Blindness and sneak attack interaction

[JoelF847]

This came up last night in our playtest part 1 in the final battle against Drakus. We got lucky when he critically failed his save against color spray and wound up being blind for 4 rounds. (if he hadn't, I'm pretty sure he'd have TPKed us). I was playing a rogue, and though - great, I'll sneak attack him all 4 round every attack, cause he blind. Nope, that's not true it turns out. The cleric and barbarian both were prone and dying, and the sorcerer stayed out of range as he should have. So it was just me versus the blind Drakus. The other party members kept returning to 1 hp, getting up, grabbing their weapons, and then taking an attack of opportunity or sometimes staying up until his turn, and he was able to hit them despite being blind often enough to drop them again, so there was no flanking possible. I figured, no problem, he's blind, of course I still sneak attack him.....except I couldn't.

Sneak attack reads "You deal additional damage to flat-footed creatures (see page 322). If you Strike a flat-footed creature with an agile or finesse melee weapon, an agile or finesse unarmed attack, or a ranged attack, you deal 1d6 extra precision damage. For a ranged attack with a thrown weapon, that weapon must also be agile or finesse."

Since sneak attack only works on flat-footed creatures, not blinded or other conditions, I first checked the blinded description to see if that made the creature flat-footed also.

The blinded condition is "You can’t see. While blinded, you treat all terrain as difficult terrain. All other creatures and objects are unseen to you (see page 303) unless you succeed at a Seek action to sense them. You automatically fail or critically fail (whichever’s worse) Perception checks that are fully dependent on sight, and if vision is your only precise sense, you take a –4 conditional penalty to Perception checks. You are immune to visual effects. Blinded overrides dazzled."

Nope, blindness doesn't also make them flat-footed. So then I tried to feint him using deception. While the feint action didn't have the visual trait, it's pretty clearly a visual maneuver, both from the description of "with a misleading flourish" and the fact that it's pretty hard to deceive someone when they can't see you since you're unseen by them. Since blinded creatures are immune to visual effects, the GM (rightly) ruled that I couldn't feint him. The blindness condition also doesn't give any kind of bonus to an attacker - just limits the blinded creatures movements, perception and attacks. So not only couldn't I get the bonus to hit him from him being flat footed, I couldn't do the extra damage.

Seems like the best fix would be to either have sneak attack work on more than just flat footed creatures, like blinded or stunned, or to at least have people who attack a blinded foe gain some offensive bonus versus them.

[Dante Doom]

You are "Unseen" to him.

If you attack someone Unseen you consider it Flat-footed and then become seen (as the first errata), but since he is blind, you continue Unseen (or maybe Sensed, but still Flat-footed)

[JoelF847]

Dante Doom wrote:

You are "Unseen" to him.

If you attack someone Unseen you consider it Flat-footed and then become seen (as the first errata), but since he is blind, you continue Unseen (or maybe Sensed, but still Flat-footed)

Thanks - we looked that up, but missed the last sentence mentioned that a creature is flat footed to you if you're unseen.

I'd argue that it's still a problem with how the rules are presented - if you're dealing with a blind creature, you shouldn't have to cross reference 3 rules to figure out you can sneak attack them. It would be a lot easier if the blinded condition mentioned that it's flat footed to attackers, and if the sneak attack rules mention you can sneak attack a blinded or flat-footed creature.

It would also make it a lot easier if there was a table listing the impact of conditions and circumstances on attacks and AC, similar to the Combat Modifiers table from PF1.