Dimness in
Game Design
November 7th, 2011
Allow me to be the first to welcome you to Darkness Week, the week devoted to, well, the absence of light. When said like that, of course, it doesn’t sound very impressive. In fact, even when you can actually see it (because darkness isn’t something that applies to your other senses), darkness rarely looks all that impressive. Mostly it just looks like big, black, empty space. That’s because darkness isn’t really about seeming to be impressive. Darkness is content with simply being one of our most primal fears.
Since this is Darkness Week, let’s talk for a bit about the rules for light and illumination (and, by extension, the lack thereof) in Pathfinder. In Pathfinder, light levels fall into four categories: bright light, normal light, dim light, and darkness. Bright light and normal light are essentially the same, except that bright light carries some penalties for subterranean or nocturnal creatures whose eyes don’t adapt well to lots of light. Interestingly, there is no level of light which is bright enough to make seeing difficult for humans or other surface dwellers, but that’s an issue for another day.
In dim light, characters can see and get around, but everything has concealment (20% miss chance), and creatures so inclined can use that concealment to make Stealth checks and hide. In darkness, characters whose vision relies on light (unlike, for example, those with darkvision, or blindsight) cannot see at all. This imposes a number of penalties that, for the most part, add up to the same penalties one would have when facing an invisible opponent, though there are a few extra bits that are rather odd.
For one, being completely unable to see imposes a -4 penalty on “Perception checks that rely on sight.” This strikes me as an interesting choice of phrase to use when imposing a -4 penalty, because under these conditions, the character’s sight has failed completely, implying that anything that relied on it would, as a matter of course, fail as well. Perhaps my eyesight simply doesn’t work properly, but if there’s no light around, and I can’t see my hand in front of my face, there’s really no way at all I’ll be able to tell you what color the wallpaper is, even if I’ve trained really, really hard to be good at perceiving things.
I suspect that the real reason for this oddly beneficent rule is a matter of erring on the side of caution, and, at the same time, of fun. If your games are anything like most games I play in, you go to a lot of places that are fairly dark (dungeons, caves, and the like), but you don’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about the darkness rules. If your DM has decided he wants to start “doing things right,” and paying attention to the little details like being able to see, the party’s spellcaster murmurs something about casting light, and, the DM, mollified that due diligence has been done, moves on to more exciting matters.
It might be a lot more realistic for blindness to render you unable to make Perception checks that rely on sight (and, in fact, I suspect that in nine games out of ten players will never ask and, if they did, DMs would outright refuse rather than look the issue up, since obviously the inability to see means it’s not possible, right?). But…let’s look at it another way, from a more game designer viewpoint.
Have you ever had a power outage in your house, after sunset? All the lights go out and all of a sudden you’re plunged into pitch blackness. If you’re like me, your first concern is all that unsaved data on your computer, and how it sucks that that’s gone. After that, though, you want to go find a flashlight or something so you can start making the best of a bad situation. Unfortunately, you have to find that flashlight first, and it’s completely dark, and you’re sure you left it around here somewhere, but…no…maybe over there…and…and the point is that it’s a very frustrating search, because it should be easy, but due to the fact that you can’t see (and, possibly, that you’re not very tidy), it suddenly becomes very, very hard.
Now bear in mind that this is a game, and, above and beyond that, a fantasy game. People play this game to escape, to pretend, and generally to be someone really awesome for a few hours a week, and do awesome things. Okay, sure, lots of people play for other reasons, but the point is, if it’s more frustrating than fun when it happens in real life, generally speaking, it’s probably not something people will enjoy going through in their fantasies.
Really, though, if I had to pick one issue with the current system of light and darkness, I certainly wouldn’t pick the ability to see without apparently, that is, seeing. No, if you ask me, the problem with light and darkness is that it’s all but impossible to make any use of it in combat (outside of, perhaps, a darkness spell).
You see, unless your PCs are running around with just a candle for their light (here’s a hint: they’re not), any source of light is going to give them a minimum of a 20-foot-radius area of normal light (that’s eight squares from end to end), and, beyond that, another 20-foot-radius area of light “one level above the level it would normally be.” Since dim light is described as “outside at night with a moon in the sky” or “bright starlight,” this means that if, say, you want your party to be ambushed in the night as they sleep around their campfire, you’re actually going to have quite a bit of trouble having darkness come into play.
Let’s assume that a campfire sheds about as much light as a torch (I strongly suspect that it should shed quite a bit more light than a torch, but they conveniently fail to give any kind of indication). If there’s anything in the sky, then that means that not only do we get a 20-foot-radius of normal light, we also get the next 20-foot-radius upgraded from dim to normal for free. That’s fully 16 squares from one end of the campfire’s light to the other. That’s almost an entire game mat (more than an entire game mat, for some people). Don’t forget that if your party has an elf, half-elf, gnome, or anything else with low-light vision, the whole thing is doubled, giving you 32 squares of, effectively, daylight from one end to the other. And if your party has a dwarf or a half-orc (or anything with darkvision), there’s no darkness at all, at least within 60 feet.
Essentially, then, the only way for you to actually use the darkness to your advantage here is for the ambushers to hide in the bushes and pepper the campsite with arrows. This suddenly becomes a lot less about darkness and a lot more about Stealth checks, cover, and a whole lot of ranged attacks. The PCs will, of course, have to set out into the darkness in order to fight back (probably – if the attackers don’t have low-light vision, they may very well be in normal light to your party’s elven archer), and that means having a giant mat accommodating quite a bit of the region around your campsite. Simply put, it’s a mess.
A far more effective way to use darkness in combat is to use darkness, the spell. This will leave everyone who’s unable to see floundering around uselessly, or else immediately retreating from the area of darkness with a suspiciously photographic memory of the way back out and the closest edge of the area of effect. If no one in the party is able to see in the dark, then unless you have a way of keeping them trapped in the spell’s area, each casting of darkness simply devolves into a long, boring wait for the spell’s effect to end. Another frustrating tactic players love when faced with threats they can’t see is to move blindly through squares until they bump into someone, because you can’t move out of the way when it’s not your turn.
If there were some set of simple rules that could govern, for example, how a character moves in darkness (i.e., do they move in the direction that they think they’re moving in? How fast can they go while groping around through the darkness to ensure they don’t smack into a wall? Can they judge distance? How well?), then you might be able to start making interesting encounters using darkness (or having your party’s torch fizzle out, or what have you). The problem here is once again navigating the fine line between accurate simulation and fun gameplay.
For those of you looking for a solution, I hate to disappoint. I don’t have a magical cure-all for the failures of darkness in Pathfinder (at least, not today), but I do have something you can try in your spare time, and see how it works for you:
A character that cannot see is unable to determine his direction. Each time he moves, roll a d8 to determine which direction he moves in. Characters move at half speed while unable to see. Each time the character moves, his player announces how far he intends to travel (20 feet, 40 feet, etc.). The DM then secretly determines the actual distance traveled, which is equal to 80 + 2d20 % of the desired distance, rounded to the nearest 5-foot square. Characters trained in Survival can still automatically determine the direction of true north, and can use that ability to move in the correct direction (though the distance traveled may still be more or less than intended).
It’s not perfect, I know, but douse the lights in a room full of pit traps, or what have you, and it will make for an interesting encounter. That’s it for this week’s Dark Designs. Thanks for reading!