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Yup, a single cantrip makes both mundane and magical darkness essentially meaningless - even before accounting for almost every PC ancestry being able to ignore it because they have darkvision. If a boss wanted to cast the Darkness spell, they have to use up a high level spell slot & casting actions only to get countered by an unlimited use cantrip from one of the PCs, probably before they even get a chance to do anything in the darkness that was created.
So...something like this needs to be in game?
{Cantrip}{Evocation}{Shadow}{darkness}
Traditions arcance, divine, occult, primal
Cast >> somatic, verbal
Range 60 feet; Area 1 square
Saving Throw Basic Reflex
You pull semi-tangible darkness from the Shadow Plane to a square within range. The darkness deals bludgeoning damage equal to your spellcasting modifier, and attempts to counteract magical light within the square.
Heighten (+2) The damage increases 1d6 and the Area increases by 1 continuous square.
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As a side note on torches: the problem with torches is that free hands are just too precious for that.Which is part of why I want to see them in play. Not only is it a classic fantasy image to explore a dark location by torchlight - but I hate the assumption that every enemy and encounter is meant to conveniently play out in a way that always lets characters perform at their very best on the player's terms. It gets repetitive and boring.
Occasionally, you don't have the world act the way you'd want, and the tactical choices you make in such situations are the most interesting to me. For something like a torch, do you give up a hand to hold one for light? Or do you restrict your vision based on the party member who is holding it, forcing yourself to rely on their positioning? Can you drop a torch to the ground and fight around the flame? Or does the ground prevent such an option from being practical? How the characters respond to this makes the situation interesting rather than darkvision/light cantrip turning it into just another normal fight. (Just recently, I actually had to remind a PC they could punch people during a barfight. It took some convincing to get the player to acknowledge that just because their crossbow was their optimal weapon option didn't mean it was their best option in every situation.)
I think you need to be very careful here. This sounds the sort of thing where a GM becomes enamored of a "realistic" idea and to the players it's not fun. You say that it's interesting if you can't always use your same optimal routine - I agree. But you can swing too far into the opposite direction - being unable to use your basic build, which cost you most of your choices during character generation, during a typical adventure.
Exploring dark dungeons and skirmishes in the woods at night are pretty core adventure situations. They're not rare or unusual. So dealing with darkness isn't an exotic incident that's a great way of shaking up the status quo, it's kinda the standard thing you do much of the time.
Now consider, if you were the designated torchbearer:
- You can't play a sword and board paladin because you need to hold that torch.
- You can't play a sneaky sneaky rogue.
- You can't play a two-handed rogue.
- You can't fight with a bow.
- You can't play a fighter with a two-handed reach weapon.
- You can't play a barbarian with a greataxe.
- You can't play a ranger with two-weapon fighting style.
Notice how in particular front-row characters really need both hands for weapons and shields. Let's see about some of the things the party can do:
Have a second-row character carry the torch. Okay, but then the front-row characters can't go too far forward. Feats like Sudden Charge become pretty useless because you're not going to Stride twice, that would put you in the dark. And you can't do fun teamwork stuff like the Light-emitting barbarian going into the dark to put a light source next to the enemy so that the archer can sight them.
You could also drop a torch on the ground and draw weapons. That also sounds more fun to the GM than to the player who has to spend an extra action to draw weapons, and the party that's still on a sort of leash to wherever they dropped the torch.
I don't think banning Light spells makes torches interesting. I think it tells the players "don't play a human barbarian, play a dwarf instead, so that you can play the greataxe build that you wanted when you said you wanted a barbarian".
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I think it's more fun to have some hands-free light sources. There's one feature of the Light cantrip that I like in particular: that you can have only one active per caster. So you could put a Light on the barbarian's breastplate so he can go ahead to light up enemies for ranged attacks, but then the rest of the party still needs to figure out a light source that stays with them. And actually, for that, torches might be fine.
I also like wayfinders: hands-free, doesn't depend on a caster, but the spell doesn't Heighten so it could be shut down by a Darkness spell. They're not that different from a lantern that you could wear at your belt actually, which would also fix most of the problems I listed above.
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This thread has talked about giving a disadvantage to darkvision to balance its strength. How about this disadvantage: a creature with darkvision cannot notice an approaching light source. It would be like noticing an illuminated flashlight during bright daylight.The situation I hate is:
Human Rogue: "This is a job for a stealth expert. I'll go and scout ahead."
Dwarf Cleric: "Hang on. We're in a cave system which is completely dark (apart from our light cantrips) because all the monsters have darkvision. If you scout ahead without a light you'll be blind. If you scout ahead with a light, all the monsters will know there's an intruder as soon as they notice the mysterious glow coming round the corner. They'll spot you long before you see any of them."
Human Rogue: "Fine. I guess you can scout ahead in your noisy armor while I continue not to use my skills."
A cool idea, but you'd have to remove the part of darkvision that makes everything grey. Because you can definitely notice a sphere of color approaching
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The way I run it in VTT is;
-Naturally dark environments are binary. For the purpose of determining vision, it is either dark or not dark.
-Normal vision characters get 5 feet of vision in dark environments.
-Low-Light Vision gets 20 feet.
-Darkvision gets 40 feet.
This isn't exactly in line with the rules, but produces something I can actually run on a VTT. Incidentally, this also means Darkvision isn't the end-all, be-all of vision.
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I think with darkvision you have to keep a couple things in mind:
If you are running published adventures, you need to be aware of the base line assumptions that monsters will mostly be able to see in the dark and make sure you are not making rules that will just punish PCs. You can still modify things, but you want it to feel fair, and you want to make sure you are not radically changing the adventure flow: if the module expects the monsters to see in the dark and you are taking that away, you will need to make sure you change your descriptions to add lights to places.
If you are home brewing, you don't have to worry as much about the base line expectations, but there are two different directions you can really go: Take away darkvision or change how it works, and both will have very different consequences.
Personally, I think that if light is going to be a scaling cantrip, and darkvision is going to be a 2nd level spell you can only cast on yourself, then ancestries with darkvision should be considered having a 2nd level innate spell that is always on. Now darkvision the spell does have a very long duration, so I wish the game was balanced around darkvision being about as powerful as having the ability to cast invisibility on yourself 1x per day as an innate ability, and was thus far less common than it is.
So...something like this needs to be in game?
{Cantrip}{Evocation}{Shadow}{darkness}
Traditions arcance, divine, occult, primal
Cast >> somatic, verbal
Range 60 feet; Area 1 square
Saving Throw Basic Reflex
You pull semi-tangible darkness from the Shadow Plane to a square within range. The darkness deals bludgeoning damage equal to your spellcasting modifier, and attempts to counteract magical light within the square.
Heighten (+2) The damage increases 1d6 and the Area increases by 1 continuous square.
While interesting, I don't see creating a cantrip vs cantrip war as a solution. Counteracting an active effect does nothing to prevent the same effect from being cast again, especially when cantrips have no limit on casting.
This also is just a nerf on all enemy casters trying to use it. Enemies high enough in level to counteract tend to be few in number and the party has more total actions each round. So an enemy using this every round to counteract light, ignoring their actual higher level spell slots, is effectively nerfing themselves into an easier encounter rather than providing any interesting dynamics regarding light conditions (a few players delay until after their caster recasts, that's it).
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Exploring dark dungeons and skirmishes in the woods at night are pretty core adventure situations. They're not rare or unusual. So dealing with darkness isn't an exotic incident that's a great way of shaking up the status quo, it's kinda the standard thing you do much of the time.
They are not rare scenarios, but neither are they typically the most common encounters in an average campaign - unless the campaign is specifically themed as such (at which point the GM should bring it up during character creation for players to build around before the campaign even starts). So having some encounters that aren't optimal for everyone and force different tactic is perfectly fine, most will still allow their normal tactics.
Now consider, if you were the designated torchbearer:
- You can't play a sword and board paladin because you need to hold that torch.
- You can't play a sneaky sneaky rogue.
- You can't play a two-handed rogue.
- You can't fight with a bow.
- You can't play a fighter with a two-handed reach weapon.
- You can't play a barbarian with a greataxe.
- You can't play a ranger with two-weapon fighting style.
Very simple solution for any front-liner that wants to hold a torch. Have a one-handed backup weapon to use with a torch in the other hand. I always play with ABP and encourage players to take options for when their most optimal tactics aren't the best to use. Once again, one of the things I hate most is when a PC hyper-optimizes to only one specific tactic - and then sits in the corner and mopes about the GM being unfair anytime their single strategy isn't the most effective option available. Saying "I can't use my favorite weapon option" is exactly that. You can still use that option if you are limiting to a torch range you don't get to control, or you can you use another option to control the light source yourself. [And personally, I have never made a character without 1-2 backup weapons partially for this reason.]
Not to mention that in a group game, you should be working with your group to figure out how you are going to deal with something like this - including who is best to hold the torch in case you get into a fight. If you plan to toss the torch to the ground, then don't give it to someone that has to draw another item afterwards if you don't want to "waste" actions. If the rogue is going to be sneaky, then don't give it to the rouge, etc.
And regarding bows, do you propose everyone just get free darkvision to ignore light conditions entirely? Because otherwise, even a light cantrip doesn't necessarily give the range for such a ranged fighter to fight optimally.
I don't think banning Light spells makes torches interesting. I think it tells the players "don't play a human barbarian, play a dwarf instead, so that you can play the greataxe build that you wanted when you said you wanted a barbarian".
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I think it's more fun to have some hands-free light sources. There's one feature of the Light cantrip that I like in particular:
I should make a few important distinctions here.
1) The actual thoughts I posted for the light cantrip was "producing dim light or just make them higher level spells" NOT "banning Light spells."2) My problem is less with magical light existing and more with it being an instant option from level 1 that near completely invalidates darkness as a condition. I expect characters to grow and eventually find previous issues (like darkness) to be less or no longer an issue as they get access to more options. But right now, darkness is almost never an issue and it limits campaign themes as a result.
3) Bringing this up on a thread about darkvision, this would be something combined with either changing darkvision or making it less common like previous suggestions. As such, "just be not human" wouldn't be solution.
4) Again, unless it a major theme of the campaign to constantly be in the dark - your human greataxe barbarian will still be at their best for the majority of encounters.
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Overall, a lot of this goes back to Midnightoker's quote from the first post, "The Light should be an ally of the player and the Dark should be an ally of the GM". PC's should not be expected to fight in the dark as optimally as they fight in the light. If this does not apply at level 1 (when most ancestries have darkvision and casters have cantrips) then it doesn't apply at all. Part of the idea is that cantrip-level magic should not instantly solve problems which humanity has struggled with for centuries, problems that have helped shape history, and/or problems which are central themes for a large number of genres/stories which may want to be told within a campaign.
Higher levels can be a different story, when the group gets ways to lessen and/or ignore previous problems, but if darkness is meaningless in play then we might as well remove the light condition rules entirely.
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This thread has talked about giving a disadvantage to darkvision to balance its strength. How about this disadvantage: a creature with darkvision cannot notice an approaching light source. It would be like noticing an illuminated flashlight during bright daylight.The situation I hate is:
Human Rogue: "This is a job for a stealth expert. I'll go and scout ahead."
Dwarf Cleric: "Hang on. We're in a cave system which is completely dark (apart from our light cantrips) because all the monsters have darkvision. If you scout ahead without a light you'll be blind. If you scout ahead with a light, all the monsters will know there's an intruder as soon as they notice the mysterious glow coming round the corner. They'll spot you long before you see any of them."
Human Rogue: "Fine. I guess you can scout ahead in your noisy armor while I continue not to use my skills."
So, you mean like against an opposition of, say, dwarves or goblins, a party can use a torch or a light spell to gain Concealment during broad daylight?
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I just really don't see the appeal in punishing Ancestries/Creatures that have Darkvision in bright/normal light. Light Sensitivity also was an "unfun" mechanic to deal with as a Player when playing a non-traditional race in previous editions.
It forces me as a GM to create environmental scenarios that are not consistent among the party.
When I as a GM want to create a challenge for my players, I try to ensure that no specific player feels "targeted" unless it aligns with the narrative. When there's an inherent light level incompatibility within the group, I am forced to make that choice (which ultimately is decided by the narrative of where they are) every single combat. Not only that, but the party sort of has to decide who's going to have to make a sacrifice.
Sacrifice is a natural part of playing the game, that's true, but sacrificing your ability to act in a game that's narrative is contingent on you, well, acting, just feels bad.
As a roundabout analogy, think about "Jail" in monopoly. It is the ultimate sacrifice of agency. It doesn't feel good to be in "jail".
Previous editions suffered from this as well, see all the nerfs to SoS/SoD over the years. Colorspray, Sleep, Confusion, etc. They all send whoever fails their save to "action jail".
This vision conflict is just another version of "action jail".
The Darkvision gets punished aspect doesn't solve any of my personal problems with party division, it still doesn't provide a "feel good" experience to anyone (idk about you, just the fact that my human can't see in the dark is not somehow better because the dwarf can no longer see in the light). It's still "action jail" except now both ends of the spectrum are going to jail, so there's been a 50% increase in "action jail" instead of a "feels good" reduction.
It also doesn't really solve the fact that Darkvision in the Dark is literally perfect vision to the point where having Darkvision in the dark vs. someone that does not have Darkvision is "sees perfect vs. doesn't see at all". Seeing in black and white should have more of an effect than forcing the GM to change his descriptions for DV people (seriously, it's like DV is trying to annoy GMs to death, now I have to remember not to disclose color too!)
To me, going in that direction actually makes it worse from a GM perspective. All of the problems aren't solved, they're ramped up to the extremes, but to each their own.
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I am starting to see a little more of what you are talking about Midnightoker, if I look at it specifically from a GM prep side of things. Darkvision, rather than a somewhat limited magical effect like invisibility, has become a fairly common and arbitrary mechanic that largely rests on individual player choices that do not feel particularly balanced around what it offers. In return, the GM has a fair bit of work to do depending upon whether any players chose it or not, and then has to do extra work based upon what happens if only a few players choose characters with it. Pre-written adventures don't try to tackle this particularly well because there are so many different possibilities (regular vision, low light vision and darkvision) that it would end up being a lot of material that might not see use.
At the same time, I don't really see anything the developers can do about it because they are stuck with a long tradition of giving darkvision out like candy to non human ancestries and people would riot if you just took darkvision away from dwarves, etc.
At the GM level (Note: make sure you talk this through with your party in advance), I think it is reasonable to cut the cheese on parties thinking they can reasonably have one party member sneak 30ft ahead of a major light source and be "stealthing" effectively. In the dark, light sources are very noticeable, from a long way off, and they cast long shadows even around corners. Dungeon doors being light proof blocks is a pretty big stretch already so the odds are that people notice a light source being brought into a dungeon from a long way off and it changes the whole dungeon ecology.
However, to Mathmuse's point, I don't think that having some limitations on existing darkvision has to be that punitive. I think what Mathmuse was saying is that if you are using darkvision, you don't notice light or its absence at all. So creatures using darkvision don't notice the growing shadows of a light source moving closer, and you just don't factor in light when deciding whether or not creatures with darkvision perceive stealth. It is a bit of a bone to toss human rogues who need light to see. Why would a creature in a cave that has been dark for 100 years ever turn off their darkvision to check for the possibility of light? It is an interesting alternative that doesn't add any additional work, and actually makes the work load on the GM less because they can just ignore the effect of light within the dungeon once the initial lighting situation for the party has been set. A rogue can stealth and cary a torch into a dark dungeon, because only creatures that can't normally see in the dark would notice the light. It's like letting all torches work like IR torches against darkvision. That is a pretty elegant solution to the existing situation.
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I am starting to see a little more of what you are talking about Midnightoker, if I look at it specifically from a GM prep side of things. Darkvision, rather than a somewhat limited magical effect like invisibility, has become a fairly common and arbitrary mechanic that largely rests on individual player choices that do not feel particularly balanced around what it offers. In return, the GM has a fair bit of work to do depending upon whether any players chose it or not, and then has to do extra work based upon what happens if only a few players choose characters with it. Pre-written adventures don't try to tackle this particularly well because there are so many different possibilities (regular vision, low light vision and darkvision) that it would end up being a lot of material that might not see use.
Exactly.
I am rarely a player, despite how often I like to make NPCs as PCs and run them that way, so most of my perspectives come from the GM.
This is pretty much what I'm talking about, since I view this interaction mostly from that perspective.
It is an interesting alternative that doesn't add any additional work, and actually makes the work load on the GM less because they can just ignore the effect of light within the dungeon once the initial lighting situation for the party has been set. A rogue can stealth and cary a torch into a dark dungeon, because only creatures that can't normally see in the dark would notice the light. It's like letting all torches work like IR torches against darkvision. That is a pretty elegant solution to the existing situation.
I still think the best solution is to change Darkvision to seeing in the dark, but with concealment.
With that, all of the same things are still possible. Dwarves still see in the dark, and they see in the dark well. They just don't see in the dark perfectly, can still be snuck up on, and would prefer the light if they can help it.
The biggest issue I have with the "You don't automatically notice light" is that it's quite frankly too complicated to imagine. Why don't they? It's a bunch of creatures that you can see moving towards you within plain view.
It also creates this scenario where now I have to manage the "on and off" nature of Darkvision.
The idea that a person seeing in black and white wouldn't notice an incoming group showing in color is just one weird portion of that change, the other is they are still revealed because they are "in the open and observable" and thus are immediately seen.
There's no way to allow Darkvision to see perfectly in light while also simultaneously saying they don't automatically see things that approach them from the light.
I mean overall, if people like that implementation, they're welcome to it. I just have a hard time seeing the value there.
The issue there is creatures that live in the underdark and don't have limbs (or access to the necessary tools) would not really be capable of making fire and not able to ever avoid having a 20% miss chance. That feels pretty off as well. The way D&D generally handles creatures having darkvision and light vision means that they kinda have to have an on and off capacity or else you have to have a "blinded" mechanic for complete darkness and bright light.
At least mathmuse's alternative puts the onus on the player to be proactive about telling you which they are using and then you, as the GM get a relatively straight forward way of handling things from there.\
And it makes logical sense if Darkvision ignores light altogether in the way it works, the difference between light and no light would be like the difference between standing in a room exposed to radio waves or not. If you can't detect them, you have no way of knowing if they are there.
The issue there is creatures that live in the underdark and don't have limbs (or access to the necessary tools) would not really be capable of making fire and not able to ever avoid having a 20% miss chance.
If a creature is truly from the underdark, I would simply grant them Greater Darkvision (avoids concealment). The number of creatures that fall into this category should be small. The fact that it isn't is the problem.
Gnolls, Dwarves, etc. all spend a majority of their time above ground in the light. Why they have Darkvision is beyond me, but this doesn't solve that issue.
A Dwarf fights better in the dark than any Human or (non-cavern) Elf. It's not a "20% miss chance", it's a "30% better hit chance" and can accurately determine the square without question.
That's significant advantage.
At least mathmuse's alternative puts the onus on the player to be proactive about telling you which they are using and then you, as the GM get a relatively straight forward way of handling things from there.
No it doesn't. It puts it on the GM to always be asking which visions they are using and managing across an entire group.
Not to mention I now have the same decisions to make for myself in terms of whether my monsters were "prepared" or "not prepared" with Darkvision.
It's like cutting off the head of the hydra, it just creates more problems since the management goes up and not down.
And it makes logical sense if Darkvision ignores light altogether in the way it works, the difference between light and no light would be like the difference between standing in a room exposed to radio waves or not. If you can't detect them, you have no way of knowing if they are there.
Except vision doesn't work that way though? Eyes adjust to light, they don't change.
Micromanaging light to solve the mechanical game mastering issues I have with light is not what I'd consider an ideal solution. Nor does it make light more "fun", because agency is still exactly the same.
Not to mention the ability is kinda a detriment as a spell unless the spell ignores these "on off" lightswitch.
Common darkvision also takes away attention for the ability if the rules to handle non-visual precise senses. Having dark-dwelling creatures with precise scent or hearing is more interesting to me than blanket darkvision.
And the proposed change I made actually makes scent and darkvsion a really engaging combo.
You can "stealth" against vision, but you can't stealth your scent (Sneak and Hide do nothing against that scent), so now someone can have both and use both senses to hone in on a creature without having "perfect vision".
It creates a kind of tension that I think is difficult to recreate right now.
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doing observation (of) thread...dotDash?
Off-topic, but if that's really an acronym, I very much want to see people start dropping into threads and saying 'doot'.
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While I like the idea that light matters, my experience in practice is that trying to implement that only leads to pain.
I recall numerous 1e games where enemies would drop darkness at low levels where it wasn't possible to have counters for it yet. These were not fun games. They all resulted in disgruntled and frustrated players. There was a certain dungeon in an early AP where the PCs just gave up and left the dungeon because of a darkness spamming boss. Removing players' sight is extremely debilitating. I would strongly recommend against anything that reduces players sight as you are very likely to piss your players off.
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Homebrew suggestion: darkvision does not exist, it is replaced by precise scent. This makes the spell Negate Aroma actually do something as well.
Yes this is a joke, but I hope it opens more discussion and makes you wonder about dwarves in this homebrew system.
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While I like the idea that light matters, my experience in practice is that trying to implement that only leads to pain.
I recall numerous 1e games where enemies would drop darkness at low levels where it wasn't possible to have counters for it yet. These were not fun games. They all resulted in disgruntled and frustrated players. There was a certain dungeon in an early AP where the PCs just gave up and left the dungeon because of a darkness spamming boss. Removing players' sight is extremely debilitating. I would strongly recommend against anything that reduces players sight as you are very likely to piss your players off.
I think it's frustrating on both sides of the table.
I will say, in this edition, there seems to be a lot of agency to produce light but not so much to reduce light.
If there was more "catch and throw" between the two, a natural progression from no-light to light in terms of player "want" that would make sense.
Just to kinda talk about a system that I "enjoy" as far as light management goes (totally different kind of game) is Darkest Dungeon. The higher the torch level, the more likely you are to get crits, scout rooms ahead, surprise creatures, but the downside is you get less loot. The lower the torch level, pretty much the opposite (higher enemy crits, less likely to scout, enemies surprise you, lots more loot). In addition to that, Light is a resource that is restricted to the torch item and the campfire. And you run out of items and have to make choices for loot.
So the whole system bounces between total darkness and high light level a lot, and the driving force is loot reward.
Now I don't think that's going to translate perfectly to TTRPG, quite simply because in the Darkest Dungeon, losing team members is sorta expected (and IMO shouldn't be in a TTRPG).
What if there were actions or certain activities that were only available at certain light levels? Like what if there were new activities you could take in exploration mode (or even existing ones enhanced/modified) to give incentives for different light.
Then it comes down to player agency and how they want to approach the narrative than simply "who's going to eat the bullet this time?"
I will say, the change I suggested sort of puts Avoid Notice in this category (since you can now effectively sneak up on things in the dark even if they have Darkvision where as before you can't really do that), but maybe there's a way to solve the problem that way.
Homebrew suggestion: darkvision does not exist, it is replaced by precise scent. This makes the spell Negate Aroma actually do something as well.
Yes this is a joke, but I hope it opens more discussion and makes you wonder about dwarves in this homebrew system.
I do wish Scent played more of a role in terms of creatures of the night.
It would be interesting if senses could "stack" to produce greater or more nuanced effects.
I treat light conditions like encumbrance: it's mostly ignored so long as basic attention is paid to it (don't try to carry ten sets of plate armor and you're good; if at least one person has a light source everyone can see). Otherwise it's only an issue if someone in the game makes it an issue or abuses the system, which hardly ever happens.
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What if there were actions or certain activities that were only available at certain light levels? Like what if there were new activities you could take in exploration mode (or even existing ones enhanced/modified) to give incentives for different light.
Then it comes down to player agency and how they want to approach the narrative than simply "who's going to eat the bullet this time?"
I love this idea! It also leads to obvious skill feats along the lines of "Follow the Leader" which unlocks the benefits of darkvision and low-light vision exploration activities to other characters.
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Follow the Expert seems like a great tactic to model off of when only one person has darkvision or something. As in a human might not see well enough in the dark to sneak around or navigate on their own - but they can see well enough to follow the PC 5ft away that CAN see in the dark.
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I treat light conditions like encumbrance: it's mostly ignored so long as basic attention is paid to it
This is how I see a lot of tables address light.
But that kind of just creates the opposite problem where things like Darkvision and Low-Light vision are almost meaningless.
That's generally the trend I've seen with these abilities: Either it's almost a gamechanging ability in how much power it gives you, especially at low levels... or it's effectively nothing at all and your heritage/racial feature/feat/whatever might as well be blank. Most of the tables I've been at it's one extreme or the other.
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Homebrew suggestion: darkvision does not exist, it is replaced by precise scent. This makes the spell Negate Aroma actually do something as well.
Yes this is a joke, but I hope it opens more discussion and makes you wonder about dwarves in this homebrew system.
Not far off my previous post, actually. Negate scent and silence are, essentially, different forms of invisibility if using the precise sense rules to their fullest in encounter design.
I treat light conditions like encumbrance: it's mostly ignored so long as basic attention is paid to itThis is how I see a lot of tables address light.
But that kind of just creates the opposite problem where things like Darkvision and Low-Light vision are almost meaningless.
That's generally the trend I've seen with these abilities: Either it's almost a gamechanging ability in how much power it gives you, especially at low levels... or it's effectively nothing at all and your heritage/racial feature/feat/whatever might as well be blank. Most of the tables I've been at it's one extreme or the other.
I had not realized this is normally how it goes, but yes, this is exactly how it goes.
It depends on how critical vision is to the narrative though, like for instance, in the most recent groups I had each of these.
In one, I totally side-stepped light as a whole and the group just used a torch anyways.
In the other they all went underground, someone had to make a sacrifice (Cavern Elf had to deal with light), and all the enemies knew they were coming because of the light.
And in all honesty, the latter scenario was just annoying, the former scenario was at least more focused on the narrative instead of on the vision.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, this mattered because in scenario 1, most players had just forgotten about their vision capabilities and in scenario 2 where it "mattered" the Cavern Elf was like "I can see in the dark", which triggered the underground approach.
Not far off my previous post, actually. Negate scent and silence are, essentially, different forms of invisibility if using the precise sense rules to their fullest in encounter design.
It would be nice if vision spells felt more impactful in general (and the inverse as well, like Silence/Negate Aroma/Darkness).
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I think it’d be a lot cooler if elves had precise hearing and dwarves precise scent. There would just need to be more robust language around concealment interacting with other senses. (Loud noises and strong scents making difficulty using them).
I think it’d be a lot cooler if elves had precise hearing and dwarves precise scent. There would just need to be more robust language around concealment interacting with other senses. (Loud noises and strong scents making difficulty using them).
Depending on where you want to look at in other fictitious settings, Elves had greater hearing (presumably from their ears and general perceptive abilities), and Dwarves can smell brimstone, gas, etc. (mine stuff) to prevent failures there.
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But what do Legolas's elf eyes see???