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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 7017276" data-attributes="member: 12731">There's nothing "only" about D&D gaming for the last two decades, probably including 90% of all current gamers.Stop pretending later editions does not have a larger impact than the semi-obscure earliest-effort ones.Beyond that; I've already adressed the faulty logic of "it wasn't true in 2e" (though I can't remember if it was in this thread or somewhere else).I say 5e is the first edition where non-darkvision can be said to be the exception rather than the rule.How can that be, if demihumans like elves only had low-light vision in 3e and 4e?Because the balance between humans and demihumans have shifted considerably since AD&D. Humans were very much the norm in the early editions, not because of anything related to vision, but because of a host of other reasons, mainly expectations. If you were there you know I am speaking the truth. Humans were very much depicted as heroes front and center, in artwork, in literature. And in the very core essence of the rules themselves: if you weren't human, you weren't allowed the "regular" way of multiclassing. You had strange limits on what you could be (like treating dwarves and elves as their own class!) and there were limits on how much of a hero you could become (level limits!), none of which applied to the human.Any hero like Drizzt or Bruenor was always the exception, the spicy exotic outsider. (Sure you might have played an all bugbear party back then for what I know, but that's hardly representative of art, mood, descriptions of the time)So arguing against "no darkvision was the norm up until 5th Ed" is deliberately ignoring the larger issue. Yes, if you only look at vision, you might be tempted to conclude 5e is the normal state of D&D. But in reality it is far from the truth. The reality is that in 5e, it's easy to create an entire darkvision-enabled party with much less baggage than in any earlier edition. This is a much larger shift than I suspect the designers realized. I believe they simply assumed humans would still be the norm, when 5e no longer maintains any reason for keeping things that way.Moving elves and half-elves out of Camp Darkvision is my identified solution to this problem, that the designers probably didn't anticipate and the playtest probably failed to catch.</blockquote>

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