Neither of them needs to be wrong. My reading doesn't disregard any rules, merely accepts that the rules do not cover every situation and that the GM uses at least a modicum of common sense. That hiding makes your location unknown, doesn't in any way require that other things couldn't make your location unknown too.
I makes sense well enough. The ranger can 'see' through invisibility but not through walls or other obstacles.
Except it doesn't do that, at all. The ranger just knows the location of the invisible creature -- they still have disadvantage to attack them, that creature has advantage to attack the ranger, and the ranger cannot target the creature with any ability that requires them to see the target. Plus, if the invisible creature is hidden, the ranger doesn't detect them at all. So, the ability is kinda weird, unless you postulate this strange 'don't know where the creature is but it isn't hidden' clause that can operate within 30' of the ranger and lets this ranger ability do something. OR, the ranger ability is just poorly written and hasn't been errata'd because it doesn't break anything with it's mostly pointless clause.
Those would all be reasons you change or rule something, but none of them explain what "can't be located but isn't hidden and is within 30'" is, does, or how it works.
The RAI is very clear -- no designer has ever indicated that there exists a situation where there's a creature that isn't hidden, but you don't know where it is, and is within 30' of you and not behind total cover. That's the use case for this ranger ability if it does what you claim. So for, no one has been able to suggest what that looks like or how it works, they just say it does. Can you give me an example of am invisible creature, within 30' of a PC, who is not hidden. and the PC doesn't know where the creature is, but would be able to see if it were not invisible? I'm don't understand how this works, nor how you would get there.
They don't have disadvantage, the rule specifically says that. But yeah, they don't really see invisible, thus I used the quotation marks.
Yeah, the first, useful clause does that, but the second clause is different and doesn't confer anything.
Easy.
This is an extremely weak argument, though. We have rules for invisibility. We have rules for hiding. We have design input on RAI that says the normal is that invisible creatures are detected. This isn't at all in the same category as rules for PC's relieving themselves. Asserting that there's a major, unstated rules impact in an area already well covered by the rules requires more effort than saying there's no rules for peeing. Why do we have so many rules in and around invisibility but none of them ever suggest that an invisible creature is usually undetectable but not hidden. What does hiding gain an invisible creature if this is the baseline? Either the assertion is that multiple places in the rules present a largely useless rule for invisibility, or that part of the Ranger 18th level ability is poorly written and doesn't do much.
My stance is that you don't automatically know location of invisible things. This is not the same that they cannot be noticed. They can be noticed (i.e. their presence know) and even their location can be known if they give it away or someone notices them for some other reason. In many circumstnace a perception check would be quite warranted. I simply do not think that such detection is an automatic success, as that would be blatantly absurd in most circumstances. The ranger's feature however allows this detection to happen automatically up to thirty feet. My interpretation doesn't ignore any rules and corresponds with common sense.
So, in the first, there's a non-hidden creature that isn't detectable and no checks against any passive perceptions are made? Do I have the right of this?
