NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 6626016" data-attributes="member: 6777737">It's not just black and white vision, though.  It's lightly obscured black and white vision.Look, here's an experiment.  A candle produces 5 ft of bright light and 5 ft of dim light.  So, 10 ft away is dim light.  Do you have a basement, closet, garage, or bathroom with no windows?  Grab a flashlight or smartphone or tablet and your PHB and go into your bathroom (it'll be just like Sunday afternoons!).  Now, let's assume your flashlight or your tablet's/smartphone's flashlight app produce the same amount of light as a single candle.  They don't -- they're much stronger -- but this should still work.  If you can steal your wife's or girlfriend's tea lights and try it with actual candlelight, even better.  In any event, turn off the bathroom lights, turn on your flashlight, and sit it close to one end of the room -- no fair pointing it at yourself if it's a flashlight.  Now, walk 10 feet away, open your PHB, and try to read.Not at all.  Water in a dark container would look black.  You may be able to discern viscosity, but not if the oil is something like mineral oil.  Odor might help, but if we're talking about stagnant pools of blood or sewage, you're probably not going to notice the smell change all that much.  The whole room is going to be pretty indescribably rank.Correct.  You should basically never willingly choose to use it in darkness. In unfamiliar territory, it's suicidal.  So what good is it?  Darkvision is useful when the only alternative is blindness.  Darkvision is useful because it turns actual dim light into bright light.  That's the true benefit of it.Ever notice in pretty much every D&D novel that the Underdark is always lit by fungus, or glowing moss, or magic rocks, or something?  It's lit by things that explicitly provide dim light.  Real dim light isn't black and white.  That means that a 120 ft passageway lit by just six candles spaced 20 feet apart is, to the Drow, a "brightly lit passageway."</blockquote>

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