Ridding Elves and Half-Elves of Darkvision

CapnZapp · Jun 16, 2019

Azzy said:
Like you said, you could run an all-Darkvision parties with dwarves (or drow, etc.). Now you can do so with a more interesting (not monolithic) party selection.

The goal isn't to enable players to ignore light.

The way you had to create a less interesting party was the main thing that kept parties to using light. Like I said, the change might seem innocent enough, but it ends up messing with the game's expectations.

The game is clearly meant to be run for a party using light. The feeling of dread fundamental to human nature when you're in an "island" of light, surrounded by darkness, is one of the simplest and most effective tools in any DMs toolbox.

In this case WotC comes across as clumsily tinkering.

Azzy · Jun 16, 2019

CapnZapp said:
The goal isn't to enable players to ignore light.

The way you had to create a less interesting party was the main thing that kept parties to using light. Like I said, the change might seem innocent enough, but it ends up messing with the game's expectations.

The game is clearly meant to be run for a party using light. The feeling of dread fundamental to human nature when you're in an "island" of light, surrounded by darkness, is one of the simplest and most effective tools in any DMs toolbox.

In this case WotC comes across as clumsily tinkering.

I'm sorry, but I believe that you are projecting your expectations onto the game. If you want to emphasize that, that's perfectly valid (and I can understand why 5e fails you in this regard), but I don't think that a lot of people care about creating a sense of "dread" through lighting and whatnot.

Fenris-77 · Jun 16, 2019

Yeah, D&D is pretty clearly not meant to be played by players who need torches. If that was the case here would be more than two races without Darkvision.

That horror in the dark storytelling vibe is definitely a thing, and can be done very well, but that's not the base play experience that's indexed by the 5E rules, or indeed any of the previous D&D rules sets.

DEFCON 1 · Jun 17, 2019

CapnZapp said:
No, that makes it sound like low-light vision is only a specialist need, and too complicated to include in the base game.

In reality, they removed lots of things in their panic to avoid 5E ending up like 4E. Removing low-light vision was one of the less good things: sounds like a trivial change, but with irritatingly large ramifications on how you adventure.

The minor savings in rules overhead are not worth having to deal with that many more all-Darkvision parties.

Right. For you and the other 17 DMs out there who get so noodly about light sources and wanting to have dungeon waylays and stealthing in the darkness that the players forsake choosing characters based on personal interest and instead go straight to the min-maxing necessary to overcome whatever challenges you guys and gals put forth. But for the other 96.45% of the DMs out there... there is absolutely no concern or issue with all-darkvision parties-- either because players don't care if they play a race with darkvision or not and thus full parties with it are pretty rare... or because the DMs don't focus their adventuring building around monsters that do nothing but try and waylay the PCs in complete darkness that an all-darkvision party negates.

So the WotC staff didn't "panic" over low-light vision... they just finally came to the realization that most of us out here barely think about lighting and thus putting in three levels of sight was not actually necessary and they went for ease-of-use. Just like they did for spell components and moving things to and from your hands.