in Roll20. It then became a game of the characters who could see directing the blinded PCs toward the dretches, all while both the dretches and the PCs were getting tossed around by the wind. It was difficult enough that the party's wizard retreated into a side hallway unaffected by the wind (he discovered this by going through one of the many doors) so he could light a torch and, from the relative safety of that hallway, shed at least some light on the matter so he could target the dretches with some spells.

What would have been an Easy encounter with some low-level demons became a whole lot more interesting due in part to lack of illumination.

 

[Ranthalan]

I wouldn't normally worry about it, but my players keep asking about it, so we play with it. They also keep track of their rations and when they need to forage even though I never bring it up. I swear, they all must do bookkeeping for fun in the rest of their spare time.