Darkvision Ruins Dungeon-Crawling

[Thomas Shey]

And as for Smell look up how some snakes use it. Some creatures have such a strong sense of smell they can follow you know where you are and fight you just fine without vision.

At very, very close range it can work to a point, but note snakes also have vision, vibration sensitivity, and in some cases, heat sensing. Smell is not their primary targeting (as compared to hunting) sense.

And if we can have Magical creatures with dark vision why can't smell be a little be over the top and when combined with advanced hearing you have a monster that can smell every footprint you make, and hear where your heart, lungs, intestines and other organs are because it can hear the noise they make. Get Creative have fun with it.

You can. But you need to say something besides "smell" to describe that. Dogs have a heck of a sense of smell, but they don't fight by it.

watcha few monster based horror movies to give you ideas

edit. A desert fly can smell a drop of Urine from 5 miles away. Give that to your monster bugs......hehe

Tracking sensing and combat targeting are a whole different beast.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Tremorsense is just crippled Blindsense/Sight. Smell is not terribly useful for combat normally.

Darkvision doesn't exist just after initiative is rolled.

 

[nevin]

Darkvision doesn't exist just after initiative is rolled.

neither does tremorsense smell or any other type of perception.

At very, very close range it can work to a point, but note snakes also have vision, vibration sensitivity, and in some cases, heat sensing. Smell is not their primary targeting (as compared to hunting) sense.



You can. But you need to say something besides "smell" to describe that. Dogs have a heck of a sense of smell, but they don't fight by it.



Tracking sensing and combat targeting are a whole different beast.

any creature on earth will fight with the senses it has. Do we think there are no fights in the deep ocean where most fish are blind? That's a little silly to claim a dog wouldn't fight by it's sense of smell if it was all it had. You seem to play both sides of the fence. In reality this but in magic it won't work. No reason there can't be a a tremorsense that works up to a mile if you decide to have it. No reason a creature can't track, follow and identify everything by smell. Rocks have smell buildings have smell, everything has a smell if your olfactory organs are sensitive enough. If a bat can fly by sound and catch it's dinner out of the air then it's silly to think it couldn't be done with the proper neural wiring and a sense of smell. Especially in caves or areas that could be explored and mapped out so the monster knows the area to the last centimeter.

Darkvision doesn't even exist in real life and your argument against the other things working is they don't work in real life. That argument only ends up in one place. Humans senses and only human senses for humaniods..........Sounds really boring to me.

 

[nevin]

Tracking sensing and combat targeting are a whole different beast.

Only a different in level of sensitivity and granularity of understanding by the reciever. cats hunt by hearing and sight. Bats hunt only by hearing. Take bloodhound or desert fly smell and crank it up to bat level with the appropriate brain circuits to process and just by smell the animal would be able to know you started at the cave entrance 10 minutes ago, you have leather on your feet, metal on your body, you are carrying a large piece of metal covered in some sort of grease and your head is uncovered and you smell like a human and you ate a roasted bat an hour ago. Then the smells will get stronger and stronger till it finds you and it will see the weaker smell where you aren't and the stronger smell where you are. And as DM I'd have it love spicy foods so your hot spices wouldn't make a difference at all. Imagine running from that creature that cans see a trail of your smells that are up to an hour or more old depending on the weather and the climate.

 

[nevin]

Don't see how that changes my point. Tremorsense has a benefit or two (detecting underground) but see how trying to use it against fliers or those swinging from ropes and see what it gets you.

well if the stuff they need is below the monster then the flyers and rope swingers are going in the wrong direction. NOt all monsters work in all scenarios. I could give you the same argument about dragons and parties in small cavern systems.

 

[Piperken]

I've come to accept dark vision as a permanent aspect of most species by doing 2 things:

1. Ensuring that the limitations of dim light are strictly kept;
2. Embracing the "mythic underworld" aspect of dark dungeons.

So dim light makes everything "lightly obscured", so Perception checks are at a disadvantage. Also a lot of visual nuance is lost (colors and small details are harder to discern). And in dark, haunted places, the darkness is "alive" and must be kept at bay or else strange things happen...

I mean, there's a REASON why dwarves and elves like light sources, even if they can see in total darkness. Hell even the Drow have their cities bathed in faery fire.

Hear, hear to more underground places designed by & for folks with darkvision!

 

[Piperken]

In the 5E game I have been running, the entire party has dark vision.

When the party entered a new room in a dungeon and one or more players said, but I have darkvision, what do I see? I usually respond with something like, Your experience as a competent adventurer tells you that while you may find some things in this room without the aid of light, some aspects may yet evade your sight.

They almost always use light now when exploring a new place.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Only a different in level of sensitivity and granularity of understanding by the reciever. cats hunt by hearing and sight. Bats hunt only by hearing.

No. Bats hunt by echolocation. Though you need one to get the other, they aren't the same thing. It also, notably, only really works well with flying prey because its too hard to pick a target out against the ground.

Take bloodhound or desert fly smell and crank it up to bat level with the appropriate brain circuits to process and just by smell the animal would be able to know you started at the cave entrance 10 minutes ago, you have leather on your feet, metal on your body, you are carrying a large piece of metal covered in some sort of grease and your head is uncovered and you smell like a human and you ate a roasted bat an hour ago. Then the smells will get stronger and stronger till it finds you and it will see the weaker smell where you aren't and the stronger smell where you are. And as DM I'd have it love spicy foods so your hot spices wouldn't make a difference at all. Imagine running from that creature that cans see a trail of your smells that are up to an hour or more old depending on the weather and the climate.

This utterly ignores the fact that scents get distorted far faster than sound or light (or other radiant energy). Its not utterly impossible to use that way in selective circumstances, but the more targets you have and the less still the air is the worse it'll work.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In the 5E game I have been running, the entire party has dark vision.

When the party entered a new room in a dungeon and one or more players said, but I have darkvision, what do I see? I usually respond with something like, Your experience as a competent adventurer tells you that while you may find some things in this room without the aid of light, some aspects may yet evade your sight.

They almost always use light now when exploring a new place.

Doesn't that make darkvision fundamentally cease to exist?

 

[Thomas Shey]

well if the stuff they need is below the monster then the flyers and rope swingers are going in the wrong direction. NOt all monsters work in all scenarios. I could give you the same argument about dragons and parties in small cavern systems.

The problem is at a certain point in process, fliers become more and more common, and we're talking about a generic fix for lack of darkvision, not a specific monster so I don't think the dragon analogy is particularly useful.