D&D 5E How strict are you with vision and illumination rules?

[CapnZapp]

Are you saying that just because you don't have an action left for stealth, that you should gain its advantages for free?

The point of the stealth rules is to create a game where it does not play an overly large role.

Everybody can skulk around, but won't be doing much of anything effective while they do. So they will mostly be doing it only before a fight, not during it. Only rogues, goblins etc can combine stealth with effective combat.

That second monster gains everything from total obscurement - most prominently, attacks against it gain disadvantage. If it also wants the benefits of hidden (foes losing track of exactly where it is), it needs to spend an action to gain that large benefit. If it also wants to be safe from lucky guesses, area effects etc, it needs to Hide, and also move away at half speed, making successful Stealth checks as it does.

Not sure what your point with the Orc is. To gain the benefits of hidden (and not just the total cover from the wall), it would have needed to not make an attack (or whatever it spent its action on).

You are saying that just because you don't have an action left for stealth, you should gain its advantages for free, aren't you?

How... strange.

 

[Yes]

I mostly ignore it. I have run 5-6 different tables the last 2 year and a half. On average, half the group has darkvision, one caster has the light cantrip and everybody has torches but there's usually only one player in the group who has to actually use torches. By the time they get to lv 4-5 at least two players have some kind of light shedding magical item.

If my players tell me they want to be skulking about and move stealthily, I don't wait for them to tell me they muffle the lights because it makes sense to do it.

Only way I can see it being relevant is if some player without darkvision wanted to go scout alone in the dark. But it never happened.

To be honest, I don't really understand the emphasis on lighting in the rule book and campaign books when half the races ( and all the coolest ones) have some degree of darkvision.

 

[iserith]

More illumination fun at Friday night's Planescape session:

The PCs were on a quest to rescue a wizard friend of their NPC ally, Wanda Curelight, who was trapped on the Infinite Staircase in an area claimed by a glabrezu that had taken some treasure off the PCs in the past as a toll. So they had good reason to go and get some payback in addition to helping Wanda.

The Staircase is basically a bunch of platforms and stairs with plenty of opportunities for precipitously dropping from perilous heights if you're not careful. On one broken landing, the PCs encountered some spiders swarms on a web-and-stone bridge (of sorts) that Skaldi the yeti costume-wearing barbarian talked to and tried to convince them to let them pass unmolested. After a botched ability check, the spiders got the impression that the food that was offered was the PCs themselves, so combat was on. The excited motion of the spiders drew the attention of two giant spiders that were underneath the platform as well as The Exile Skein, a drider, who had made this area his lair after crawling through a portal from Menzoberranzan. Skaldi had a light spell on him from Wanda. The bard, Bo Low, had a torch lit.

Anyway, the hillbilly wizard Robert Bob Roberts gave the paladin Carl Lagerbelly a snort of crystal haste. The self-proclaimed avatar of Tempus, now all hopped up, charged to the far side of the platform toward the darkness where the drider war lurking. The drider slinked away closer to the edge and then withdrew underneath the platform again. Carl, being human, could see nothing in the darkness and was blundering around. Bo Low, the insane dwarf clown (who may or may not have formed a posse at one time), was shouting at him not to fall off the platform, giving him directions on where to move and stand to avoid an almost certain death from falling. It then became a fun little game of the PCs trying to keep their light sources on either side of the platform as the party split up trying to fight all the spider-related monsters at the same time.

Carl's view:



Bo Low's view:

 

[iserith]

Yet more illumination fun at Friday's Planescape session:

I mentioned upthread about a situation that may unfold wherein the PCs were crossing a massive, crater-ridden platform on the Infinite Staircase while a crazed sorceress perched high above them on the stairs lobbed fiery death upon them. That situation came to pass.

The PCs started to make their way across when the sorceress revealed herself by casting a fireball centered on the party. Robert Bob Roberts, the hillbilly wizard, counterspelled it at which point the party broken in various directions as that was his last 3rd-level spell slot of the day. The fast-movers Skaldi (a wolf totem barbarian) and Chungus (who has boots of striding and springing) moved as fast as possible toward the staircase from where the sorceress was attacking. Fireballs rained down on some party members still on the platform who had light sources, badly damaging Robert Bob Roberts, Bo Low (the insane dwarf clown bard), and Wanda Curelight, their NPC priestess ally.

Skaldi was immolated as he charged up the stairs toward the sorceress, which would have meant his death and reduction to ash if he hadn't saved on his next turn. But just as he, Chungus and even the Harmonium fighter Malcer got close, the sorceress dimension door'ed up to a higher platform completely out of reach of the PCs - but still within range for her to blast them with long-range fire bolts (thanks to her metamagic). The party began to regroup on the main platform as she tagged anyone in the light with fire bolts.

It was at this point, low on hit points and resources, that the PCs figured out that they needed to douse their lights if they wanted to survive. So they did. This meant about half the party was bumbling around in the dark making their way up another platform in an effort to get out of range; the other half of the party had darkvision. On that platform they ran afoul of a goliath blackguard possessed by a shadow demon, accompanied by scary quasits. This tied up some of the party, but Chungus, unhindered due to his magic boots and darkvision, started making a run toward where he thought the sorceress might be, taking a circuitous route to get there. This meant going through the lair of two vrocks who were protecting an egg, so now Chungus was being chased and harried by a vrock on his way to the sorceress while the rest of the party battled the blackguard and quasits. All in darkness so as not to draw the attacks of the sorceress!

Eventually, Chungus made his way up to the sorceress, charged her down and grappled her, stuffing one of his filthy socks in her gob so she couldn't cast verbal spells, but not before she nearly blew him off the (220') platform with a gust of wind spell. Shortly thereafter, he tossed her off the platform and she died from the fall. The party breathed a sigh of relief and sparked up torches and light spells so they could then deal more handily with the other threats they ran into!

Anyway, a combination of terrain, a long-range monster, and darkness (which both helped and hindered the PCs) made for quite a harrowing moment this past session. Illumination is a great way to introduce additional difficulty and tactics into challenges.