Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 3418901" data-attributes="member: 1656">There are four Illusion [Pattern] spells in the PHB: Color Spray, Hypnotic Pattern, Rainbow Pattern, Scintillating Pattern.All four of them affect creatures within the area of the spell.  You're not projecting like a flashlight; you're causing the area of the spell to be filled with colours, and it's being a sighted creature within that area that causes the effects.Someone standing outside the area can look at the colours of any of the four spells and be unaffected - they can see the pattern, but it cannot influence them unless they are inside it.  And if you're inside it, it doesn't matter which direction you're looking - if you can see, then you can see the colours, because they're all around you.What you're talking about sounds more like the effect of a Robe of Scintillating Colors, which explicitly works as a gaze attack - so the normal rules about turning one's back or averting one's eyes will apply.  Color Spray doesn't work as a gaze attack; it works as a cone, and has no effect on sightless creatures.  The mechanics are completely different.Let's say there are four orcs, standing in a two-by-two formation.  I cast Hypnotic Pattern, centred on the grid intersection that connects the four squares occupied by the orcs.All four orcs are within the field of clashing colours, but two of them are on the 'near' side of the point of origin, and two of them are on the 'far' side.Do we assume that all the orcs are facing me, and thus the 'near' orcs - despite being wholly within the ten foot radius - are unaffected, since they're 'facing' away from the point of origin?  Do we need to introduce variant facing rules to determine whether anyone standing on the other side of the area is considered to have total concealment from the orcs, since they're looking at me and not behind them?Or do we determine that the orcs are within the area and not sightless, and therefore subject to the spell as written regardless of which way they're 'facing'?-Hyp.</blockquote>

Verification