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<blockquote data-quote="Cognomen's Cassowary" data-source="post: 6877585" data-attributes="member: 6801445">It's a bit of a gray area, no pun intended. Officially, per the errata, this is the rule:That works fine for an area of darkness, since a character standing in the darkness need not have trouble seeing characters in a lighted area. However, if you read it to mean that both parties are effectively blinded when looking into or out of a cloud of fog, the blindness more or less cancels out, with each side gaining both advantage and disadvantage. The only difference from normal sight in that case is that neither side can actually have advantage or disadvantage on an attack, since any number of one cancels out any number of the other.The question which is left to the DM to answer is whether a creature has to be within the &quot;heavily obscured area&quot; to be obscured by it. In the case of darkness, the answer to that should be &quot;yes,&quot; since two parties in lighted areas should be able to launch arrows at each other normally even with darkness between them. In the case of fog, though, you wouldn't expect two parties in clear patches on opposite sides of the obscurity to be able to fire away at each other. That's why I call the rule dodgy; we've got one where we need two.In my game, I would play by common-sense rules, but that devalues certain spells like fog cloud. I could see a DM saying that you have to actually be within the obscured area to be obscured, and that you can see out normally, just to make it a single, consistent rule between darkness and fog.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Cognomen's Cassowary, post: 6877585, member: 6801445"] It's a bit of a gray area, no pun intended. Officially, per the errata, this is the rule: That works fine for an area of darkness, since a character standing in the darkness need not have trouble seeing characters in a lighted area. However, if you read it to mean that both parties are effectively blinded when looking into or out of a cloud of fog, the blindness more or less cancels out, with each side gaining both advantage and disadvantage. The only difference from normal sight in that case is that neither side can actually have advantage or disadvantage on an attack, since any number of one cancels out any number of the other. The question which is left to the DM to answer is whether a creature has to be within the "heavily obscured area" to be obscured by it. In the case of darkness, the answer to that should be "yes," since two parties in lighted areas should be able to launch arrows at each other normally even with darkness between them. In the case of fog, though, you wouldn't expect two parties in clear patches on opposite sides of the obscurity to be able to fire away at each other. That's why I call the rule dodgy; we've got one where we need two. In my game, I would play by common-sense rules, but that devalues certain spells like fog cloud. I could see a DM saying that you have to actually be within the obscured area to be obscured, and that you can see out normally, just to make it a single, consistent rule between darkness and fog. [/QUOTE]

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