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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9659632" data-attributes="member: 6790260">It's not the caster being blinded that alters the fear spell. It's the target being blinded.If you cannot see the thing you're afraid of, you don't know which direction to run. That seems perfectly adequate for a spell of the Illusion school that causes someone to be so frightened they run away.If you can't see the illusion that you're supposed to be frightened of, why would you still be frightened? Obviously being blinded would be a real pain and not fun, but it wouldn't be "brain has stopped working, please leave a message after the AHHHH!!!" fear.Edit: And yes, if the spell writers (or editors) have been so sloppy as to conflate line-of-sight with line-of-effect, then of course there are going to be problems. It is possible to see something you cannot affect. It is also possible to affect something you cannot see (e.g. sickening radiance explicitly says that it "spreads around corners", so it clearly can affect targets you can't see that are physically behind a solid wall.)Yet another place where treating "natural language" as though it can bear the burden of specificity and clarity leads to a serious problem, if they were so foolish as to conflate these things. Even I, as critical as I am of 5e, would need to see an actual citation for that.Edit II: Electric BoogalooHaving checked, 5e does not explicitly use the phrase "line of effect"....but in the Spellcasting rules it lays out everything needed for the definition thereof. That is, every spell has a point or object/entity of origin, with a specific shape of area of effect, usually cone, cube, cylinder, line, or sphere starting from that point. Within the defined area of effect, the spell's effects extend along unblocked lines (really "rays" but I won't quibble too hard) from the point of origin. For something to block a spell's effects, it must provide total cover--so things which do not provide total cover do not block a spell's effects. It doesn't explicitly say so, but the existence of spells like sickening radiance implies that this unnamed-but-defined line of effect rule allows exceptions with spells that specify that they spread around corners.Functionally, this means 5e has the rules for line of effect, without ever using the phrase "line of effect".</blockquote>

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