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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Patryn of Elvenshae" data-source="post: 1723219" data-attributes="member: 23094">No.  Either you're misreading or I'm mistyping, so I apologize.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />When you create a black and white movie, you are measuring the intensity of light reflected from a given surface.  So, black cloth, because it reflects a small amount of light, will look darker than white cloth or shiny black metal - because it reflects less light towards the camera.  Navy blue cloth will reflect less than the white cloth, but more than the black cloth, and so will appear grey.Color movies work in the same way, except they capture the intensity of a several subsets of the whole spectrum of light - generally, Red light, Green light, and Blue light.In a black and white movie, someone wearing a white suit and someone wearing an appropriately shiny black suit will look identical because, as far as the film can tell, they are reflecting the same amount of light.  Because of this, you cannot determine the actual color of the suit.Darkvision, specifically, does not allow you to distinguish color - which is an artifact of various things reflecting light differently.  You can see the words written in black ink on white paper because the black ink reflects less light and a different wavelength of light than the paper does, creating dark spots on the paper which your brain is able to interpret as words.  It is hard to see yellow ink on white paper because, as yellow is closer to white, the difference in amount of reflected light and the wavelengths of that light is smaller, and thus the *contrast* is smaller.Since Darkvision works without light at all - and even in the presence of light - it cannot see colors.  It cannot interpret the differences between red light and blue light and green light which separate a black piece of paper from a white piece of paper - or from black spots on a piece of paper from the background of the paper, because the *only* difference between the two is color.So, where does the greyscale come in?It comes in because it's like a false-color version of a Hubble telescope print.  Those nebulae aren't really pink and purple - at least, the base data doesn't support the claim - rather, radio frequencies of a given wavelength are assigned the color purple, those of a different wavelength are blue, etc., and eventually you get a beautiful, but falsely colored, picture of the galaxy which allows you to make out certain details.Darkvision does the same thing - it provides a false color image to the brain based on distance from the observer - out to 60', in the case of dwarves.Thus, looking at someone, their nose is whiter than their forehead because it's closer.  Eyebrows are brighter than the forehead, but darker than the nose.  Etc.For this reason, using Darkvision, you cannot read normally printed materials because you can't see the difference between "paper" and "paper with thin layer of ink."You could, however, make out runes carved in a wall, or embossed paper, because the difference would be enough to register.  This provides a great reason for dwarven reliance on such methods for their recordkeeping - you can't carve paper, but you can carve metal slabs.And I'm pretty sure that, somewhere, it was explicitly stated that you can't use Darkvision to read normal writing.  I just wish I could remember where.</blockquote>

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