Shadow Walker, Favored Illumination, and being a team player

[Nohwear]

I have been playing with the idea of making a Shadow Walker. This has lead me to wonder about their Favored Illumination feature and other ways of making things dark. Is there a significant chance of hurting your fellow players, at least in PFS, to try and keep things at dim light or darkness in order to maximize your time in your favored illumination? For that matter, is there a significant chance of it being a problem to use your powers and talents to keep your opponents in the dark?

[Belafon]

Nohwear wrote:

I have been playing with the idea of making a Shadow Walker. This has lead me to wonder about their Favored Illumination feature and other ways of making things dark. Is there a significant chance of hurting your fellow players, at least in PFS, to try and keep things at dim light or darkness in order to maximize your time in your favored illumination? For that matter, is there a significant chance of it being a problem to use your powers and talents to keep your opponents in the dark?

I actually had concerns about some of the choices in this book being "not group friendly." But with a couple of exceptions the options won't harm your group unless you make choices that you know may debilitate your group (which falls into the "don't be a jerk" realm).

Although the archetype has "Shadow" in the name, a Shadow Walker's abilities actually aren't tied to having darkness around you. The solution is: choose Normal Light as your favored illumination. You still get the darkvision and you still have the option to cast darkness or deeper darkness if it's the only way for your party to escape but you aren't relying on dim or dark light levels to trigger your abilities (which would likely annoy others at the table).

[KingOfAnything]

The safest choice for favored illumination is probably going to be normal light.

An assorted party is not likely to enjoy dealing with dim light or darkness concealment unless you have plenty of potions of darkvision to hand out.

[Fromper]

Darkvision's only a 2nd level spell, so scrolls and potions are cheap once you're past low level. Share with your friends. Or play at a table with my gnome sorcerer who gets Darkvision as a bloodline spell (Deep Earth bloodline).