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| 1 person marked this as FAQ candidate. |
This cybernetic upgrade reads as follows:
These cybernetic spheres replace your eyes entirely. You gain low- light vision, as well as the ability to see infrared and ultraviolet light. These enhancements grant you a +2 bonus to vision-based Perception checks and allow you to notice some things people who can see only the red-violet light spectrum can’t, including the lasers from darkvision capacitors (see page 209). This doesn’t grant you darkvision, but in darkness you can see significant sources of heat due to your infrared vision.
So suppose you have a race that has darkvision from the get-go. Does that mean that it loses darkvision to gain this new vision?
Often the first sentence of the paragraph is just fluff, but in this case I'm not so sure. Is there a precedent in SF for an item to also be a detriment?
Based entirely on the flavor text, I feel like a character would lose their natural sight. That said, I wouldn't feel good about telling one of the players at my table that their PC has lost darkvision, for example, so I would probably say that they still have it in addition to their new eyes' abilities. I'm a player friendly GM, though.
You could come up with some explanation, such as, in order for the eyes to function and not be rejected they have to contain lab grown organic material that is genetically similar to its new host. The organic material has the same photoreceptors necessary for darkvision, or something like that.
This being the internet, any suggested solution found on these boards going one way or the other could be argued away by another person who loves poking holes in other peoples' fun, but I look at it like this: do I want my players to enjoy playing and have a good time? Yes. Would this unbalance the game? Not at my table.
Would allowing the PC to keep their darkvision hamper anyone's enjoyment or cause any GMs to lose control of their table?
eye replacement so... yeah.
If you have darkvision already you should probably pick up the much cheaper retinal reflectors, which go behind your eyes
What about races with alternate senses like khizar?
If a khizar got this implant tailored to its race, would it lose blind sense and blindsight? Would it gain normal vision with darkvision and low-light vision?
I think not. Implants are meant to be upgrades, and so don't take away any abilities unless specifically stated.
My GM brought up a great point when this came up. I remembered this thread and wanted to add it in. The level 9 Darkvision Capacitors offer everything that the Wide-Spectrum Occular Implant does, and also offers darkvision. I know the issue is if you keep your existing sense, but I wanted to point out that there is an improved version that does offer it. Our GM used this to rule that the wide-specturm implant replaces your eyes, as it says, and the bonuses are a tradeoff if you already had darkvision. If you don't have darkvision the item is a pure boon.
I too would like to keep my darkvision, but I don't think there's a sound argument for it. Eyes grant darkvision. If you rip out your eyes, you can't see. The replacement eyes do not have darkvision, which means your eyes are no longer granting you darkvision.
I know people are going to agree to disagree here, but I just can't see how you'd get darkvision from something other than your eyes, or how you would keep darkvision if you removed your eyes. I can see into the infrared spectrum though!
By the same token, one could ask if a Drow (or other races similarly affected) still has light blindness if they replaced their eyes with cybernetic ones. The implants don't say they take away that racial trait.
By a literal reading of the rules, there is no way to remove it, because it's inherently part of being Drow. But it's also hard to imagine a vision-based flaw remaining when you've replaced the organ responsible for allowing the light to be perceived in the first place.
Personally, as a GM I'd follow what I consider to be the common sense approach: a Drow who got cybernetic eyes would lose the light blindness trait, but would only keep darkvision if the new eyes included it as a feature, since both of those traits are based on the eyes (much like a blind drow would lose both darkvision and light blindness, since they've no longer got use of their eyes.)
You could argue that Adaptive Biochains versions of implants would maintain all other aspects of the subject's vision traits since they're tailored to the subject's DNA, while the simple cybernetic versions would not.