It’s all well and good to describe how gloomy something is, until 95% of your players pipe up with “all Elves have low-light vision, so we’re fine”, and “I have Darkvision 60 foot!” It makes it quite difficult to set a scene sometimes.
My proposal is to to return darkness to something to continues to have an effect, isn’t just frustrating for everyone to deal with (like a 50% miss chance), and still leaves some races having an advantage in dark confines. Darkness: an area that is in darkness causes any sight-based perception checks, as well as any attack rolls (for ranged or reach weapons) to take an additional -1 per 5 feet of darkness between the target and the viewer. Creatures with low-light vision take only -1 per 10 feet of darkness between the target and the viewer. Creatures with darkvision take only -1 per 20 feet of darkness between the target and the viewer. Magical darkness doubles the above penalties. Note that this rule removes the concealment chance entirely for darkness, which means creatures in the dark can still be affected by critical hits, though these are much less likely overall. It’s a simple rules-based solution that still means creatures with low-light vision can miss seeing something in dim lighting (so it doesn’t ruin your mystery plot immediately) but does mean they have a mechanical advantage over other creatures without similar vision abilities. (Originally posted on Game Masters Stash on 27 February 2019)
krys
20/3/2019 01:11:51 pm
Personally, I try to make darkness as mysterious as possible. Even when PCs have low-light vision or dark vision, I describe what they see in deliberately vague generalities. In addition to that, I came across a blog a long time ago (I don't remember where) that proposed an interesting idea as darkness more as a force of nature rather than just the absence of light. With that in mind, just imagine that as the PCs retreat further from the light, darkness becomes STRONGER? Perhaps when they get down to the Evr'dark realms, their light spells will only work at 1/2 strength or worse? Imagine the fear some players may experience when they start to realize that maybe the darkness isn't just the lack of light but maybe even a force that may even be aware and resentful of those who choose to weaken or 'harm' it? Great posts btw, thanks for the great ideas!
Luke
20/3/2019 01:17:55 pm
Sounds cool! If you’re personifying (deifying?) Light into a god, it makes sense that darkness would be an equally primal sort of force. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
May 2022
Categories
All
|