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<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6613668" data-attributes="member: 6787650">You mention 1.) realism, and 2.) ease of adjudication. I'll address your comments in this order.RE: realism, yes, people fire blind in combat, but as far as I can tell don't fire blindly at coordinates, they fire blindly at certain vectors: &quot;up this corridor&quot; and not &quot;at a five-foot square 45 feet up this corridor.&quot; If there's an enemy in the dark 55 feet up the corridor instead, guess what? Your arrow aimed at 45 feet away will probably hit him. Ergo, having to guess the exact five-foot square that someone is in is unrealistically harsh, and also gamey--unless you're firing at someone so far away that projectile drop is a real factor. (D&amp;D tends to neglect projectile drop anyway. Who says &quot;You can't fire that longbow indoors because it will hit the ceiling&quot;?)RE: ease of adjudication, &quot;obscurement is usually in tight little zones.&quot; In my experience, obscurement comes in huge swathes. When fighting at night or underground, everything not within 40' of a torch or 60' of a character with darkvision is heavily obscured unless there is a particularly brilliant moon. If I have four PCs and eight monsters in combat, trying to track the location of all twelve characters without showing any of them on the battlefield except the ones carrying torches/within darkvision range of each other would be an amazing amount of hassle. Even if I'm using a grid as I sometimes do, it would do me very little good because to keep the game fair I couldn't actually show anything on the grid, and I'd have to have my players keep their coordinates secret as well. N.b. under the &quot;can't hit me unless you guess where I am&quot; rules, the winning strategy is have a high-AC guy like a monk or paladin carry a torch around to follow the bad guys while using his action to Dodge while the other PCs pelt the bad guys with advantage from outside the light radius. Result: the entire party basically gets advantage to attack and the enemy has to attack your toughest target at disadvantage. This does rely on a saner interpretation than RAW of what &quot;heavy obscurement&quot; means, since RAW (PHB 183) says that you can't actually see a guy holding the torch unless you're within the torch's light radius, which is bonkers and can't possibly be RAI.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6613668, member: 6787650"] You mention 1.) realism, and 2.) ease of adjudication. I'll address your comments in this order. RE: realism, yes, people fire blind in combat, but as far as I can tell don't fire blindly at coordinates, they fire blindly at certain [I]vectors[/I]: "up this corridor" and not "at a five-foot square 45 feet up this corridor." If there's an enemy in the dark 55 feet up the corridor instead, guess what? Your arrow aimed at 45 feet away will probably hit him. Ergo, having to guess the exact five-foot square that someone is in is unrealistically harsh, and also gamey--unless you're firing at someone so far away that projectile drop is a real factor. (D&D tends to neglect projectile drop anyway. Who says "You can't fire that longbow indoors because it will hit the ceiling"?) RE: ease of adjudication, "obscurement is usually in tight little zones." In my experience, obscurement comes in huge swathes. When fighting at night or underground, everything not within 40' of a torch or 60' of a character with darkvision is heavily obscured unless there is a particularly brilliant moon. If I have four PCs and eight monsters in combat, trying to track the location of all twelve characters without showing any of them on the battlefield except the ones carrying torches/within darkvision range of each other would be an [I]amazing[/I] amount of hassle. Even if I'm using a grid as I sometimes do, it would do me very little good because to keep the game fair I couldn't actually [I]show[/I] anything on the grid, and I'd have to have my players keep their coordinates secret as well. N.b. under the "can't hit me unless you guess where I am" rules, the winning strategy is have a high-AC guy like a monk or paladin carry a torch around to follow the bad guys while using his action to Dodge while the other PCs pelt the bad guys with advantage from outside the light radius. Result: the entire party basically gets advantage to attack [I]and[/I] the enemy has to attack your toughest target at disadvantage. This does rely on a saner interpretation than RAW of what "heavy obscurement" means, since RAW (PHB 183) says that you can't actually see a guy holding the torch unless you're within the torch's light radius, which is bonkers and can't possibly be RAI. [/QUOTE]

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