Honestly, I think D&D would be much improved either by removing darkvision or by making it super-rare. As it is, every single campaign I’ve played for the past quarter century has had moments like this:
“Oh–y’all, we’re going underground. Does everyone have darkvision?”
”Me!”
”Me!”
”Not me!”
”I do!”
”Sigh. Okay, Sonja, you’re, like, human, right? Do you have a torch?”
”Sure, but I also fight with a sword and shield.”
”Fine. Bilbo, you’ve got darkvision, and you just use a short sword. Can you carry the torch?”
”I can, but I also stealth.”
”Oh yeah. Gandalf, what about casting Light on Sonja’s shield, and then Bilbo, you can go like –wait, what’s the radius on the light spell?”
and so on. Then someone talks about casting Darkvision, and then that’s a second level spell slot that’s never available as long as you’re spelunking, and then when combat happens you have to figure out the light situation again, and….
….and then add in a virtual tabletop like Roll20, and inevitably someone’s darkvision is jacked, or a torch is added and the DM has to pause to remember how to add an additional light source, and….
If darkvision didn’t exist, or if PCs only got it on rare occasions, these conversations could be eliminated or much reduced. I don’t think they’re the fun part of the game for most players.
I have a confession to make: I’ve been playing D&D since 1984 and I can count on both hands the number of times the DM has given us a (non-magically) dark room. It’s like encumbrance: light and darkness rules should be part of the game, but nobody ever remembers to use them.
It’s sort of a don’t ask-don’t tell situation: we don’t ask where the light’s coming from, and the DM doesn’t tell us we can’t see.
Skyrim has mods that make lighting realistic. It removes any light sources that aren’t coming from an in world source (big chasms in the cave wall that lead to the surface, torches, candles, etc) and then extinguishes the sources of light that don’t make sense (who is coming through this dungeon full of trolls to light candles and torches?).
The end result is an uplayably dark game, unless you build your character to only use one handed weapons and carry a torch or you get Nighteye or the Light spell. The torch is annoying for gameplay; Nighteye or the Light spell make the game look like shit.
So while it’s a fun idea, I end up turning those mods off.
Oh, wow! It happens all the time in our game. Honestly, that would still annoy me as a player: darkvision is a major perk for the species that get it, and having it be superfluous would be annoying.
I don’t really see how getting rid of dark vision helps with this, though. You’re going to have exactly the same conversation entering a dark area, you’re just going to have more than one person who needs a torch. And now Bilbo is straight fucked, because he can’t do stealth and carry a light source, and he also can’t maneuver in an area of total darkness, so he’s got to hang back next to Sonja with her glowing shield and her -4 on stealth checks due to her chainmail bikini.
Plus, you still got to check on the radius of a torch.
Does it? Literally every problem you mentioned in your dialogue still presents if nobody has dark vision. Sonja still needs both hands to hold her shield, Bilbo still needs to not have a torch so he can sneak, you still need to remember how far the light from a torch goes. Taking away dark vision changes this from “a problem one character needs to solve,” to “a problem every character needs to solve,” without adding in any simpler solutions.
It becomes part of the game, so there’s a set solution. All I know is that I’ve been in too many of these conversations, and they’re boring logistics conversations instead of fun ones.
That said, I’m not super-invested in this. If your experience/perspective differs, that’s cool.
We found out early on that for us, dealing with lighting made the game less fun. So we decided to ignore the entire subject, unless it was really important to the story.
In most of my games we did this, but some DMs like to play with that, plus also counting ammo and encumbrance. Mind you, we do track special ammo and if a small character wants to carry a large chest, or several polearms, we do question that.
Not only does my game not count ammo and encumbrance, a few years back we switched to milestone based leveling instead of XP and honestly, I don’t think any of us miss it.
Yep, same here. For adults, who sometimes have sick kids or other responsibilities, it is the best system. Also discourages “kill them all” mentalities.
At the tabletop, we rarely used lighting rules mainly because, as LHoD pointed out, it’s just 80% of the group having some form of Darkvision anyway and some quick accommodation made for the human or halfling in the group. Using a VTT like Roll20 or Foundry, the GM might set up the lighting but it’s still usually “I cast Light” then business as usual. It’s very rare that I’ve seen a GM turn it into all the enemies getting surprise because they see us coming or some other adverse effect to blasting ten thousand magi-lumens down the tunnel.
In my opinion, the mechanical thinking behind Darkvision is less that the PC gets some regular advantage but rather they get an advantage in limited circumstances like trying to sneak, losing their gear, etc. Darkness as a common event is so easily mitigated between 80% of the races getting Darkvision, several light-creating cantrips so it’s virtually guaranteed that someone can make resource-free illumination and various longer term solutions that it feels like darkness actually mattering is supposed to be a relatively rare event. I’m not saying this is how it “should” be but it does feel like the thinking from the development side.
No one cares about encumbrance at the tabletop unless you’re being dumb and trying to carry six suits of plate armor. With the VTT, it’s automatically tracked though so you need to keep an eye on it. Unless I’m playing some STR-dumped wizard though, it’s rarely an issue anyway.
My D&D games aren’t dungeon crawls, so lighting very rarely comes up as a factor. When it does, we play by RAW (and since nobody is going to have natural darkvision in my usual parties, this means all the other options are in effect).
And for all the sword-and-shield fighters out there - two words: “lantern shield”
I literally cannot remember the last time I counted ammo, encumbrance, or even experience points. Possibly when 3E first came out. I’ve even abandoned gold after the PCs reach level 4 or 5. I’ve found there’s essentially very little for them to do with gold (my players didn’t care to try the new bastion rules), so I just stopped giving out gold and gems. The PCs can pretty much afford to purchase any mundane item their little hearts desire.
Yes, this is the way. The mechanism of counting experience points is just not fun for me. Much better for character progression to be tied to the story than game mechanics.
Oh man, I thought I was taking a brave stance speaking up against XP, but I guess that’s a pretty common stance!
I do track gold still but in other settings, like a scifi game I ran, I didn’t.
Many modern and future games give you a wealth stat or a requisition stat (if you’re meant to be working for a government or organization) or something similar, where rather than tracking your cash balance, we put you into a category of how wealthy or connected you are and then you can roll to see if you’re able to acquire different items of different levels of rarity.
