D&D 5E Philosophy: Devil's Sight

[DND_Reborn]

The bit where Devil's Sight can see only in Darkness is awesome flavourful. It implies that Darkness is a kind of anti-light, and not the absence of light; that fits with a lot of human intuitive fear.

Devil's Sight uses Dark to see. Normal vision uses Light to see.

In my view, while you see "normally" with no penalty, I'd make colours in the Devil's Sight vision be sort of inverted, but that the ability includes this not hindering you in any way. But not really inverted -- you aren't seeing red in the place of green, you are seeing a 4th 5th and 6th colour that is illuminated by Darkness.

For the most part, colour 4/5/6 correspond to colours 1/2/3; but there would be exceptions. Things drawn in materials that are only visible from the Dark.

Under that model, dim light has both dim Darkness and dim Light, and they don't add to full vision. But if you have DS, you can still tell where the Light ends, the Dim Light ends, and then when the Devil's Sight dominates.

Interesting mechanic for it. I have reconciled with the idea that DS doesn't help in dim light, the idea that any light interferes with DS. Basically, bright light cancels DS just as darkness cancels normal sight. The light in dim light hurts DS (causing disadvantage) and the dark in dim light hurts normal sight (causing disadvantage).

That said, a Sorcerer (Shadow Magic)/ Warlock would be a cool combo. With Eyes of the Dark from the sorcerer, you have 120 feet DV, and with DS you get 120 feet as well. Now you can see up to 120 feet in ANY condition without disadvantage! Oh, I see my next character brewing already.... evil chuckle Guess I could go with the Hexblade for Warlock and grab those Eldritch invocations as well as Spell Sniper.

 

[clearstream]

Now imagine a magic powerful enough to actually create a darkness that affects these darkness-immune creatures. That could be a truly terrifying villain.

Why, hello there fog cloud...

 

[tetrasodium]

You just don't get it, do you? Every time I bring up SA it is because other people use it. I think most of JC's "advice" is crap personally. Whether you follow that advice or not, I don't care. I think DS IS balanced for exactly the reasons I've stated. You have yet to show why, other than it "ruins the DM's fun" (basically) for planning adventures.

So, you're upset that superior DV races have something against them (seeing in bright light), non-DV races have something against them (seeing in darkness), but DS breaks things? Aha, right, ok. So, what about regular DV races? There are TONS of them! They have no penalty in light or dim light (up to 60 feet anyway), and are better in dark having only disadvantage (which, doesn't impact attacks at all). A warlock of ANY race without sunlight sensitivity would see equally well in dark and bright light, but have disadvantage in dim light. Play a warlock with both DV and DS and you never have disadvantage for the most part.

The idea that this removes suspense is very limited thinking.

As for Eldritch blast being too good with the Agonizing/Spear combo? Nah. Again, warlocks have limited invocations and if a player wants to focus that much, have at it. Is it pretty good? Sure. Broken? Nope.

As an aside, I do agree CHA is over-used in 5E, especially for warlocks and catering to them to not need to rely on STR or DEX for combat. CHA is the new mental version of DEX if you make the right build. With Bard, Sorcerers, and Warlocks all CHA casters, it makes multiclassing between them a no-cost thing.

It doesn't matter why you keep bringing up that people could use JC's 5+ year old un-errata'd tweet, the fact is that you keep doing it in ways that try to imply DS is reasonable.

Yes there are tons of regular Darkvision equipped races, but aside from 2(?) exceptions they are all limited to 30-60 feet & that is well within the effective range of nearly every ranged spell or weapon rather than pushing into disadvantage, needing a feat to reach, or just too far away.... It's also well within the range of all but the most powerful spotights available to players (ie bulls eye lantern). I'm not upset that DV equipped races might see normally the things lurking in darkness when they pass into the range of being already in or just inside the start of bad things.

Using light shadow & darkness to build suspense & tension has been a storyteller's tool since fire was new because it speaks to the hyperalert lizard brain within us. Just like storytellers, most players are human. The only person surprised by that "limited" thinking is you and whoever wrote devils sight like a badly worded twinky munchkin homebrew.

Yes using JC's advice in this case could be one of the rare exceptions where he has a good point & would have a good point(yea his advice is usually "crap" as you put it, but he does have say in what gets errata'd & probbly more than us). Devils sight is not limited to 120feet on drow and deep gnomes, nor does it add daylight sensitivity to variant humans or any darkvision equipped race. It's not like they get 120' devils sight because the character has superior darkvision, or even because it follows after the well established goggles of night tradition & improves it a notch... but that kind of 0>60>90 improvement isn't good enough for the twinky munchkin grabbag that is a design goal in the warlock.

Why are non-devils sight warlock topics relevant to devils sight? I felt like my sarcasm & derisive mocking of wotc's choices in some of those areas should have made that clear. Frankly it's impossible to talk about warlock stuff (always on invocations with no level gate especially) without viewing them through the same lens normally reserved for badly worded & probably broken homebrew & not everyone accepts that it should get the sort of gm skeptcism not normally used when looking at "official WotC published content". Whoever at Wotc keeps accidentally releasing badly worded & problematic warlock stuff like some of the things I've mentioned bears some of the blame, but so too does WotC itself for not including the "well obviously RAI was.." & "this is the bit that got left out" shoulders the rest. WotC could fix devils sight as JC suggests & others in this thread have said would be an interesting flavorful change, but that would require them to gather a strong enough consensus to stand up against the director/playwright/owner/manager/producer/DM with a significant other roadblock that results in so many warlock abilities with boneheaded obviously ripe for abuse wordings coming out of WotC that it's hard to say they are just an oversight without skepticism.

 

[clearstream]

Yeah, but if we're going to go with the natural language argument, then we must also admit that sometimes in natural language "can" is used in place of "must" or "shall." It's fairly common in natural language to use less absolute or more passive verbs even when we're speaking in absolute or active terms. It's not even hard to find academic papers discussing the difficult semantics of these words.

Furthermore, the entire point of the natural language format was so that people explicitly didn't nit-pick the exact phrasing of the rules. They're intending to de-emphasize how things are phrased and emphasizing general or overall meaning.

Ultimately, I don't think the DM's job really changes here. They should:

1. Determine a model for how the mechanic works.
2. Explain the model to the players.
3. Base your rulings on that model.

That's well put. When you homebrew following their approaches to wording, you find yourself moving away from one-true-way design thinking toward possibly-something-like-this thinking. It's not terrible, but then it leads to decisions over things that are relatively trivial and might as well have been settled up front, according the best experience and playtesting of the design team.

So then consider "You see normally in darkness, both magical and non-magical, to a distance of 120 feet." As much as I earlier argued that "You may see normally in darkness, both magical and non-magical, to a distance of 120 feet" would make it clear a choice was involved, removing "can" altogether seems even clearer, if no choice is intended.

A simpler phrasing would have been better. Was the ambiguous phrasing chosen for the sake of ambiguity!?

 

[PsyzhranV2]

It doesn't matter why you keep bringing up that people could use JC's 5+ year old un-errata'd tweet, the fact is that you keep doing it in ways that try to imply DS is reasonable.

Yes there are tons of regular Darkvision equipped races, but aside from 2(?) exceptions they are all limited to 30-60 feet & that is well within the effective range of nearly every ranged spell or weapon rather than pushing into disadvantage, needing a feat to reach, or just too far away.... It's also well within the range of all but the most powerful spotights available to players (ie bulls eye lantern). I'm not upset that DV equipped races might see normally the things lurking in darkness when they pass into the range of being already in or just inside the start of bad things.

Using light shadow & darkness to build suspense & tension has been a storyteller's tool since fire was new because it speaks to the hyperalert lizard brain within us. Just like storytellers, most players are human. The only person surprised by that "limited" thinking is you and whoever wrote devils sight like a badly worded twinky munchkin homebrew.

Yes using JC's advice in this case could be one of the rare exceptions where he has a good point & would have a good point(yea his advice is usually "crap" as you put it, but he does have say in what gets errata'd & probbly more than us). Devils sight is not limited to 120feet on drow and deep gnomes, nor does it add daylight sensitivity to variant humans or any darkvision equipped race. It's not like they get 120' devils sight because the character has superior darkvision, or even because it follows after the well established goggles of night tradition & improves it a notch... but that kind of 0>60>90 improvement isn't good enough for the twinky munchkin grabbag that is a design goal in the warlock.

Why are non-devils sight warlock topics relevant to devils sight? I felt like my sarcasm & derisive mocking of wotc's choices in some of those areas should have made that clear. Frankly it's impossible to talk about warlock stuff (always on invocations with no level gate especially) without viewing them through the same lens normally reserved for badly worded & probably broken homebrew & not everyone accepts that it should get the sort of gm skeptcism not normally used when looking at "official WotC published content". Whoever at Wotc keeps accidentally releasing badly worded & problematic warlock stuff like some of the things I've mentioned bears some of the blame, but so too does WotC itself for not including the "well obviously RAI was.." & "this is the bit that got left out" shoulders the rest. WotC could fix devils sight as JC suggests & others in this thread have said would be an interesting flavorful change, but that would require them to gather a strong enough consensus to stand up against the director/playwright/owner/manager/producer/DM with a significant other roadblock that results in so many warlock abilities with boneheaded obviously ripe for abuse wordings coming out of WotC that it's hard to say they are just an oversight without skepticism.

Tetra.

Stop.

This is a lot of words to say that you think that Warlocks are bad and that everybody who likes and plays them should feel bad. You can achieve that with fewer.

 

[clearstream]

On a slightly off topic, but still related; if you are in a 50' deep pit and the sun is directly above you, and then some one cast darkness at the top of the pit, do you have any light at the bottom of the pit?

Yes. Darkness casts no shadow.

 

[Charlaquin]

On a slightly off topic, but still related; if you are in a 50' deep pit and the sun is directly above you, and then some one cast darkness at the top of the pit, do you have any light at the bottom of the pit?

Assuming the pit’s radius is less than it equal to that of Darkness, I would say no.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yes. Darkness casts no shadow.

How does the light get around it?

 

[tetrasodium]

The bit where Devil's Sight can see only in Darkness is awesome flavourful. It implies that Darkness is a kind of anti-light, and not the absence of light; that fits with a lot of human intuitive fear.

Devil's Sight uses Dark to see. Normal vision uses Light to see.

In my view, while you see "normally" with no penalty, I'd make colours in the Devil's Sight vision be sort of inverted, but that the ability includes this not hindering you in any way. But not really inverted -- you aren't seeing red in the place of green, you are seeing a 4th 5th and 6th colour that is illuminated by Darkness.

For the most part, colour 4/5/6 correspond to colours 1/2/3; but there would be exceptions. Things drawn in materials that are only visible from the Dark.

Under that model, dim light has both dim Darkness and dim Light, and they don't add to full vision. But if you have DS, you can still tell where the Light ends, the Dim Light ends, and then when the Devil's Sight dominates.

Yes, that could have been an interesting & flavorful way of wording devils sight, but that

That's well put. When you homebrew following their approaches to wording, you find yourself moving away from one-true-way design thinking toward possibly-something-like-this thinking. It's not terrible, but then it leads to decisions over things that are relatively trivial and might as well have been settled up front, according the best experience and playtesting of the design team.

So then consider "You see normally in darkness, both magical and non-magical, to a distance of 120 feet." As much as I earlier argued that "You may see normally in darkness, both magical and non-magical, to a distance of 120 feet" would make it clear a choice was involved, removing "can" altogether seems even clearer, if no choice is intended.

A simpler phrasing would have been better. Was the ambiguous phrasing chosen for the sake of ambiguity!?

given the amount of ambiguously worded warlock abilities like this one in devils sight or "regain all expended spell slots when you finish a short or long rest" combined with ones created by later additions like Aspect of the Moon & resulting coffeelock silliness... It's hard to say without giant heaping boulders of sarcasm that bringing out the resulting adversarial gm vrs player tension of forcing the GM to make those rulings was anything but a deliberate design goal & that is completely inexcusable if the case. WotC not issuing errata on it after all these years doesn't help matters
@PsyzhranV2 not warlocks, that apparent deliberate design goal is bad.

 

[NotAYakk]

Multiclassing isn't core to 5e balancing. When you find a multiclass combo that breaks the game due to lack of precise wording, that really should be the DM's job in 5e. They don't want to make the wording more awkward to make multiclassing require less rulings.