D&D 5E Why do so many DMs use the wrong rules for invisibility?

[ThePolarBear]

For invisibility and darkness, the rules are actually quite sparse. Someone in darkness is effectively blinded.

Blinded
• A blinded creature can’t see and automatically fails any ability check that requires sight.
• Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature’s attack rolls have disadvantage.
​

[...]

Oh, and if I'm missing a rule somewhere feel free to point it out. Wouldn't be the first time.

Don't mind if i do. That part was changed because it made zero sense. It's now "you are effectively blinded when looking at something that' in an heavily obscured area" - not a direct quote, but enough to give an idea of what the change was and how it affects things. Now, leaving aside that heavy obscurement still blocks "vision", you can theoretically see a campfire while in the woods at night and far from any light source while before you were not able to.

Thus rendering the darkness pointless. What's needed here is a flat minus to the attack roll (peronally, I'd say -4), with possibility increased by that much of hitting a wrong target (or a wall or other obstacle); but for some reason 5e design seems not to want to do this.

Lan-"RAW 1, common sense 0"-efan

As stated by others Darkness is not irrelevant for other reasons but i will offer a different POV on the advantages of rolling without disadvantage/advantage while in darkness: It reduces the time spent rolling dice and missing. It keeps combat shorter. It does so nullifying every other possible source of "i'm ahead of them!", and i agree is silly to have it act as a "great equalizer" but... i kind of sort can see a spark of reason in total darkness BEING a "great equalizer".

The weirdness of the invisibility and darkness rules is definitely a clear design flaw where the advantage/disadvantage mechanic is shown to have a major weakness.

I agree that it's a weakness, at least in my opinion. i don't know if it's a design flaw. It applies to everything and is stated to needing to be applied so. It's more like a wanted thing.

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On invisibility, sound, knowing where... the only thing i care about is that, to me, RAW tells 3 things:

IF my character can hear someone/thing, i can target it directly;
Invisibility does not automatically allow you to roll stealth for hiding, but a DM might very well allow someone invisible to roll for it for free, since DM is DM - or use a passive score...;
Creatures in combat are normally aware of their surroundings and know what it's happening UNLESS some specific situation or condition is present.

What i do with these three informations? I start with the base assumption that combat alone is not enough to mask the presence of an unhidden invisible creature or to allow said creature to fall under the "must guess the location" rule UNLESS there's something about the current conditions in which the fight takes place that prompts for a different adjudication.
I do not go as far as to say that a character knows exactly where an invisible creature is, but if that creature is hearable and there's nothing preventing it the player can declare that creature as a target.
A DM has the role of mediating between the rules and the players, judging each single different situation using rules, common sense and the input from its players - it's not a machine running a prewritten program and should not act as one.

 

[I'm A Banana]

There are some logic flaws I keep seeing on this thread (and similar ones).

One is that if you succeed on a hide you are not detected therefore you are detected if you have not successfully taken a hide action. That's like saying that all mammals are bats because bats are mammals. If you are invisible you may or may not be detected depending on the situation.

Speaking by RAW:

It is hypothetically possible to be undetected if you have not taken the hide action.

However, invisibility by itself isn't sufficient to be undetected - explicitly, "any noise it makes or tracks it leaves," and by inference, a lot of other circumstances, will still reveal your location. "Any noise" can logically include the rattle of your backpack as you move, or the sound of the fabric of your robes, or the sound of you breathing, the sound of your footsteps on the ground, or, well any noise. This is reinforced under Hiding, where it states "an invisible creature can't be seen, so it can always try to hide. Signs of its passage might still be noticed, however, and it still has to stay quiet."

So if you are a silenced odorless flying nudist and you turn invisible? Maybe then you are also undetected. Or maybe the DM rules that you moving through the air makes a gentle woosh noise, so you're still detected because you're not flying through a vacuum. In practice, it's hard to imagine a circumstance where the only thing you're missing to be effectively unnoticed is that you're visible, but the DM is given a lot of leeway to determine that.

There's plenty of room to think that doesn't make a lot of sense (the "noisy battlefield" argument is one I find pretty persuasive), and everyone's free to do whatever they want in their own games, but the RAW seems pretty clear to me, as does the intent that you need to do something above and beyond "become invisible" to be completely undetected.

Another is the slippery slope argument. That since depending on the circumstances an invisible creature may not be detected even though they have not taken the hide action they are never detected if they are invisible. I don't see anyone stating that on this thread.

I think the default RAW expectation is that "If all you do is turn invisible, you aren't also hidden."

Anyone who turns invisible and also then becomes hidden is doing something else to also be hidden - invisibility itself doesn't also confer the hidden status.

All I can say is that being invisible does not automatically mean no on knows where you are in any games I've played. Nor does it mean that you are automatically detected if you have not taken the hide action.

If a creature is making sufficient noise to be heard, stepping in mud or otherwise leaving tracks, is in a light drizzle/smoke/mist, is close enough that you can feel a disturbance in the air ... or any number of other reasons ... then your PC knows where the creature is.

I think that's in line with how it's intended to be run, but I also think that "sufficient noise to be heard" isn't the (very low) bar that the RAW sets. Per the RAW, your location can be detected by any noise you make. Which basically means that unless a creature takes special precautions to not make ANY noise (silence spell, the Hide action, being naked and saying "I'm not moving and I'm holding my breath and I don't even scratch that itch on my nose," to which my response would be, "Okay, make a Dexterity (Stealth) check to see if you can avoid that itch..."), invisibility ain't gonna cut it. "Sufficient noise to be heard" per RAW = "any noise."

It's funny. To me the worst would be rules that explicitly state that I always know where someone is even if I cannot see, here or otherwise detect them.

In a previous edition, I don't know how many times everyone at the table agreed that it was idiotic that we knew exactly where everyone was unless they were officially "hidden". [Sarcasm]Because why wouldn't you know that there's an invisible creature 200 feet away. Flying 10 feet above the ground. When the PCs are in the middle of a battle having to shout over the noise of combat. Totally made sense.[/Sarcasm]

One thing that I've found useful in my own adjudication is this consideration: how far away can you hear the normal sounds of human conversation?

Turns out this is a hard question to answer because acoustics is dang science, but some rando on the internet suggests 20 meters as a rule of thumb, and that translates to 65 feet. If I set a default assumption of "Creatures generally make noise equal to the sounds of normal human conversation, maybe a bit louder what with the armor and the heavy backpack and all", 60 feet seems like a good rule of thumb. Unless stated otherwise, they're basically always making this amount of noise.

So you wouldn't necessarily notice something invisible and 200 feet away.

But you'd hear it making woosh noises if you were 60 feet from it, IMC.

That same rando suggests 10 meters for whispers, so maybe someone invisible "trying to be quiet" could be 30 feet away?

You want anything else, I'm going to ask you to make a Stealth check or otherwise describe to me how you're preventing yourself from making small adjustments of your body or whatnot.

What doesn't make sense to me is the assumption that someone carrying a backpack loaded with supplies and a coin pouch heavy with coin and armor and daggers and opulent robes can just go invisible and suddenly drop off the face of the earth. Or that a flying creature doesn't make any noise as it flies.

 

[dagger]

We run it the way we have since AD&D 1e......

 

[Celtavian]

What's the major weakness of advantage/disadvantage?

That it limits offsetting penalties in a strange way in some cases like making it easier to hit in places of darkness if both participants are affected by it when the advantage benefit of hitting a blinded target it canceled by the disadvantage of not being able to see creating a flat roll with all bonuses. It's a very goofy way to run the situation where it somehow becomes easier to hit if both targets can't see. That doesn't at all mirror the reality of two blind people swinging at each other.

The other weakness is the strange way it stacks and offsets. Once you have it, that's it. Just as no matter how many advantage situations you have from a special ability, prone, restrained, and the like all add up to advantage or vice versa. There have been many times when gaining advantage leaves my players bored because they have no other special abilities or situations to use.

Many times it's been like, "We got advantage. No one else needs to do anything but launch an attack." It become a bit boring when that is the limit of your tactical options.

 

[Tony Vargas]

We run it the way we have since AD&D 1e......

% chance of detecting invisible based on level?

 

[Oofta]

Speaking by RAW:

It is hypothetically possible to be undetected if you have not taken the hide action.
...

This reminds me of a joke.

A man asks a woman "Will you sleep with me for a million dollars?"

The woman thinks it over for a moment and agrees.

The man then asks her "Will you sleep with me for twenty dollars?"

The woman replies "Of course not, what kind of woman do you think I am?"

The man replies "I know what kind of woman you are, now we're just negotiating price."
​

So you're saying that in some cases someone who is invisible is also undetectable even though they have not taken the hide action.

Now we're just negotiating the price.

Where the line is drawn of when and how someone that is invisible (or otherwise unseen) can be detected when they have not taken the hide action is up to the DM.

 

[FrogReaver]

A blinded target can't easily defend himself. So yes if he can't see and I can't see it makes perfect sense to assume neither of us has an advantage or disadvantage on the other.

That it limits offsetting penalties in a strange way in some cases like making it easier to hit in places of darkness if both participants are affected by it when the advantage benefit of hitting a blinded target it canceled by the disadvantage of not being able to see creating a flat roll with all bonuses. It's a very goofy way to run the situation where it somehow becomes easier to hit if both targets can't see. That doesn't at all mirror the reality of two blind people swinging at each other.

The other weakness is the strange way it stacks and offsets. Once you have it, that's it. Just as no matter how many advantage situations you have from a special ability, prone, restrained, and the like all add up to advantage or vice versa. There have been many times when gaining advantage leaves my players bored because they have no other special abilities or situations to use.

Many times it's been like, "We got advantage. No one else needs to do anything but launch an attack." It become a bit boring when that is the limit of your tactical options.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

A blinded target can't easily defend himself. So yes if he can't see and I can't see it makes perfect sense to assume neither of us has an advantage or disadvantage on the other.

But if he can't see, and you can't see AND you're doubled over in pain from nausea AND you're tangled up in a net AND you're lying on the ground AND there's a huge dragon closing in on you AND you haven't slept in three days, then that probably shouldn't be an equal playing field.

That's the limitation of the dis/advantage system - that one significant circumstance negates the relevance of all other significant circumstances.

 

[Dausuul]

While I wouldn't be quite that hard on them - I can't see any designer intentionally setting out to make a bad rule - I wonder if this is a result of the playtesting not coming to any consensus either (or giving lots of conflicting recommendations) and the end-result rules just reflecting that. Note this is pure speculation on my part.

Have you ever sat down and tried to write a set of stealth rules that is a) consistent, b) easy to understand, and c) makes sense in play? I've tried, and I am here to tell you, it is bloody hard. It's straightforward to make a rule for any given scenario (invisibility; darkness; sneaky person; et cetera), but to take all those scenarios and create one cohesive system that covers them all... that is a job of work.

My guess is that most of the playtesters just went with their intuitive understanding of stealth rather than trying to apply the rules as written, and for those who did run it by RAW, it worked okay for the most common scenario (rogue trying to hide behind stuff), so it didn't pop out as having problems until the book was already in print.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

But if he can't see, and you can't see AND you're doubled over in pain from nausea AND you're tangled up in a net AND you're lying on the ground AND there's a huge dragon closing in on you AND you haven't slept in three days, then that probably shouldn't be an equal playing field.

You have :
Disadvantage 6 (can't see target, in pain, tangled in net, prone, scared, exhausted)
Advantage 1 (target can't see you)
For a net Disadvantage.

Your target, attacking you back, has:
Disadvantage 1 (they can't see you)
Advantage 2 (you can't see them, you are prone)
For a net Advantage.