Darkvision Ruins Dungeon-Crawling

[Starfox]

A favorite about 3E/Pathfinder darkness was how a Shadowdancer got invisble in darkness, even against creatures that could see in that darkness.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And if stopping that BBEG's plan is so vital and time sensitive, why didn't king/noble send couple dozen of his soldiers instead of bunch of misfits to deal with it?

Well, by moderate levels, because said misfits were far more capable than four times their number in typical soldiers. D&D parties are often effectively commando groups.

 

[Maxperson]

Such lights still put you at a disadvantage trying to sneak up on others, which to me is the core of this thread. Common darkvision among monster disables scouting using Stealth.

Huge numbers of monsters have darkvision, and others have tremor/blindsense. You will be on the other side of that coin almost as much.

Light, however, helps keep you from being surprised, and helps you find traps, and helps you find secret doors, and helps you find the magic ring just sitting on the desk in the middle of some stuff, and...

 

[GMMichael]

Dungeoncrawling, at its core, is a slot machine. There's only one important choice: do we press on for a chance to find more gold but at a risk of dying horribly and losing everything, or do we go home and forfeit possible future gains?

Oh, come on. Playing slot machines involves a lot of important choices. Do I ask the gal next to me to put out her cigarette, or move to another machine? How much longer can I hold out before my bladder bursts? Someone on the other side just hit a big payout, so should I move to another set?

Adventure structure, where PCs can't just go home (because they really need to stop the Big Bad Evil Guy at the heart of the dungeon) does way more to ruin dungeoncrawling than any such specifics.

This might be right, but I don't know that adventure structure's ability to ruin, well, the adventure, is in debate.

Disagree. If someone doesn't have it, the party uses easy to get permanent light sources anyway.

You might have been slightly ninja'd here. The post above yours, as well as an earlier post of mine, discusses how permanent light sources involve tactical/resource decisions that darkvision doesn't.

And yes, the DM remembers to enforce the disadvantage on visual perception checks in 5e if the party all has darkvision. That makes it much harder to find secret doors, see traps, and detect ambushes.

Darkvision in 5e is a nothingburger, and in prior editions it was almost a nothingburger since light was going to virtually always be present anyway.

Well, regarding D&D 5e (sorry, Vampire 5e), a lot of combat decisions are nothingburgers. Archer problems? Just dash toward them for a round. Might get surprised by a troll? Have the cleric ready a cure spell for you. Need to place your fireball at least five feet away from your tank? Thanks, Grid. Prepare a light spell? Spells known are spells prepared.

As @Retros_x notes, other games have a bit more respect for darkness.

 

[Starfox]

Huge numbers of monsters have darkvision, and others have tremor/blindsense. You will be on the other side of that coin almost as much.

Light, however, helps keep you from being surprised, and helps you find traps, and helps you find secret doors, and helps you find the magic ring just sitting on the desk in the middle of some stuff, and...

One solution I tried to make light less of a hindrance was to say that creatures with darkvision could only tell if there was light by the fact that they could suddenly see colors - which would not be very apparent in a dungeon. But this solution never caught on with my players.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is another thing they actually detailed a bit in AD&D with infravision, imposing a two segment delay on adjusting to infravision from normal vision (if the lights suddenly go out, for example). 1979 DMG p59 and referenced in the example of play on p98.

Infravision was at least a try at infrared vision/thermal imaging in a quasi-realistic way, so its not a surprise it made at least an attempt at that. I don't recall for sure (but I think so) that it had gone away by 3e so all you had was low-light and darkvision (and of course tremorsense, blindsight and blindsense).

 

[Maxperson]

A favorite about 3E/Pathfinder darkness was how a Shadowdancer got invisble in darkness, even against creatures that could see in that darkness.

The 5e Ranger/Gloomstalker has that as well.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Exactly.

Ideally, all these different options should have trade-offs. Light is great but enemies can see you coming. A torch is great but you need a free hand, and it can go out. Magical light is great but it uses resources (or should). Darkvision is great but it's easy to miss stuff. Tremorsense is great but there's a bunch it misses. Blindsight is great but only at close range. Etc.

It's only when there's one solution that works ideally for the PCs in all situations that you may as well ignore it.

Well, if one is more dominant even if it doesn't cover the full ground, you can at least ignore it a lot. As long as darksight is good enough to be aware of obvious things, its not hard to shift to conventional vision and, say, candles, when you think you're going to need it.

 

[Maxperson]

One solution I tried to make light less of a hindrance was to say that creatures with darkvision could only tell if there was light by the fact that they could suddenly see colors - which would not be very apparent in a dungeon. But this solution never caught on with my players.

Wouldn't the loss of dim light(in 5e) also be a giveaway?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thats not true for most systems. Light sources usually come with a cost, dark vision rarely. Dark vision removes one layer of resource management. Resource management is a core principle of good dungeon crawl systems IMO. It forces the players to make decisions. Without resource management the party can just "clear" the whole dungeon without any repercussions.

I wouldn't go so far and say darkvision ruin dungeon crawls, but to act like managing light resources and just having darkvision "always on" is the same, not really true. I would say in a city the difference doesn't matter, but in a dangerous environment like a dungeon it matters.

There are differences, but some of the downsides of the easier versions of light aren't significant hits to resource consumption and haven't been for a very long time in the D&D sphere properly at least (and a lot of games that aren't in the D&D sphere aren't much focused on dungeon crawling in the first place); its not like Continual Light is new. Yes, it heralds your approach but bluntly, so what? As I've noted, most characters outside of specialty groups are pretty poor at stealth anyway, so counting on that is a nonissue.