A first-level spell that blinds everyone in 40 feet, and by the rules as written it makes nobody harder to hit. Both of those things are true. Come fight me.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level conjuration spell called Fog Cloud. Available to Druids, Rangers, Sorcerers, and Wizards, plus Tempest clerics in the 2014 rules, Marid genie warlocks, tritons, and in 2024 the Polar Land druid and the Sea druid, this is the spell that drops a 40-foot-wide ball of soup on the battlefield and then makes your whole table argue about what just happened. Half the internet thinks it does nothing, the other half thinks it’s the best first-level control spell ever printed, and they’re reading the same three sentences.
Sitting at a range of 120 feet, a casting time of one action, and a concentration length of up to one hour, Fog Cloud has no save, no attack roll, and no damage. You pick a point, fog appears, and everything inside it is heavily obscured. What that phrase means is where every argument starts, so let’s go to the rules as written. And remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: 120 feet
- Components: V, S
- Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
Here’s the 2014 text, straight from the Player’s Handbook, page 243:
“You create a 20-foot-radius sphere of fog centered on a point within range. The sphere spreads around corners, and its area is heavily obscured. It lasts for the duration or until a wind of moderate or greater speed (at least 10 miles per hour) disperses it.”
Three sentences. The spell is small and the rules it plugs into are not, so one at a time.
“A 20-foot-radius sphere of fog centered on a point within range.” A point, not a creature you can see, so you can drop fog into a dark room as long as you have a clear path to the spot and it’s within 120 feet. A 20-foot radius is a 40-foot-wide ball, eight squares across, and it’s a sphere, so it goes up and down too. You can fill a corridor, plug a doorway, or bury a goblin warband in it.
“The sphere spreads around corners.” That clause lets the fog pour through a doorway and curl down the hall instead of stopping flat at the frame. Remember it, because it’s the sentence that disappears in 2024.
“Its area is heavily obscured.” This is the sentence every argument is about. The 2014 vision rules say a heavily obscured area blocks vision entirely, and a creature effectively suffers from the blinded condition when trying to see something in that area. Blinded means you can’t see, you auto-fail any ability check that requires sight, attack rolls against you have advantage, and your attack rolls have disadvantage. Now stack that on the unseen attackers rule. When you attack a target you can’t see, you have disadvantage. When a creature can’t see you, you have advantage against it. So picture your fighter and an orc, both standing in the fog. The orc can’t see the fighter, so the orc swings with disadvantage. The fighter can’t see the orc, so the orc is an unseen attacker and gets advantage. Advantage and disadvantage cancel, and the rule says they cancel no matter how many of each you have. Straight roll. Two blind men swinging in a cloud hit each other exactly as often as two men in daylight. That is the rules as written, Mike Mearls confirmed it on Twitter back in 2015, and yes, it’s weird.
I can already hear the comments. “So it does nothing, John.” No. Read the cancel rule again. It cancels everything. Three wolves jump your cleric, AC 18, and wolves have Pack Tactics, so every bite comes in with advantage. A wolf is plus 4 to hit, so it needs a 14 on the die. Flat, that’s 35 percent. With advantage it’s about 58 percent. Drop Fog Cloud on the scrum and every wolf now has advantage from Pack Tactics, advantage from being unseen, and disadvantage from attacking something it can’t see. Any disadvantage at all wipes the whole stack. Straight roll. Every wolf is back to 35 percent, for one first-level slot, no save, and it lasts an hour. The spell doesn’t make people miss. It makes sure nobody in the cloud gets a bonus.
Then there’s the sight half. A huge number of spells and monster abilities say “a creature you can see.” Hold Person, Counterspell, Disintegrate, Power Word Kill, a medusa’s gaze, a beholder’s eye rays, a Vecna stat block that’s nothing but “a target he can see.” Opportunity attacks require that you can see the creature leaving your reach. Fog turns all of that off, and almost nothing sees through it. Darkvision is about light, and fog isn’t dark. A warlock’s Devil’s Sight reads darkness, not fog. Truesight pierces darkness, invisibility, and illusions, and says nothing about fog, so a lich with 120 feet of truesight is as blind in there as a commoner. Blindsight works. Tremorsense pinpoints a location but isn’t sight, and the 2024 book says so in those words.
“It lasts for the duration or until a wind of moderate or greater speed (at least 10 miles per hour) disperses it.” Concentration, up to an hour, so it can outlast the fight and cover a retreat, but a stiff breeze ends it. Gust of Wind kills it on the spot, the DMG’s strong wind weather rule disperses fog outright, and a DM who rules that your windy clifftop is blowing 15 miles an hour is playing fair.
At Higher Levels. “When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the radius of the fog increases by 20 feet for each slot level above 1st.” So a 2nd level slot is a 40-foot radius, a 3rd is 60, a 4th is 80. Doubling the radius quadruples the footprint, and the 2nd level version is the one that traps casters. A lich with a 30-foot walking speed standing in the middle of a 40-foot radius cannot walk out on its movement. It has to Dash, spend a teleport, or burn an action on Dispel Magic, and every one of those is a turn it didn’t spend disintegrating your barbarian.
Limits and Cheeses
I’ll keep this short, because Fog Cloud is one of the cheese-heaviest spells in the game and the deep dive lives in the uses post.
The big limit is that it’s symmetrical. Your cloud blinds your party exactly as hard as it blinds the monsters, so your rogue loses advantage, your wizard can’t target anything inside it, and your archer is shooting at a guess. The moment one side can see through the fog and the other can’t, it becomes one of the nastiest buffs a first-level slot can buy. Blind Fighting gives you 10 feet of blindsight. A bat familiar gives you 60 feet of it, as a bonus action in 2024 and a full action in 2014. A druid in giant snake or giant crab shape has it built in. Now you see them, they don’t see you, you swing with advantage and they swing at you with disadvantage, and the rest of your table is standing outside the cloud wondering why you’re the only one having fun. There’s a whole Reddit genre of “my friend fogs every fight and we hate him.” Coordinate or don’t bother.
The second limit is that unseen is not hidden. The rules assume everyone knows roughly where everyone else is unless somebody takes the Hide action, so an archer outside the cloud can still shoot at your square, unseen attacker at unseen target, which, say it with me, is a straight roll. If you want to vanish in the fog, hide in it. The fog lets you try, because you can’t hide from a creature that can see you clearly and nobody in there can.
Everything else, the lich trick, the counterspell trick, the beholder trick, the Tempest cleric opener, the monk who wants to run on it, that’s all in the Fog Cloud uses post. This one is about what the spell is and where it came from.
The 2014 version versus the 2024 version
Did Fog Cloud change in the 2024 Player’s Handbook? The stat block didn’t move an inch. Still 1st level conjuration, one action, 120 feet, V and S, concentration up to an hour, 20-foot radius, plus 20 feet per slot level, page 276. The text got trimmed in two places and the rules around it shifted.
First, the sentence “the sphere spreads around corners” is gone. The 2024 text is just “You create a 20-foot-radius Sphere of fog centered on a point within range. The Sphere is Heavily Obscured.” Before anyone panics, this was a global edit. The 2024 book cut “spreads around corners” from Fireball, Darkness, Cloudkill, and Stinking Cloud too, and leaned on the general area-of-effect rule instead, which says an area extends in straight lines from its point of origin and a spot is only excluded if every line to it is blocked by total cover. So does 2024 fog still pour around the bend? Strict reading, the permission is gone and it behaves like every other sphere. Most tables will rule that fog acts like fog. Ask before you plan a heist around it.
Second, the wind. 2014 gave you a number, “moderate or greater speed (at least 10 miles per hour).” 2024 says “a strong wind (such as one created by Gust of Wind).” No number, but an explicit example, and the 2024 DMG’s strong wind hazard disperses fog. Same answer in practice.
Third, the obscurement rules got rewritten, and the double-blind straight roll survived. The 2024 glossary entry for Heavily Obscured is one sentence, “You have the Blinded condition while trying to see something in a Heavily Obscured space,” and chapter one adds that a heavily obscured area is opaque. The 2024 Unseen Attackers and Targets box is nearly word for word the 2014 one: attack a target you can’t see, disadvantage, whether you’re guessing its location or targeting a creature you can hear but not see; a creature that can’t see you, you have advantage against it. What did change is hiding. In 2024 the Hide action requires you to be heavily obscured or behind three-quarters or total cover, and out of every enemy’s line of sight, it’s a flat DC 15 Stealth check, and success gives you the Invisible condition. Fog Cloud is now a portable qualifier for that action, which is a quiet little buff to every rogue who carries a fog scroll.
History
Now the part I love, because Fog Cloud is old, and for most of its life it was a bluff.
Original D&D in 1974 didn’t have it. The earliest ancestor I can find is in The Strategic Review in 1975, where the brand new illusionist class got a 2nd-level spell called simply Fog, alongside a 1st-level Wall of Fog. When Advanced Dungeons and Dragons arrived in 1978, the Player’s Handbook gave the illusionist Fog Cloud as a 2nd-level spell with a gimmick that will make you laugh. It was a greenish, billowing cloud built to look exactly like Cloudkill, the 5th-level death fog. It was 40 feet wide, 20 high, 20 deep, it rolled away from the caster at 10 feet a round, it lasted 4 rounds plus 1 per level, and it did nothing but block vision. The entire point was to make the enemy think you’d just cast Cloudkill and run.
2nd edition in 1989 moved it to the wizard list, still 2nd level, and gave it two modes. You could cast it as a stationary fog bank of any shape up to a 20-foot cube per caster level, which blocked all sight, normal and infravision, beyond 2 feet. Or you could cast it as the Cloudkill lookalike again, the same 40 by 20 by 20 yellow-green mass drifting away at 10 feet a round and sinking into low ground. A strong breeze killed it in a round, a moderate one halved the duration. The bluff survived a full edition.
Third edition made it the spell you’d recognize, and the 3.5 version from 2003 reads like this. Conjuration, 2nd level for druids, sorcerers, and wizards, a 20-foot-radius spread, 20 feet high, medium range, 10 minutes per level. No more fake Cloudkill. Instead it obscured all sight, darkvision included, beyond 5 feet, gave 20 percent concealment to anything within 5 feet and 50 percent total concealment beyond that, and came with real wind numbers: a moderate wind of 11 miles an hour or more cleared it in 4 rounds, a strong wind of 21 or more in 1. It also picked up a little brother, Obscuring Mist, a 1st-level version centered on you that lasted a minute per level, and 5e would later squash the two into one spell.
4th edition in 2008 had no power called Fog Cloud. The closest thing was the wizard’s Wall of Fog, a level 6 daily utility, a heavily obscured zone you could sustain as a minor action.
And then 5th edition, 2014, dropped Fog Cloud to 1st level for the first time in its history and made it a concentration spell that runs up to an hour with a 120-foot range and a 20-foot radius that grows with the slot. Gone was the 5-foot bubble of partial vision, gone was the miss-chance math, replaced by the heavily obscured keyword and everything that keyword drags in. 2024, as we covered, kept every number and trimmed a few words.
Opinion
Fog Cloud is the best spell in the game for finding out whether a table reads the rules. Run by the book, it’s a first-level, no-save, hour-long switch that turns off Pack Tactics, turns off every “creature you can see” spell a monster has, turns off opportunity attacks, and hands anybody with blindsight a one-sided fight. That is an absurd amount of spell for a 1st-level slot, and the people calling it useless are, I think, stuck on the fact that it doesn’t hand them a disadvantage to roll. Fog Cloud is terrain, and terrain doesn’t roll dice.
The knock is that it’s a team spell that’s easy to cast selfishly. The druid who drops it on the melee every round because he has Blind Fighting is making one character better and four characters worse, and no amount of rules text fixes that. Fog Cloud is at its best when the whole party agreed to it, or when you aim it at the enemy caster in the back and leave your friends in the open.
I’m curious where you land. Do you run the double-blind straight roll by the book, or does your table house-rule it to disadvantage because two people flailing in a cloud should not hit each other like it’s noon? And have you ever fogged a fight and had your own party turn on you? Let me know in the comments below, go check out the companion post for every cheese we could dig up, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
