Azurewraith
Explorer
Im with @hirston on this one it also just makes it easier to adjudicate the rules and i like simples.
Help me understand the argument here, please.
Say you're in a waist-high grassy field on a bright summer day, and you cast darkness on a solitary small tree in the middle of that field.
- Does someone outside the darkness see the tree?
- if not, what do they see? Do they see the rest of the world behind the tree (the tree is invisible?)? Do they see a silhouette as Hemlock suggests (so the darkness spell is much more useful if cast with a wall behind you to eliminate the silhouetting)?
PHB_Errata_1.1 said:Vision and Light (p. 183). A heavily obscured area doesn’t blind you, but you are effectively blinded when you try to see something obscured by it.
The spell says creatures with Darkvision can't see through the darkness. To me that means that no one can see what's in or on the other side of it. Also, if anyone is within the radius of the spell, they can't see out of it because that would be seeing through it.
Ruling anything else than darkness being an opaque blob of blackness leads to insanity, so don't do it.
Saying you rule "you can see past the darkness but not into it" might sound easy, but what does that even mean?
Just don't do it.
Player's Basic Rules said:A heavily obscured area—such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage—blocks vision entirely. A creature in a heavily obscured area effectively suffers from the blinded condition (see appendix A) when trying to see something in that area.
The bolded part has had me a bit confused I guess. I've been reading it to mean the vision of observers both inside and outside of the area, as if there is a barrier between the two. I couldn't for the life of me understand why they didn't fix this phrase when the errata were issued, since it obviously couldn't apply to darkness the way I was interpreting it.
I see now, thanks to this thread, and those who've patiently explained their understanding of Darkness, that the second sentence does indeed clarify the meaning of the first. It might have been more clear to say that a heavily obscured area blocks vision into the area entirely, or something like that. Now that I understand it, it seems clear enough.
I still don't think I like the idea of backlight shining through the sphere of a Darkness spell, due to the above language about it blocking vision, but the spell is quite good run with observers on the inside being able to see out, as are heavily obscured areas in general. I really didn't know what the spell was good for until now.
(Oh WotC, sigh.) I haven't looked at a revised PHB, I'm just going off the errata document v1.1, but it sounds like the errata still left things in a confusing state.
It's a 'pendulum swing' back towards vague natural language after previous editions' love affair with closely-parsed 'Rules As Written,' and precise jargon & 'exception based design.'It is a horrible way to write a rules text by the way, but it's hardly the only place WotC does that with their writing--the daily XP budget rules in the DMG are written exactly the same way (clarifying sentence last), and they confuse people into believing the that daily XP values are supposed to be raw XP instead of adjusted. Oh, WotC. [shakes head]