How can I use the darkness as an environmental feature if the 4/5 of the party has darkvision?

How can I use the darkness as an environmental feature if the 4/5 of the party has darkvision?

Advanced darkness.

Lemme ask this another way: How can I turn a player's darkvision against them?

Remember that players who rely on darkvision will rarely bring any source of light with them, then use enemies can blend into the background or things otherwise. Decide how darkvision works in your setting (be it infrared or whatever) and then build something that works around that limitation.

My gm replaced except dorfs and tieflings every player races' darkvision with lowlight vision.

Have warnings written in the dungeon at the same luminosity as the wall but a different colour.
Of course they'll then stumble through and trigger many traps and the like they should've been warned about. After a small gauntlet of such problems have them encounter the NPC who was leaving the warnings who is baffled that the warnings have been ignored.

Add signs that are important to the dungeon.
Suddenly, you need a torch to read the color differences that make up the letters.

I'm running Starfinder. The final battle will be in a chamber the BBEG floods and turns off the lights; the enemies will be weresharks who will use the water to swim around in. I just looked up underwater perception in Starfinder and Murky Water can only be seen 1d8x10 in depth. I might monkey around with those numbers but thanks for helping me work through this.

Make a colorful encounter. Most darkvision are just black and white.

that must suck for the 1 guy with no darkvision. do they make him stumble around in total darkness? do they lead him by the hand? when combat starts do they cast Light for him?

He's playing a Vesk which has low light vision. But yeah last time they were in an asteroid he was tethered to a guy with a flashlight with 20 feet of slack. It was kinda fun watching them skate around in zero g always being forced to stay within 4 squares of each other. I don't think the Vesk has bought a flashlight or anything yet.

From my experience, I always carry a hooded lantern. Costly because I have to keep it lit even when it was covered up. For the most part, we held hands.

Shadows and darkness are different

Limiting visibility works, but remember that darkvision doesn't allow you to see perfectly, shapes that look like something else are still hard to distinguish, things that work on normal vision like similar looking textures will work on darkvision too. As other anons have said using colour means they have to use light as darkvision is normally shapes only.

Slut.

...

Darkvision is in black and white, and even then I don't think you are able to read with it
It lets you see but not as well as light does

Make darkness and the inability to see clearly the only way to progress. Light can be manipulated as a weapon, create illusions that confound, confuse, and if strong enough harm one. What if they were in an area where nothing within the "light" is real but can still harm like hiding traps, making false exits, disguising enemies, etc. Even if the illusion is identified it does not dispell making seem like the players are clipping through the enviroment. In low light the magic becomes unstable creating a fog of abstract but natural shapes. Perfect angles are not common in nature so this revelation could be used as a tool for the party to decipher what is real and not but at the risk of limited range.

Celestial dungeon. A literal dungeon complex where the walls are made of light and they are blinded half the time, the peeps with the darkvision get it worse.

my players liked it a lot. Made them think outside the box.

I'd like this question answered for people like me who have tiefling players that took See in Darkness, and see perfectly fine no matter what kind of darkness it is.

let the player have the advantage.

Darknessvsbeholder.

Just fucking remove it, you’re the DM. Tell them in your world dark vision doesn’t exist. Problem solved. You’re welcome. Now delete this thread

you're the GM. If darkness is important to what you want your game to be about, then the dark does what you want it to.

>see via sonar
>no level of darkness or liquid can interrupt this
>the only thing that would baffle this is if you made the walls out of egg cartons

You would be amazed how often this beats everything.

Hurt their eyes

I don't know the lightning rules for 5e, but in 3.PF and 4ere you'd have to make the arenas ludicrously massive to make use of darkness (unless it's magic darkness), because just a regular ass torch lights up a regular sized battlemap almost completely

Which means do whatever, this is clearly asspull territory and the rules don't matter

A regular torch lights up about 60ft, half of which is dim illumination.

That said, in 5e send a group of gloom stalkers at them. (Yes I saw this was starfinder, maybe invisible creatures? Something with a stealth field generator? Darkvision doesn't help there)

60 ft which is, uhhh 12 squares in all directions. As far as I remember the battlemap we had was something like 25x25 squares. Whenever darkness came up, unless it was magical darkness, it was mostly irrelevant, because then we'd have to have a room or area where enemies can be more than 60 ft away from you, which means we'd have to fill about half the battlemap with stuff. At which point the darkness only provides enemies with not being able to be targeted by ranged characters, which you can also easily achieve by just putting walls at certain places to provide full cover

An arena which was kind of interesting for once and played with "sight" was a dark warren like ghetto. Enemies dipped into and out of line of sight and were generally hard to pin down. Yes, it was dark, but even if a monster walked through the light it was gone just as fast behind a corner

Pick up veins of the earth.

piss the players off by nerfing their darkvision using a DM-fiat effect. chances are they'll fucking hate you for it.

this is correct dark vision is boring af

In which way? In most editions of D&D, a simple torch or cheap magical light sources turn darkness into a non-factor, especially in regards to combat.
I can only remember a few instances when characters with darkvision (mind you, darkvision, not infravision) had a significant advantage over guys with low light or regular vision

Well, archers with further away Darkvision.

Rely on the fact that darkvision in full darkness can’t distinguish colors.

Just look at the game and get creative.

Darkvision has limited range and can't see around shit, use those 2 things in combination.

Stop being That GM

give some creatures the Gloomstalker's ability to ignore darkvision.

or you can run magical darkness and give creatures devil sight.

Introduce an Ancient Baatorian

3/4 of my players are humans. So light is a problem for them.

Also, this is what Veeky Forums and plebbit always gets wrong. Traps will fuck you up even if all of your party has darkvision. Darkvision lets you see in darkness as it is dim light. In dim light you have -5 passive perception and disadvantage in perception checks that rely on sight.

So good luck finding any trap.

Make it so light that they need to cover their eyes.

Im gonna change up a few things about darkvision

>Humans
Darkness sensitivity: No darkvision of any kind. Fear of Darknes. Translates to shadowweave weakness?
Can they even be Shadowweavers?


>Dwarves
Runelight vision
Dwarves can not see in darkness, that is a common misconception among other races. To see in darkness, dwarves uses Runelight, which all runes emit.

>Gnomes
Farsight
Gnomes spend their time on the road and is helped by a natural talent for seeing clearly at long distances. It’s commonly said it was taught to them by predator birds like falcons.

Instead of getting farsight, maybe get animal darkvision. Havent read up on that or really thought this through, just farsight as a thing they could have.
Alternatively, they can use their shadow weave affinity to see in darkness.

>Elves
Soul Sight, 4 XP
Elves can see "the shadow" the soul cast in the real world. Souls within a body is much easier to see and identify than a free spirit. With this gift Elves can tell if another Elf is pure or impure with a single glance, as if staring directly into the soul rather than the Elf in question. This gift have lead other races to believe that the elves can see in darkness, but it is another false impression, they can just see the outline of the soul in darkness. Because of how integral Soul Sight is in recognizing other people, all orc (except the old ones) look alike due to their divine spark.
Some elves, particularly Weesham (Elven Necromancer/doula), work in human cities as soul diviners, selling their talent so a human can learn what their soul is made from.

>Lizardfolk
Heatvision and for most lizardfolk limited color vision, though some have full and others none.

>Orcs
What do. Hunter ritual (Divine) to see see their prey/enemy.

Boy, it turns out there is a second reason Devils are there for the greater good

>3/4 of my players are humans.
>3/4 of my players
>players
What, did someone finally invent an AI that plays tabletop RPGs? Can it also GM?

Ironically not only do these things exist- they're outright linked.

>referee
What kind of faggot terminology is this?

That's from Veins of the Earth, a sourcebook to run a "weird" not!Underdark for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, which is a OSR game and thus uses the old-timey name for DMs. "Dungeon master" came with the publication of AD&D

Lol have all the enemies have truesight and darkness over them.

Is that 10-80 feet? that's pretty deep.

DnD already had this in mind when they designed the Beholder. It has 120 ft of darkvision, while PC races only get 60 ft of darkvision. The Beholder's lair is described as having 120ft ceilings and being completely dark. It can see them and shoot lasers, but they cannot see it as long as it floats near the ceiling.

And since a Beholder already looks like an alien being, it would fit in just fine in Starfinder.

This reminds me of something similar: Why would I want to be the one race in a dungeon crawl that needs to hold a torch in one hand to see anything?

And many powerful abilities in DnD (idk about Starfinder) require you to be able to see a target. 120ft darkvision ceiling prevents melee fighters from doing anything because height. Ranged fighters need to randomly shoot and most likely miss since they don't know exactly where the Beholder is. Lastly, casters can't see to target with strong spells (not to mention the Beholder has an antimagic cone it can point at them).

There is a cave salamander in Throne of Night which can only he seen in artificial light. It adapted to hunt under dark creatures, can cling to surfaces and looks like a giant grey penis with legs. It would be perfect for star finder, just make it native to outerspace.

Put them in a position where they're using Darkvision, and then hit them with flashbangs.

Alternatively, name them Co-earls of Gloucester, and introduce the husband and wife Regan and the Earl of Cornwall as NPCs. The situation should resolve itself.

typically Darkvision is black & white so things like oozes looking like rocks and such are very easy to use.

Use fog that straight up limit their vision range, you can make it so thick they can't even see their hands, or make it normal but they need to get close to see anything, you can make it magical fog that needs special torches.

Or use creatures that are either invisible or blind in with the background so they need to be creative.

Holy fuck this made me want to make a D&D mod for dwarf fortress with all monsters and let the thing run its course, to make the world collapse under itself

mist/fog, heavy rain, patches of brightly glowing lights or sunlight coming through gaps. vines, stalactites, clouds of insects

>Alternatively, name them Co-earls of Gloucester, and introduce the husband and wife Regan and the Earl of Cornwall as NPCs. The situation should resolve itself.

I'm sorry user. That joke is way, WAY, too smart for Veeky Forums. Good attempt, though.