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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 9649632" data-attributes="member: 9789">A player (with foreknowledge of the enemy locations) kicked in a door and cast Magical Darkness on a group of unaware enemies, with the reasonable intention that the blinded enemies would not be able to target the players, and "as they move out, we can pick them off." But RAW, this did nothing: the other players can attack those enemies normally, and those enemies can attack the players normally.I suppose you could rule that since the unaware enemies were caught in the spell before they knew the characters' exact locations, the characters could all make Stealth rolls and see if that beat the enemies' Passive Perceptions, as all the characters were effectively Invisible; if not, the enemies were "unaware" of the characters and therefore cannot target them, whereas the players could simply target the enemies and roll normally (see OP). And as each character attacked, this would fail their Invisibility from being hidden (although the enemies are still blinded), and thus allow the enemies to target them (and roll normally - see OP). Except that in this specific case, that's much ado about nothing as the characters all went before the enemies, and thus the Darkness was once again useless.Also just FYI, one player decided to run into the darkness and hack away, which RAW would have made all their rolls normal as well. My "rule on the spot" was to impose disadvantage on anyone (without blindsight) attacking anything inside the cloud or from within the cloud, because that made the most sense, even if it broke the rule of "advantage and disadvantage cancel each other out." The darkness-casting player made a reasonable tactical choice and spent a 2nd level spell and I didn't want to make that decision useless, and the reckless player that ran into the darkness made a tactically poor decision and I didn't want to make it tactically sound. But what became harder to reckon was how they could all target each other inside the darkness; there are just no rules to adjudicate that. In the end, it just became another thing I had to make up on the spot.</blockquote>

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