The Alexandrian

Here are the tent-pole Evocation [light] spells from the core rulebooks:

light – Brd 0, Clr 0, Drd 0, Sor/Wiz 0
darkness – Brd 2, Clr 2, Sor/Wiz 2
daylight – Brd 3, Clr 3, Drd 3, Pal 3, Sor/Wiz 3
deeper darkness – Clr 3

I feel as if one might go mad trying to understand this progression of spells. The druid’s affinity for light spells makes perfect sense, and even the fact that the paladin has access to daylight and not the lesser light spell has some logic to it (since daylight has some martial application).

But what doesn’t make much sense to me is that the arcanists get access to the more powerful daylight, but not the more powerful deeper darkness.

The other odd thing is that the 3.5 darkness and deeper darkness spells actually creates illumination and can be used to light an unlit area: “This spell causes an object to radiate shadowy illumination out to a 20-foot radius.” This is weird enough in its own right, but it gets even weirder when deeper darkness and daylight interact with each other and cancel each other out.

In other words, if you’re in a cave and you cast deeper darkness, you can see. If you’re in a cave and you cast daylight, you can see. But if you cast both deeper darkness and daylight, you can’t see.

These oddities were the result of attempting to re-balance the darkness spells. In all previous editions of the game, darkness had actually created an area of impenetrable darkness (as the name might suggest). But this was considerd too powerful for a 2nd-level spell, and so the “shadowy illumination” formulation was applied as a patch of sorts.

While I tend to agree that darkness was very powerful, the loss of any way to create true magical darkness was an unfortunate loss. Apparently, someone at WotC felt the same way. But their solution was somewhat perverse: In the Spell Compendium there is a spell named blacklight, which creates a true magical darkness which the caster can see through.

Oddly, however, this is a 3rd-level spell which is, in virtually every way, superior to deeper darkness. It can also be cast by arcanists.

I’m not sure what the best solution for the darkness/light spells would be. But I would certainly look at normalizing the level progressions, add more powerful versions of the darkness spells (with matching light spells to provide the natural antithesis of the two sub-types), and smooth out some of the discrepancies in how the various spells interact with each other. I’d probably also look at creating a more powerful version of the light spell to add back in the combat utiltiy of the spell that was stripped out in 3rd Edition.

One Response to “Thought of the Day: More D&D Weirdness”

  1. Justin Alexander says:

    ARCHIVED HALOSCAN COMMENTS

    Marc
    The thing to remember with Blacklight is that is is only 20 ft radius and round/level. Compare this to the duration and radius of Deeper Darkness, and I presume that is how the two spells are supposed to be “balanced.”
    Monday, August 31, 2009, 12:05:50 AM


    Justin Alexander
    What I ended up doing in Spells of Light and Darkness was revising the darkness, deeper darkness and similar spells to suppress natural light sources — reducing all natural light sources to shadowy illumination. (More powerful spells create true darkness and even more severe types of darkness.)

    Then I cleaned up and normalized the rules for how light and darkness spells work, creating a consistent pattern of effect.
    Wednesday, October 08, 2008, 6:49:02 PM


    Jarrett
    Long time lurker (and fan) but had to chime in on this one.
    The spell descriptions make more sense if you assume the spell is being cast to counter the default lighting conditions. Darkness is always assumed to be cast to diminish light sources and Light is always assumed to be cast to illuminate darkness.
    If you require a consistent mechanic to take care of the casting-Darkness-to-see-in-the-dark situation, think of the Darkness spell as moving things one step down the Bright-Shadowy-Dark spectrum:
    Casting Darkness in bright conditions reduces it to shadowy illumination. (The default conditions of the spell description)
    Casting Darkness in shadowy illumination makes it dark. (The same result as your more “powerful” version, but easily countered)
    Casting Darkness in natural darkness has no effect except to counter other light sources, magical or mundane. (The idea that the Darkness spell was actually designed to allow you to see in naturally dark caves makes me cringe)
    Wednesday, October 08, 2008, 5:57:34 AM


    Justin Alexander
    In practice it will actually be 4+3+2 = 9 spells (since most PC wizards will have an Int high enough to get bonus spells).

    While a darkness that creates total darkness isn’t too bad all by itself, it becomes incredibly powerful as soon as you pair it up with, say, blindsight. Even just optimizing the melee fighters in your party with Blind-Fight feats can be a fairly devastating tactic.

    The other reason for moving away from total darkness is that it can prove difficult to adjudicate at the table — particularly with the miniatures-focus that WotC has been moving in.
    Friday, October 03, 2008, 1:55:28 AM


    Lior
    Low-level wizards are fairly weak. Going by the v3.5 SRD, a 5th level Wizard gets 6 spells/day: 3+2+1 by level. Complete darkness as in the old darkness spell (reverse of 1st level “light”) may be powerful, but even at 5th level can only be used thrice per day — and that would come at the expense of hold portal, shocking grasp, or sleep.

    In other words, even low-level wizards have access to great power, but they only use it sparingly. It’s perhaps more of a problem with higher-level wizards, and why the area of effect is limited. Also, while this spell allows a 6th level wizard to wreak complete havoc in a camp of low-level orcs, it won’t actually kill any of the orcs (unlike, say, fireball), so a high-level leader can get them reorganized. Moreover, the same effect won’t scare a party of 6th level NPCs at all.
    Thursday, October 02, 2008, 9:05:50 PM


    Kevin Morris
    I never adopted the “shadowy illumination” bit in my games. Darkness may be a strong 2nd-level spell, but there are lots of strong spells in the game.
    Thursday, October 02, 2008, 6:32:58 AM

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