Back to magical darkness.
We've established that any game that tries to represent natural darkness with obscurement is an epic fail. (Let me just note this happens more often than you think. WFRP2 is my favorite game, but its notion that light from lanterns stop at the far edge of its range tells me only one thing: more game designers need to go out into nature and experience real darkness, perhaps for the first time in their lives! But I digress.)
Anyway. I see three common ways to implement magic darkness in fantasy games:
1. Extinguish lights. This is very easy to adjudicate, but seldom what players expect or want. This could equally easy be called "control lights".
2. Obscurement. Unlike natural darkness, obscurement is a good simple fit for magical darkness. Again fairly simple to adjudicate. Main drawback: people realize this is just a reskinned Fog Cloud. Still, a good choice.
This is what I use for D&D, any edition. Darkness creates a black ball of blackness. Simple. Not too powerful (except for certain Warlocks...)
3a. The area is still see-through, except it's in darkness. This creates all kinds of logical and physical headaches (if you see through the area, but not the people in it, do these people then not block what's behind the area?), and is OP as hell.
3b. You can see out, but not in. Easy to say, a nightmare to adjudicate. And again, very VERY powerful.
What we need to realize is that #3 for most intents and purposes duplicates Invisibility, and more specifically, Greater Invisibility. That should tell you it's inappropriate for a level 2 slot.
And unlike Invisibility all the questions regarding how to run it in game remains unanswered. My only suggestion is to say it IS invisibility (and to bump it up to a higher spell level).
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