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Kind of a rules question and a "never really thought about it question".
Darkvision. Is it active all the time? Or is an ability you can turn on and off.
If it's active all the time, I would have some important questions:
Are the players color-blind?
Do they even know what darkness is?
If they close their eyes, do they see the back of their eyelids?
Just curious. We just always take it at face value.
It's active all the time, but Darkvision does not overrule normal vision if normal vision is better.
I dont know if it was repeated in 0athfinder. But i read in a 3.5 book if you have 60 ft of dark vision and 20 ft of light you will see cokour til the edge 9f the light then bw for the ther 40 ft. I cannot remember where this is from though.
Darkvision originates from the user. Low light starts where the light is dim.
It's active all the time, but Darkvision does not overrule normal vision if normal vision is better.
So, how does that work? If my normal vision, due to a torch, can see normally up to 20' and everything from 20-60' is black and white?
Guess I am over thinking this, it's fantasy, move on. :P
Pretty much yes.
I'm not quite sure what happens in the 20-40 area since the torch makes that part dim light. Not sure if Darkvision is better or worse than that really.The oposite is true as well btw. 60 ft from you someone with a torch stands, you see 0-40 ft in darkvision and the last 20 ft in normal. and then 20 ft behind him too since its normal light there :)
For the dim light zone (20-40), the dark vision character is unaffected by penalties to see targets (such as to attack or spot) but would suffer the same penalties that you would give to a normal vision character for telling color apart.
So we have a dwarf standing guard at a gate. There is a torch next to him. A figure appears at 60'. The dwarf can see this figure perfectly well, no penalty to perception and can make out that it is a human. However, he cannot tell if the band around the figure's arm is green (good guy) or blue (bad guy)! The figure moves forward to 30' feet away. The dwarf can see him perfectly fine and can now roll perception at -2 (or whatever dim light penalty is) to determine the armband color. he rolls a 3. The dwarf is shot with a hand crossbow when the figure comes into the 20' full light, right after he sees the armband is blue. Poor dwarf.
Well first, yes it's on all the time. You can't turn it off. As for the color blind question and if they know it's darkness it's a sometimes and a yes. When your in the dark you can only see black and white(so yeah your color blind in the dark but it's black and white so you know after you get used to it, it's dark). As for the eyelids, I have NO idea, it never came up in my campaign. Oh I know you didn't ask this but I'm still going to tell you a tip, in case it ever comes up:
You can see in the low light and in most darknesses. The only exception is deeper darkness which is pitch black to you.
Good luck and I really hope you will use this quality to your advantage(I know I did).
-Dunali
I see that this post is nearly a year old but its exactly the question that was raised in a previous session. I agree with the answer whole heartedly however when I brought this exact post to him his answer was the post was moot due to no paizo employee input. I realize that there are tons upon tons of questions raised and it would be difficult for employees to weigh in on all matters. I'm glad that the community is knowledgeable and strong enough to help with this burden but to appease my stubborn DM and put this behind us would it be possible to get an offical ruling here. I just need a YAY or NAY. Again many thanks.
Your search fu fails you, grasshopper.