Dwarf society had the push skyward over 2000 years ago in Golarion time from current time in Golarion. Even before that dwarf cities and living spaces were lit with torches and other means of light. The did not exist solely in darkness underground. Dark vision was an adaptation to help them, they can still see colors like a human in areas of sufficient light.
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They see color in light.
The see in black and white in the dark.
It's just that simple.
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Ok, here is a simple way of thinking about it grounded in reality.
ALL color is light, period. If it is dark, then by definition they cannot determine color until a light source is brought in range.
The "White and Black" Darkvision they are talking about aren't shades of color, they are simply the outlines and generalized shading (Think general object awareness). It is really more like echolocation than it is visual sight.
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Actually there are even colors you can only se with darkvision or ones that you can't see with darkvision.
Actually there are even colors you can only se with darkvision or ones that you can't see with darkvision.
True story. I can't remember where it's detailed, but there is actually an artform (Dwarven? Maybe Drow?) which uses different types of fungi to create works of art. Except they only exist in the dark, and you can only see the colors with Darkvision.
I always described it as color fading as the light failed, and once they're using darkvision they just see shades of grey.
I think the Alien's normal vision mode in the latest Aliens versus Predator game gave a pretty good approximation of what i imagine darkvision to look like.
Here's a good way of thinking of it.
Imagine a video camera on the dwarf's helmet, which has a flood light above it that illuminates everything they can possibly see as they look around.
Now, imagine their helmet has little video screens in the eye-sockets, so that they can't actually see out. Now imagine those little video screens are black and white, like an old John Wayne movie or old Victrola TV Set.
The dwarf can't tell if John Wayne's shirt is orange, red, gray, light blue or pink. He knows it's not white, and it's not black. He can read a book, as long as it's black ink on white paper. Where he has problems is red ink on blue paper, they fade together.
There are no shadows, only places where his line of sight is blocked. It's very hard to sneak past dwarves in the dark. You need to make distractions or have vanish/invisibility.
There was a Picture of a mindflayer seen in darkvision in the old 3.0 DMG, but I can't find it on google...
Genereally it looked like a sonar picture in black/white, so no sharp edges and not real depth of view
If you have darkvision, and there is no light, then you see in black-and-white.
If you have a lightsource, then you can see in color.
The way I envision what darkvision looks like to the viewer is pretty much what you see in night vision goggles, except only out to your maximum distance.
I'm sorry, but it is NOT 'echolocation' nor is it 'low-light vision via night vision goggles'.
It is demonstratably 'what you see on an old black and white movie'.
How so? Can you read a scroll with an echolocation wire diagram? No? Then there would be rules about darkvision not being able to read scrolls. Instead, it says it works like normal vision but in black and white. No way in the world is echolocation wire diagrams like seeing normally but in black and white.
For the same reason, it's not night vision goggles. They are a lot closer, but, you still have shadows, and there's only sight where there is low light, which is not darkvision, darkvision just works, out to 60 feet, and then it stops, like a hard wall. A better envisionment would be a virtual reality headset that shows everything within 60 feet, with no shadows, in black and white. Note that NVG's are EXTREMELY hard to read things with unless the object in question is designed for high contrast (stop signs and road signs are easier to read, they're big and high contrast). Trying to read a newspaper (or scroll) via NVGs is next to impossible. Most military agencies issue red light flashlights for such activities. You pull the goggles, up, shine the redlight on what you're reading, then pull them back down. Redlight is just that, red light that doesn't show far beyond it's point of focus.
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2. Do they see in perfect color as humans until the light fades out, at which point the rest of the distance converts to black/white?
This is the way we do it in all of my games. Say you have Darkvision out to sixty feet. Now say you have a 20 foot illumination light source. You would see color in the 20 foot area that is lighted. Beyond that, you'd see in black and white up to your range of vision. In this case, you'd see black and white for another 40 feet beyond the light.
I've always thought that both visions function normally at the same time.
Thus, for someone with darkvision, they normally for light, but they also see in black-and-white outlines/overlay within the range of darkvision; similar, in some regards, to Adam in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but a film instead of just broad outlines. These two visions don't actually interfere with each other; again, unlike Adam's, as the lines could theoretically interfere with fine-point vision - think "in-line" instead of "outline" but without the visual interference.
Can you read a scroll with an echolocation wire diagram? No? Then there would be rules about darkvision not being able to read scrolls. Instead, it says it works like normal vision but in black and white. No way in the world is echolocation wire diagrams like seeing normally but in black and white.
It's worth noting that in the previous edition (3.5 and 3.0) it did have a clause about not being able to read (and earlier editions straight-up said it was infravision aka heat vision, so, you know). That's probably where so many people get it from. Honestly, I'm surprised that it's not in PF's definition of darkvision - that's news to me.
The way you describe it as a black and white movie makes a lot of sense in context of PF, though.
True enough, earlier it was heat vision, but that didn't make a lot of sense. :) A cave tends to be the same ambient temperature all over, makes it hard not to walk into a wall using infrared. You can find living organisms well, and pick out places where the wind is blowing or water flowing, but that's about it. And forget about picking out undead. :)
As to PF's definition...
Darkvision is the extraordinary ability to see with no light source at all, out to a range specified for the creature. Darkvision is black-and-white only (colors cannot be discerned). It does not allow characters to see anything that they could not see otherwise—invisible objects are still invisible, and illusions are still visible as what they seem to be. Likewise, darkvision subjects a creature to gaze attacks normally. The presence of light does not spoil darkvision.
Nothing about not being able to read, and if it was heat vision, invisibility would not work against it I'd think. Also, illusions wouldn't work with it, given no heat. :) Same with echo-location. They simplified it for PF, it's vision without light, out to X feet, without color. Both normal and darkvision work fine with each other. If you're in noon-day sun, and look at a cave entrance 20 feet away, you see 40 feet into the cave, but it's black and white inside the cave, with color all around it.
That's actually really cool. I, personally, like it.
Tacticslion, out of curiousity, where in 3.5 did it say that you cannot read via Darkvision?
DARKVISION
Darkvision is the extraordinary ability to see with no light source at all, out to a range specified for the creature.
Darkvision is black and white only (colors cannot be discerned). It does not allow characters to see anything that they could not see otherwise—invisible objects are still invisible, and illusions are still visible as what they seem to be. Likewise, darkvision subjects a creature to gaze attacks normally.
The presence of light does not spoil darkvision. If a character has darkvision with a 60-foot range, and he stands within a 20-foot radius of light, the character can see normally in the light, and 40 feet beyond the light because of his darkvision.
Nothing about not being able to read. On the other hand, the 3.5 DMG section on Blindsight does state that when using Blindsight you cannot read.
- Gauss
Dwarves of Golarion has the special substance that creates colored art within Darkvision.
For what it's worth, human vision becomes more-or-less grayscale at low light levels. There's even a term for it. It's something that's so innate that we often don't realize we're not seeing colors, but it's related to why you can't read in very dim light, even though you think you can see things fairly clearly.
Tacticslion, out of curiousity, where in 3.5 did it say that you cannot read via Darkvision?
DARKVISION
Darkvision is the extraordinary ability to see with no light source at all, out to a range specified for the creature.
Darkvision is black and white only (colors cannot be discerned). It does not allow characters to see anything that they could not see otherwise—invisible objects are still invisible, and illusions are still visible as what they seem to be. Likewise, darkvision subjects a creature to gaze attacks normally.
The presence of light does not spoil darkvision. If a character has darkvision with a 60-foot range, and he stands within a 20-foot radius of light, the character can see normally in the light, and 40 feet beyond the light because of his darkvision.Nothing about not being able to read. On the other hand, the 3.5 DMG section on Blindsight does state that when using Blindsight you cannot read.
- Gauss
Gauss, you know, I don't know. Honestly.
I just looked it up in my own copies and both the 3.5 and 3.0 books say you can see normally except for the gray-scale effect.
While I knew (with what I believed was equal surety) blindsight didn't let you to read, I was supremely confident that darkvision didn't allow it either. Frankly, I'm astonished.
After ten years of 3rd Edition, somehow not only I but all several dozen people I've played with have apparently had the wrong impression. I'm actually extremely curious where that impression came from, then, as it's going to be bothering me now.
EDIT: to be clear, one of the reasons that I was so certain was the fact that several of my friends and I even had a long conversation about it, and how frustrating it was that we couldn't read in darkness with said ability. EDIT 2: As in, we were looking at the text and its limitations, and discussing how annoying that was. Urg. I really want to know where this came from! Obviously I'm not the only one that got this idea (looking at the descriptions of darkvision up above), but I really have no clue how I got this idea or from where.
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Unlikea few statements, being able to see heat wod be another color in itself. When it is the only color seen however, everything seems grey scale in that color.
You cannot read if you cannot discern color differences. So unless the letters have physical form or have somehow give a different return to the darkvision spectrum then the paper it's on, you won't be able to read. It is possible to get inks for darkvision would expect, but it would be special ink just like any other color. That said ink is black and may in this case be considered a black body (which means it absorbs all spectrums with no reflections) and the parchment white. They could probably see parchment as white and reflective to infrared as well in which it would be readable with darkvision. I would imagine it to be difficult though since there would be much infrared to reflect ( just like have a really dim chemlight being visible across the room but not giving enough light to read on the other side of the room)
Also form can still be seen within a same temperature environment. Don't be fooled by cameras, they suck compared to the human eye. They can't even see something with a full moon out.
Interestingly, someone with darkvision would have four primary colors and thus could see many more colors in daytime then a normal person can.
Light from an object comes in two forms, reflected and produced. Produced light is releazed at a frequency proportionate to the heat of the object. There is no other color then to display the heat of an object. But that light that is released can be relflected of an object as materials have properties for absorbing or reflecting certain frequencies, thus reflected light indicates the heat of the source object but not the object that reflected the light, if any. The visible spectrum is the heat from the sum that is actually able to pass through the atmosphere.
So darkvision can see a frequency that indicates a broad range of heat probably centered between -60 to 210 degrees f, considering it can see generally on the surface where it is cool and underground where it is hot. This would make darkvision a very wide spectrum. And each color cone appears as one color regardless of the width of spectrum it can pick up, thats why your general "colorless" light cones don't see red, yellow and blue even though they can see the same spectrum that covers all three of those.
So no, infrared does not ever interpret colors, it is a color.
Also, there is no conversion of colors, and the em spectrum we see has only three colors (our more numerous "uncolored" light sensing cones actually are their own color, just the frequency coverage is so large, it overlaps with all the others we can see so it goes unnoticed as a seperate color.) And in fact, if an eye cant see a color, then the person who has said eye, sees only black. I.E. fill a room with bright infrared a normal person sees nothing but blackness, same would be in true but inreverse if the individual had only infravision.
As for evolutionary, both could be developed if both continue to be useful. In fact the majority of animals have one or more of the same six color receptors. Humans got three, felines lost red, birds are believed to have kept uv but lost several others. But there is a crab that developed 256 different color cones and can see a vast portion of the em spectrum. (And no molocules do not exist within infrared waves or any other em waves)
Therefore of the three options presented by the OP, I would have to say two is closest, but it is more like (in our terms) seeing red, yellow, and blue but with the red and green fading out to just blue.
Even more interesting is the fact that there is a bit of a gap between red and the other colors (which is why red stands out so well) so you could theoretically get a light that shines only a frequency between those colors and seem near colorless. (Would make an interesting science experiment.
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The 3E playtest version of darkvision worked more like echolocation, until I pointed out some problems to MC, JT, and SW (for example, you wouldn't be able to see fog or mist with darkvision), and it was changed to "just like normal sight, but in shades of gray" in the final version that went to print.
So if you've heard the "darkvision = echolocation" line, you probably heard it from a 3E playtester (or someone who heard it from them). Likewise, the playtest version called feats "heroic feats," so if someone calls them "heroic feats" instead of just "feats," probably a playtester.
As to the OP's question, it should work like option #2: dwarves see color just like humans, except where there is no light they can see things in shades of grey. Which, by the way, means that wearing a hooded cowl to keep your face hidden in shadow doesn't stop a dwarf from seeing exactly what you look like.
BTW I like the "dwarf with searchlight helmet and B&W camera goggles" description, that's pretty accurate.
Thanks Sean, glad you liked my example. :)
Thanks Sean!
Any chance if we give you a cookie you'd pop over to the Chill touch thread and offer an opinion on it? :P
If you really want it based in reality think of the rod and cone photoreceptors.
Rods see better at night and dont have the ability to see color. (Darkvision = having a s$@% ton of rods, low-light would be having more than normal but not a s@~# ton).
Cones see better color, clarity, distance, everything but darkness. (Normal vision).
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If you really want it based in reality think of the rod and cone photoreceptors.
Rods see better at night and dont have the ability to see color. (Darkvision = having a #$&^ ton of rods, low-light would be having more than normal but not a ^&$# ton).
Cones see better color, clarity, distance, everything but darkness. (Normal vision).
Tacticslion, yeah, a lot of such things creep into people's understanding of the game over the years. As demonstrated by this thread there are still people that think of Darkvision as a form of Infravision.
- Gauss
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If you really want it based in reality think of the rod and cone photoreceptors.
Rods see better at night and dont have the ability to see color. (Darkvision = having a #$&^ ton of rods, low-light would be having more than normal but not a ^&$# ton).
Cones see better color, clarity, distance, everything but darkness. (Normal vision).
Additional rods only help if light of the right frequency is present.
@Gauss
All EM waves are the emenations of heat. Basically we humans in reality see heat, the question comes as what frequency and how broad a span of frequencies.
Darklight vision would be the same but would have to be a freq that is emenated rather commonly in the ground, and not merely a reflection from the sun. Saying it's the infrared section is just a guess for lack of better one. However infrared is the right direction for lower heat emmissions.
DarkLightHitomi, at what point was I bringing science into it? I am pretty sure I was referencing Darkvision and Infravision rather than physics. Infravision was turned into Darkvision precisely because people kept associating it with Infrared based vision and that created a number of mechanical problems.
- Gauss
Perhaps you are right seebs, but the point is that Infravision was removed because it didnt work right.
- Gauss
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Tacticslion, out of curiousity, where in 3.5 did it say that you cannot read via Darkvision?
DARKVISION
Darkvision is the extraordinary ability to see with no light source at all, out to a range specified for the creature.
Darkvision is black and white only (colors cannot be discerned). It does not allow characters to see anything that they could not see otherwise—invisible objects are still invisible, and illusions are still visible as what they seem to be. Likewise, darkvision subjects a creature to gaze attacks normally.
The presence of light does not spoil darkvision. If a character has darkvision with a 60-foot range, and he stands within a 20-foot radius of light, the character can see normally in the light, and 40 feet beyond the light because of his darkvision.Nothing about not being able to read. On the other hand, the 3.5 DMG section on Blindsight does state that when using Blindsight you cannot read.
- Gauss
Gauss, you know, I don't know. Honestly.
I just looked it up in my own copies and both the 3.5 and 3.0 books say you can see normally except for the gray-scale effect.
While I knew (with what I believed was equal surety) blindsight didn't let you to read, I was supremely confident that darkvision didn't allow it either. Frankly, I'm astonished.
After ten years of 3rd Edition, somehow not only I but all several dozen people I've played with have apparently had the wrong impression. I'm actually extremely curious where that impression came from, then, as it's going to be bothering me now.
EDIT: to be clear, one of the reasons that I was so certain was the fact that several of my friends and I even had a long conversation about it, and how frustrating it was that we couldn't read in darkness with said ability. EDIT 2: As in, we were looking at the text and its limitations, and discussing how annoying that was. Urg. I really want to know where this came from! Obviously I'm not the only one that got...
It come from 1st and second edition AD&D where dwarves had infravision (AKA heatvision) and elves had ultravision (seeing in the near UV scale.
Heatvision was vision in the near infrared range, was spoiled by heat (a torch, bonfire, ecc.), you were unable to read, invisibility worked against it but there were discussions about noticing the "hot" footprints of living creatures, being temporarily blinded by the heat flash of a fireball and tons of other rule discussions.
The change was made with 3 ed D&D, and the mind flayer in gray image is a page 75 of the DMG. Probably the idea was to simplify the rules, avoiding all discussions about what emit heat and what not (to make a RL example of the effect of heat on cave creatures, there is a kind of spider that live in 2 caves, one in Slovenia and one in Italy, that is so used to live in the caves that it will die from heat exposure if kept in a hand. As the body temperature of that spider is near equal tot eh ambient temperature it would be probably invisible to infravision but not to darkvision).
To continue the list of problems with infravision, most glass is opaque to IR but salt (NaCl) is transparent it, at least for some wavelengths.
Body heat bleed through thin walls if you you lean on them for some time.
You can see heat plumes from hiding people in the right conditions.
and so on. As we aren't used to see in the IR range a list of comprehensive rules on how it work probably would be a 64 page booklet by itself.
In 1E, elves and dwarves had infravision. Only a few unusual monsters had ultravision.
Eh? All the caves I've been in were chilly.
... you know, I'm wondering if it was from some novel or another. That may be a possibility (since we mostly treated the novels like canon).
I'm personally really curious how a number of us were discussing something written, referencing it, and being annoyed. I know this was the 3.5 Era, because I was GMing in Miami, and I didn't do the former until 3rd and the latter was entirely a 3.5 campaign.
ANYWAY.
Is the OP is satisfied? Does that answer your question well enough?
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Eh? All the caves I've been in were chilly.
Technically you have to get under the frost line, and anycave I have ever heard of with its own special life has to be tenuously seperated from the surface and is thus below the frostline.
Most caves that common people can get into are barely actual caves and are mostly above or at the frostline (the frostline temp is 60-70 degrees and gets warmer the further down one goes) so it may seem nice and cool to someone walking into one out of the 90 degree hot sunshine. However such caves are too exposed to have their own seperated environs for specially adapted life. And the spiders he is refering to are specially adapted life.
So if your a tourist to caves who only has seen cool caves, you haven't seen a real one. I have been three caves up north as a kid and I've been to one in arizona. Those are the real ones anyway. All were hot. Now i have been to tiny little caves found while hiking or whatever, and while they seemed nice and cool, it was mostly the lack of sunshine with an insulated covering and barely touching the frostline. Just the same way ones basement is always closer to sixty the rest of the house.
Edit: Take the crystal caverns found in mexico. They are over 120 degrees inside.
Eh? All the caves I've been in were chilly.
Close to the surface, underground temperatures are very close to the yearly average. So if you go underground in the hot summer, the cave will be cool. If you go underground in the dead of winter, the cave will be warmer than outside.
However, beyond the influence of varying surface temperatures, the deeper you go, the hotter it will get. From Wikipedia "The harshest conditions for hard rock mining are in the Witwatersrand area of South Africa, where workers toil in temperatures of up to 45 °C (113 °F). However, massive refrigeration plants are used to bring the air temperature down to around 28 °C (82 °F)."
Edit: Ninja'd
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Are you sure those spiders would die from "heat" exposure and not hypothermia? Having a cold cave is rare.
Almost all underground environs are hot, the only exceptions being under a glacier, or near an underground river.
A cave has a almost constant temperature, and while the temperature in a mine go up when you go down, natural caves aren't so deep.
Those specific caves have a temperature of about 10 degree Celsius.Our body temperature is 36 and something degree Celsius.
For them being in hour hand is like for one of us being in a very hot sauna.
They survive for some time, like we can survive in a sauna at 80-90 degree Celsius for some time, but not for an unlimited time.
The ability to see with no light source at all is flat out magic, plain and simple.
I always assumed they were seeing heat - which meant that they couldn't do things like read - but clearly that's not meant to be the case.
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Seeing heat can still read depending on the ink and paper used, and what freq of heat one can see.
Personally, i will continue to use darkvision as seeing a broad range of heat (absolute darkness makes more sense this way) and that certain things about it are shifted for ease of play rather then the world working differently.
Don't know why but somehow thinking of the rules the world follows and that the game doesn't follow all the rules in the game world makes it easier to do deal with and imagine, rather then trying to place the restructions of the game onto the game world.