My first 3e character was a blind sorceress, and the funnest I've ever played. Granted, we tweaked some rules a bit like letting her seeing-eye mongoose familiar tell here where the baddies were, but all the same she had a lot of problems that were enlightning and fun to deal with.
We limited her movement to 2/3 normal, but that just made her as fast as the halfling. She took some major skill penalties except for those we felt she could do by feel (depending on the situatuion). She also got an 18 Cha at level 1 and Blind-fight as a bonus feat.
Tweaks I would allow now: Listen is always a class skill, player starts with Blind-Fight and maybe even Skill Focus (Listen) for free. The section on blindness in the DMG (p. 300) says "Characters who remain blinded for a long time grow accustomed to these drawbacks and can over come some of them", so I take this to mean that the peanlties described there are the "worst" a character should have for blindness.
What I would do: still lose Dex bonus to AC from ranged attacks (but keep it for melee attacks), -2 (instead of -4) to Search and most Str and Dex checks, but of course Spot and other eye-based uses of skills can't be used. And I would reduce the miss chance to 25%, letting the Blind-Fight feat further reduce it or even negate it. This is assuming that the character doesn't get blindsense, which I would allow at increasing radius as the character increases in level (or in relation to the Listen skill).
BTW, PHBII has a feat called "Keen-Eared Scout" that has a number of benefits, but notably among them is that if you beat the DC by 10 (normally 20) you pinpoint the exact location of the source. I interpret that to mean the 5-ft square it's in. Still, the requirements mean you can't take it until you have 6 ranks of Listen. I might allow a 1st level character who has been blind most of his/her life to take it, however.
I posed the general idea of a blind character to the WOTC boards soon after 3e was released. The feedback people provided was interesting... (SKR's comment was that it's "sorcerer", not "sorceress" regardless of gender.) And almost all of the rest of the responses were about how to get her healed. But I didn't want to play a sighted character! And in the real world, there are really only five or six cases of people who have been blind from birth or nearly birth who have been granted their sight. It sounds like quite a miracle, but in reality it's really hard for them to deal with, and some have even committed suicide. So beware that miracle or wish!
