D&D 5E Darkvision and whiteouts

[merwins]

Uh. Not to be that guy, the original premise is flawed. Whiteout conditions have nothing to do with illumination. You can be in Whiteout conditions at night, with only a dim flashlight. They're basically just a case of total obscurement comparable to the fog cloud spell. So dark vision or even some hypothetical light vision are both completely unrelated.

It's like asking if a Elf has advantage to stay awake or resistance to fatigue if he tries to stay awake for 4 days. It has no relationship with advantage vs magical sleep effects.

OP here. No problem. It became apparent almost immediately that I had mistakenly equated all situations of "unable to see due to environmental conditions."

I have one character in my party whose perception is through the roof and has darkvision. Trying to figure out how to thwart it without overpowering encounters or specifically sabotaging the character.

I have made some rulings that are erroneous when running 5E, but I do try to retcon when possible and correct moving forward when not possible.

So I'd disallowed reading in the dark, unless it was embossed/debossed, or seeing fine detail. More like one of us seeing in the dark, but that's not really how it's written to work.
Been reading up on how darkvision is "the same as regular vision, but with no color." Not, as I originally interpreted it, which was more like a topographical silouettes/shade on shade. So I'll be fixing that. Way too much interpretive overhead on my part.

 

[Ahglock]

I get that. I had a PC with a 25 passive perception it basically made it impossible to sneak up on him, have hidden X or whatever. When someone is that perceptive it's weird for a lot of story points. I mostly just embraced it as a method for that guy to shine. Still there is nothing wrong in stealing class abilities for a monster. Hide in plain sight from the ranger class. +10 to stealth give them expertise in stealth plus a decent dex and while still and prepared you could have over +20 stealth. That should beat most perception checks. Since they have to stay still it for s bunch of that bonus it shouldn't screw things up too much.