Darkness and Listen (etc.)

[Schmoe]

The occurence of magical darkness has appeared more frequently in my campaign, and I have some questions concerning it. First, how do you handle the PC's not knowing who is where? How does the Listen skill play a role? Combat makes a lot of noise, so I'm not sure it makes sense not to tell them that "something" is in that square.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing how others handle the situation.

 

[mikebr99]

Sure... you can make a secret listen check (with circumstance penalties for combat noise), if one of them passes... "hey, there's something IN there... Wanna go look?? "

 

[Schmoe]

I'm more concerned about the situation where a massive melee is underway and suddenly magical darkness descends, covering the entire battle. What now?

 

[nsruf]

A quick and dirty way to handle this would be to let everybody know where their opponents are (e.g. if you are using a battleplan) and apply the normal attack modifiers for invisible attacker and defender (50% miss chance is already pretty much coverig for not knowing where your target exactly is). For large battles, rolling listen checks every turn would be too tedious, IMO. Only characters who take care not to make any sound would be allowed to "disappear" in the darkness with the usual move silently/listen opposed rolls.

For small fights, you could probably make up a DC table listing various activities and let each combatant roll every turn which enemies he is currently aware of. But I think this is usually not worth it.

 

[mikebr99]

Or, make it more realistic... take the map away from the table. The Spellcasters will be finding their light spells soon enough. And I bet the fighters will be taking blind-fighting feat next level also.

Darkness is a very big hinderance to non-darkvision creatures, and should be played to full effect.

The Pc's wont want to move anywhere, and all will be screaming to the spellcasters to get those light spells off...

 

[Schmoe]

Or, make it more realistic... take the map away from the table.

Actually, I really like this idea. It would be very easy to describe that "you hear the sound of movement <here>, <here>, and <here>." Identifying exactly what is making the noise should be more difficult.

Thanks.

 

[kramis]

I ran an adventure where this happened. The rules actually say that any type of melee action allows automatic listen checks to anyone nearby to know that "something" is in that square. This includes casting spells with Verbal components since they are required to be loud. It's gets iffier with the sound of a Bow.

I left the map on the board for convenience, but had a smaller version of the map behind my screen. I took everyone's figures off and on their turn they had to pass me notes with their intended actions. I then included a random "loss of direction" chance, worse for longer attempted movement, and determined where they were on my map. They were allowed to keep notes on where they thought they were themselves (a few were quite surprised when they hit a wall that wasn't supposed to be there).

I would then pass short notes back for minor events, or pull a character aside for mroe complex ones. All rolls were open, even if the others didn't know what they were for.

It was a bit of a hassle, but was worth it in the end. It was a VERY exciting encounter, and everyone really enjoyed it. Of course it was a party of 5 high level characters up against one Half-fiend Drow Rogue with some stealth equipment. Having only one opponent made it much easier to deal with.

If I were to run a massive battle in the dark, I would probably just let everyone else know what was happening to each other to save time, and in general unless someone was begin stealthy, they would know fighting was going on in some squares nearby, and they could shout to each other if they wanted, though that would also help the enemies.

 

[Artoomis]

The simplest way to handle this is:

In actual melee, you know what square your opponent is in. He's simply making too much noise to not know. 50% miss chance still applies, of course - and you can forget missle weapons except to the adjactent square - with no AoO since nobody threatens a square when they can't see.

If a character wants to be hidden, she can do so pretty easily. She just has to move after she acts - finding someone's location who is NOT actively involved in the melee is well nigh impossible - the melee masks their relatively small noises. Thus the spell caster who casts and moves is nearly impossible to find.

Listen checks are appropraite to try and locate the spell caster who cats and does not move. Of course, don't forget the distance modifer, as well as a circumstance penalty for trying to pick out a particualr sound from the general melee.

I should think that a party would have good defenses against this by the third or fourth time.

 

[kreynolds]

Listen checks are appropraite to try and locate the spell caster who cats and does not move. Of course, don't forget the distance modifer, as well as a circumstance penalty for trying to pick out a particualr sound from the general melee.

Of course, also don't forget that you have to beat the Listen DC by at least 20 to actually locate the exact square the caster is in. Total darkness is the same as invisibility. I ran a game a couple weeks ago with 2 high level rogues going at it. My god. That took almost 2 1/2 hours. But boy, it was worth it.

 

[Artoomis]

Of course, also don't forget that you have to beat the Listen DC by at least 20 to actually locate the exact square the caster is in. Total darkness is the same as invisibility. I ran a game a couple weeks ago with 2 high level rogues going at it. My god. That took almost 2 1/2 hours. But boy, it was worth it.

Right. Of course, as I stated above, I wouldn't apply that to actual melee participants unless they choose to strike and then move away - maybe to prepare for spell-casting the next round or something.