One of my players made a blind monk/kensai. To make this actually ok to play he has taken (improved/greater)blindfight and a 3.5 spell called listening lorecall that gives him blindsight 30 feet.
This has been fine, but something came up the other day.
He has been using spell combat and Teleport offensively. However, some of the phrasing of teleport seems wonky for this. Here are my concerns.
Familiarity: “Very familiar” is a place where you have been very often and where you feel at home.
No problem there. This is the kind of place where if you get up in the middle of the night you know to not stub your toe on the end-table.
“Studied carefully” is a place you know well, either because you can currently physically see it or you've been there often.
Here it starts. He can't physically see anything. And places he can study by touch, smell, and hearing are likely to fall into Very Familiar in a hurry.
“Seen casually” is a place that you have seen more than once but with which you are not very familiar.
Again, can't see.
“Viewed once” is a place that you have seen once, possibly using magic such as scrying.
See above (that's a bad pun).
Now, he does have blindsight.
Blindsight
Some creatures possess blindsight, the extraordinary ability to use a non-visual sense (or a combination senses) to operate effectively without vision. Such senses may include sensitivity to vibrations, acute scent, keen hearing, or echolocation. This makes invisibility and concealment (even magical darkness) irrelevant to the creature (though it still can't see ethereal creatures). This ability operates out to a range specified in the creature description.
Blindsight never allows a creature to distinguish color or visual contrast. A creature cannot read with blindsight.
Blindsight does not subject a creature to gaze attacks (even though darkvision does).
Blinding attacks do not penalize creatures that use blindsight.
Deafening attacks thwart blindsight if it relies on hearing.
Blindsight works underwater but not in a vacuum.
Blindsight negates displacement and blur effects.
But my concern is that this doesn't confer the same effects as true vision. If you wanted to teleport to one of two identical rooms, but one was red and one was blue, there'd be no way for him to tell the difference. let alone if they had murals or inscriptions or what have you.
But mainly the concern is, do you think a blind mage with blindsight can teleport 30 feet ahead to an area he can only sense with blindsight? What about an area 100 feet behind him he just walked by 10 seconds ago without scouring the area?
Blindsight lets you "see" well enough for Teleport in my book. It's basically regular sight with very few exceptions. It's certainly detailed enough to pick out specific landmarks of an area.
The "Red and Blue but otherwise identical rooms" scenario doesn't matter a whole ton. He doesn't need to know exactly what the room looks like, he just needs to be familiar enough with it to go back to it. Look at it this way, you set a colorblind man loose in a house painted in colors he can't tell the difference between, and he can still navigate through the house properly. The color isn't particularly relevant, it's his orientation relative to the other rooms and such.
A sighted person could run into this exact scenario with rooms that are COMPLETELY identical, and if he studied a specific room he could Teleport to that specific room (but not the other identical rooms). It's magic, don't try to apply real world logic like "Well if he can visualize any of the rooms since they're the same, he can go to any). And an argument could be made that knowing where the room is in relation to all of the other rooms around it might be necessary for teleporting.
Though why he's not using Dimension Door instead for combat I have no idea.
Basically, I don't really see an issue. He's still limited by the normal Teleport rules, with the drawback that he can only Teleport to places he's been within 30 feet of (he can study a location from a distance, for instance).
He's not using dimension door because he doesn't have dimensional agility. So you would allow him to use Studied carefully for teleports within 30 feet? What about the second part? Teleporting back where you came from, that you haven't studied at all, just walked by?
Seems like it perfectly falls under "seen casually" to me, for stuff he's just passed by but cannot currently see. Just like a Wizard who strolls across a town he's never been to and passes around a corner or something. He's casually seen that street he was just on.
And seems like DD still might do him better unless he wants to move or has some Swifts he wants to use. Lower level spell (as a Magus, Teleport is almost his max level spell).