It's fine with me if you don't reply to this, Niara. I'm perfectly happy with having the last word.

I know I won't change your mind. Nothing will change your mind. I could bring the entire staff of Wizards of the Coast in here AND the ghost of Gary Gygax, and they wouldn't change your mind. As you said yourself, you are "100% certain". I find that to be a very dangerous mindset, total certainty. Even scientists aren't "100% certain" about things that have, by and large, been proven. That's the way that zealots think. When one is "100% certain", they no longer really listen to conflicting evidence, they just automatically discount it as soon as they hear it, because it conflicts with that which they have already decided is an absolute fact. So I'm not trying to change your mind.

As I've said before, I appreciate your posts. I admire your thoughtfulness, your articulateness, and your attention to detail. You're one of my favorite posters on these forums. But I think you've just clamped down your jaw on this one and chosen a hill to die on, and the TONE of how you've dismissed those who disagree is sticking in my craw a little bit. "Oh, it's FINE if people want to HOUSE RULE things." "Oh, I recognize that most people are doing it WRONG, but *I* like to play by the RULES." It comes across as smug and condescending to me, so I'm not content to let it go.


The problem with a hyperliteral reading of RPG rules, where only what it says is true, and what it doesn't say isn't true, and what it says is absolutely true in the most specific way, and you can't make any logical leaps, is that it very quickly leads to absurd situations. Every set of complex rules has its little loopholes and contradictions, those of D&D definitely being no exception. When we find a conflict within D&D rules, we have to come up with an interpretation that resolves that conflict, in the way that we think best represents "design intent", as you said.

Here are some problems with your hyperliteral take on Darkness:

First of all, you're using the literal interpretation selectively. This is the most common tactic of rules lawyers. They take one sentence, or one part of a sentence, and apply it with exacting literalness, while conveniently ignoring some other sentence which can be interpreted more loosely or mitigated in some way by a less literal reading.

Darkness only does what it says it does, you say, and it doesn't say it's opaque, it doesn't say it blocks line of sight. True, it doesn't say that, but it doesn't have to, because the rules elsewhere already do.

To quote one of the rules YOU quoted: "A heavily obscured area--such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage--blocks vision entirely. A creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area."

A heavily obscured area--such as darkness, opaque fog, or dense foliage--blocks vision entirely.

blocks vision entirely

blocks

Interesting that we didn't take THIS super literally. Now I suspect that your argument, if you were going to reply to this, which you aren't, is that the second sentence in the rules quote, and specifically the "see something IN that area" part of it, partially invalidates the broadness of the first sentence. But it doesn't necessarily do so. It's just one particular way to interpret the meaning of those two sentences. It is a completely separate sentence. It is asserting a new, different thing. It is giving an additional, specific context. But it does not AUTOMATICALLY reduce the meaning of the first sentence.

If I say: "I like fruit. I like apples." that does not automatically mean that apples are the only kind of fruit that I like. Maybe that's just an example of a fruit that I like, among others. Maybe I especially like apples, but still also like other fruit, as I declared in my first sentence.

So, "blocks vision entirely" is pretty darn unequivocal. Block means to prevent something from entering or passing through. Therefore, by a hyperliteral reading of the rule, a heavily obscured area prevents any sight from entering or passing through it. But we'll come back to this one.


Another problem with the hyperliteral interpretation of Darkness is that it creates a clearly ridiculous scenario. Darkness says "a creature with darkvision can't see through this darkness". NOT "darkvision can't see through this darkness". Just a CREATURE with darkvision. And not "can't see inside this darkness", but "THROUGH this darkness". This leads to hilarity.

So what this means is, if you have a human standing on one side of a Darkness effect, and an elf standing on the other, the human can see THROUGH the Darkness spell clearly to the elf on the other side, but the elf can't see through to the human. That's especially hilarious when we realize that this rule prevents DROW from seeing through it, too.

Oh but wait! Maybe the poor elf is a Warlock, and they have Devil's Sight! NOW they can see through to the human, right? NOPE. "You can see normally in Darkness, both magical and nonmagical, to a distance of 120 feet." IN Darkness. IN. Not through. So the Devil's Sight elf is ALSO screwed. (Unless they stand INSIDE the Darkness spell, then they're good. But no seeing through from the other side!) Rules As Written, sorry.

Now, does this seem like "design intent"? Darkness, what a great spell for humans to cast! Terrible for elves, though. Even more glaringly so for drow, who have it as a racial ability. Oh Lolth, you got jokes.

You can't really come back with "oh you can't take THAT PART so literally" though, as you've already painted yourself into a corner by typing 1,000 words on just how literally we have to take the Rules As Written.


You've also chosen a specific, limiting definition of "illuminate". Technically, if any light enters the Darkness effect at all, even if only for the incredibly brief moment of passing through at the speed of light, it is, to at least a VERY SMALL degree, illuminating the space through which it travels. That space being within the Darkness. Which is literally disallowed by "nonmagical light can't illuminate it" in the rules. Sorry, hard reading of RAW means not one single photon is getting in there. So no seeing through for anyone. Take that, you almost Darkness-seeing-through overpowered humans!


Of course, the previously-mentioned hyperliteral interpretation of the heavily obscured area rule also breaks reason and sense. Because if it "blocks vision entirely", which RAW says it does, then how are we able to see a distant torch, or the stars? We know that can't be right, right?


These outcomes of literally following the RAW are patently absurd, and thus a reasonable person can conclude that they couldn't possibly be what the designers intended. What we have here is a rules CONFLICT. A conflict created by taking the words on the page TOO literally, and NOT making necessary "logical leaps". What can we do when we have such a conflict? How do we decide how to resolve it?

Well, fortunately, we now have the Internet. We can go and see what other people have to say about it, and try to suss out a good interpretation based on public acclamation. You've admitted that many people are ruling Darkness "wrong", but that kind of understates it. I spent about an hour just now looking at dozens and dozens of threads all over the Internet about Darkness, and it's not many people. It's VIRTUALLY EVERYONE. How could ALL these people have somehow come up with such a wrong interpretation if the RAW is so clear as you imply?

But maybe that's not enough to really feel confident in our interpretation. What if we could ask the actual designers of the game what the "design intent" was? I mean, the phrase "design intent" sort of suggest that the designers would know what they intended, right?

If there was one, isolated Jeremy Crawford tweet, and we REALLY wanted our own interpretation to be true, we could come up with all sorts of excuses why we shouldn't listen to him. Which you did an admirable job of. But I went to https://www.sageadvice.eu/ and searched for "Darkness", and found 10 pages of results. There are MANY designer posts which support the "people can't see through a Darkness effect to the other side" and "people are blinded while inside the Darkness" interpretation. Not just by Crawford, though he has several in this vein. There are also similar statements by Dan Dillon and Mike Mearls, Mike freaking Mearls!

[Linked Image]

BOTH co-creators of 5th Edition are wrong about this? Plus another designer (tweeting about it in a very specific question to the topic, in 2020), plus almost EVERYONE else across the internet? Plus four people disagreeing here in this very thread? They're ALL wrong? Really? Oh, these spoony designers, not knowing their own intent. They should probably write themselves some post-it notes or something. Oh, these hundreds of other D&D enthusiasts, sadly illiterate and unable to parse out the meaning of a simple spell. They all need to sign up for Niara's reading comprehension class.

I just really want to see the conversation where Niara sits down in a conference room with the designers of D&D and informs them all that they are wrong, and that they are of course FREE to house-rule the game as much as they want, but SHE prefers to play by the RULES.

I'm done here. I'll just leave a few links to SOME of the designer statements contradicting Niara's 100% certain reading of the rules.

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2015/06/18/cast-in-the-darkness/

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2015/02/02/blind-fog/

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2017/12/1...-far-you-can-see-beyond-the-spells-area/

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2017/12/2...re-inside-the-darkness-has-devils-sight/

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2020/04/1...s-spell-opaque-i-e-blocks-line-of-sight/

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2016/05/14/if-a-creature-inside-a-darkness-spell-throws-a-ranged-attack/

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2018/04/0...dim-light-or-as-if-it-were-bright-light/



And that closes the topic, I suppose, eh? Since OP isn't going to respond any more.

Niara, I really do like you, so I hope you don't take any of this as an attack. But I think you put your foot down a little too hard on this one. Everyone is welcome to their own religion, though.