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If silhouettes always count as heavily obscured, then observers are always "effectively blind" to silhouettes and thus no silhouette can ever be seen. Ok, for creatures, maybe never having silhouettes be visible isn't that big a deal in practice--human-sized creatures don't actually block that...

Adventurers' Guilds start to make a lot more sense in-fiction if you treat them as intended to exploit adventurers, rather than assist them.... "What? You're looking for a place to sell that magic sword to raise cash? Well, I don't know anyone in these parts who would want a magic sword, but...

It's not that it's a paradox, so much as a contradiction by definition. If the darkness is fully transparent, then it can't be seen at all, by definition. If the darkness is instead partially transparent and partially opaque, then it can be seen (if it's backlit, anyway) because it partially...

I'm confused. You say it's filled with "elemental darkness, so completely transparent like the air of a pitch-dark room". But you also say you want the darkness itself to be visible. How can the elemental darkness itself be visible if it's completely transparent?

I think you and I may have very different conceptions of the neurological phenomenon of "sight". To me it's perfectly meaningful to talk about seeing the absence of something. For example, if a wall is all green except for a white patch, it's perfectly reasonably for me to say I can see the...

There's certainly room to quibble over whether, e.g., the moon can be "seen" in a solar eclipse or if instead one is seeing a shadow perfectly superimposed over the moon. Differing perspectives on what it means to be "seen" could definitely affect the relative complexity of opaque vs transparent...

Personally, I think the main purpose of having classes is to make character creation a conceptually different exercise than it would be if abilities could be picked al a carte. By combining abilities into thematically linked packages, players taking levels in a class to get a certain ability...

Then I'm glad your intuition and designer intent lined up in this case. :) Obviously I have merely anecdotal data on how often "melee weapon attack" is misunderstood in practice, but I've definitely had multiple new players be confused about how attacking with a melee weapon does not...

Out of curiousity, if it had instead been written "melee-weapon attack" would you still consider it a contradiction in terms to make a "melee-weapon attack" with a thrown weapon?

The confusion comes from whether "melee weapon attack" means "an attack with a melee weapon" or "a melee attack with a weapon" throughout the text. In technical/formal English, the lack of a hyphen signifies that each adjective independently modifies the noun, whereas the presence of a hyphen...

To my knowledge, "melee-weapon attack" appears nowhere in the rules, so unless you know differently, I believe your claim that both phrases are used differently in the text to be false. Jeremy Crawford has said so explicitly. The Sage Advice Compendium says: "Here’s a bit of wording minutia: we...

I would agree that overall the rules are sufficiently clear. That doesn't stop the exceptions from becoming recurring topics of debate or confusion. For example, as explictly noted by JC, the meaning of "melee weapon attack" hinges on the lack of a hyphen between "melee" and "weapon". He's...

While the rules could have been written that way, they weren't. The errata'd rules literally say that observers are "effectively blind" when trying to see anything in a heavily obscured area. If the DM rules that a creature in darkness is within hearing range, then its location may still be...

That approach certainly works. Do note that ruling such creatures are both visible and simultaneously Heavily Obscured may produce follow-on complications, such as whether or not you let such creatures take the Hide action.

The vision and obscurement rules are very abstract, treating light levels as a constant at any particular location rather than taking into account the relative positions of observers and light sources. There's two broad ways (with infinitely many variations and intermediate approaches) a DM can...

Out of curiosity, how do you run the transparent darkness interpretation at your table? Are backlit creatures in the area of darkness visible as silhouettes, or are they invisible? Is the sphere itself visible on its own, or only apparent by its effects on the illumination of the objects inside...

Oh interesting, thanks for elaborating! Apparently the difference is in how we use the word "adjudicate". To me, until I figure out what it looks like I can't adjudicate how to describe to a player what they can see (necessary for step one of the basic play loop), and until I know if creatures...

Wait what? The old post doesn't even begin to address what a transparent sphere of darkness in an otherwise well-lit area would look like. It asserts that creatures inside the darkness would be unseen, but doesn't address what about a darkness spell prevents those creatures from being seen as...

(Emphasis added.) I suspect that the original writers expected that by writing the rules casually they would make the rules easy enough to understand that there would be comparatively fewer rules ambiguities than were created by the more technical language of past editions. Heck, for all I know...

I highly doubt the designers intended natural darkness to be opaque pre-errata. Ergo, it is unlikely that they based the wording of the spell on the idea that natural darkness is opaque.