Darkvision Ruins Dungeon-Crawling

[Thomas Shey]

I should note that carrying capacity would also likely be an issue. How many torches and how much lamp oil can you carry?

At what point in your D&D career? After you could afford henchmen, or later on when you started finding Bags of Holding? Quite a lot. Earlier on, depending on what kind of dungeon it was, mules weren't pricey.

 

[R_J_K75]

though the resource management is what a lot of people seem to think is the core question here, which is why I've been addressing it.

True, but I think our conversation has gotten away from the resource management around the need for dark vision

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not sure the economic issues are the most important. You can only carry so much, and the more torches you care, the less treasure you can come out with. On tope of that, torchbearers and other hirelings come with their own problems -- attracting hungry wandering monsters not least among them.

Clunking around in armor is going to attract more hungry monsters than a few guys functioning as human mules will.

In other words: these are elements of dungeon crawl play that are intended to be important, however you deal with them.

Perhaps so, but my observation still is that a number of years with the sun-source of the game playing with vastly different people taught me they rarely were to a degree that mattered, and nothing else I heard from people at the time suggested their experiences were vastly different. It could be a bit of an issue at the very start of your career (which is to say when you were first level) and then rapidly became less and less of one as time went by, to the point where after Continual Light became available, it disappeared completely.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I completely forget about hiring torchbearers! That was always a fun time having two or three dudes accompanying the party, no doubt scared witless by everything around them and yet still managing to hold those dang torches. What troopers. All for 50 gold a day, too

It wasn't the worst idea to have the mage carry one too at first, just in case.

(Though if you look at the cost of living stuff in OD&D, 50 gold was a hell of a payout actually. D&D has always had a tendency toward money inflation).

 

[Reynard]

Clunking around in armor is going to attract more hungry monsters than a few guys functioning as human mules will.

Depends on how reasonable the rules are.

Perhaps so, but my observation still is that a number of years with the sun-source of the game playing with vastly different people taught me they rarely were to a degree that mattered, and nothing else I heard from people at the time suggested their experiences were vastly different. It could be a bit of an issue at the very start of your career (which is to say when you were first level) and then rapidly became less and less of one as time went by, to the point where after Continual Light became available, it disappeared completely.

Again, I don't think how it used to be done is important to the discussion here. We are talking about dungeon crawling as a playstyle now.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Depends on how reasonable the rules are.

I won't speak for every rules set ever, but in most I'm familiar with, D&D-derived or not, the noise armored warriors make is not going to be increased meaningfully by a couple torchbearers.

Again, I don't think how it used to be done is important to the discussion here. We are talking about dungeon crawling as a playstyle now.

Which, in many cases, is derived from older D&D versions, so I'm hard pressed to agree with your assessment. If the OP was only talking about things like Torchbearer, he could say so.

 

[Autumnal]

I find that these visual nuances (3d representation, perspective, angles) are really difficult to describe verbally, and unless you are working with artwork provided by an adventure, aren’t particularly effective (particularly since I’m also a crappy artist).

How do you go about these things?

Well…play with other well-read gamers who share an interest in horror, dark fantasy, sword & sorcery, etc subjects. So basically like any question of aesthetics.

Resource management, including light, is fundamental to the dungeon crawl. I don't know what else to tell you.

it’s never interested me much. What matters to me is exploration, discovery, and responding to challenges.

I was about to mention the Backrooms to @Autumnal when we both rolled for initiative, and you got the higher score. What makes the Backrooms into one of the best megadungeons is its' use of liminal space. They give you the impression that a given backroom goes on forever. And new backrooms are constantly being discovered.

Agreed a lot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

At what point in your D&D career? After you could afford henchmen, or later on when you started finding Bags of Holding? Quite a lot. Earlier on, depending on what kind of dungeon it was, mules weren't pricey.

A good bit of it, because carrying out as much treasure as possible was always a priority, and that means carrying capacity is always a consideration. Hard to bring animals into a dungeon, and hirelings are a whole other category of factors in themselves.

 

[Reynard]

it’s never interested me much. What matters to me is exploration, discovery, and responding to challenges.

So, given the subject of the thread, let's talk about how darkvision impacts those elements of dungeon exploration.

I'm going to use a vague "night vision goggles" definition of "darkvision" here, just because we are talking about more than just 5E.

If the players are relying on darkvision, I think it is not just reasonable but required for the Gm to give them less information than if they rely on bright light sources. Darkvision is going to obscure details and even distort what the characters see. They may also have to rely more on their other sense, particularly touch, to get a full picture of their environment -- and touching every random thing in a dungeon is a baaaad idea.

If the fun of the dungeon crawl is discovery, then players should be inclined NOT to rely on it because they are limiting their own fun.

 

[Thomas Shey]

A good bit of it, because carrying out as much treasure as possible was always a priority, and that means carrying capacity is always a consideration. Hard to bring animals into a dungeon, and hirelings are a whole other category of factors in themselves.

Any number of dungeons I saw were mule-capable; there's actually a pretty limited number of places a human can get into a mule can't, and they all involve either wiggling (in which case you can't carry much in or out anyway) actively climbing (which is isn't clear in most games most characters can do worth a darn) or swimming (ditto, and has a bunch of associated problems). And basic torchbearer type hirelings aren't an exceptional problem, nor were they that more expensive than the other elements. You can make an argument that many people wouldn't want to get involved in going into a dungeon, but that's presumably factored into the prices listed.