I mean who doesn't have dark vision these days?
5e was absolutely devastating to the torch-seller economy
weeps gently in dragonborn
My dragonborn warlock doesn't understand your joke.
Underground races make sense, but I've never understood why elves and forest gnomes get it (dark elves excluded, they make sense).
Yeah when I was DMing 5e we just house ruled that only underground races had darkvision, most races currently with darkvision had low light vision (from 3e) instead, and I think I stripped a race or two of even that. All of my players agreed with the changes. Darkvision in 5e is stupid.
Honestly, that's one of my biggest gripes: so many character abilities are just "turn this part of the game off." Something like Goodberry completely obviates the need to worry about food, and darkvision leads to annoying assymetry, and incentivizes the GM to just gloss over it, or hand the one player who doesn't get it from their race or class some magic goggles and be done with it.
If you don't want to play worrying about light sources or food, you can just do that. If you want to track those things, you can make it fun. But 5e's approach is kind of neither. It's there, but it sucks, so it doesn't matter. Bleh.
I'm playing a human wizard and for like 70% of the campaign, I was working with 2 spell slots constantly being used. One for dark vision and one for mage armor. Now I can cast mage armor without using a slot, so I'm only down one slot when we are traveling through the underdark. We have plenty of light sources, but we don't use them because we don't want to draw attention to ourselves.
100% agree. I like DMs having more hazards and obstacles at their disposal.
It's almost not worth picking up at character creation if the DM is probably going to ignore it.
Just be the asshole in the party that doesnt have it and starts ruining surprise attacks and stealth.
There's always 1 drow that has super dark vision.
This is Deep Gnome erasure
Sorry, couldn't see you there.
Duergar are better.
In the "Veins of the Earth" underdark setting for retro D&D, the author was clearly annoyed about this because they draw attention to the fine distinction between "Dark Vision" (which only monsters have) and "Infrared" or "Low Light" vision, which still give you some advantages underground but which both also require some kind of light source to work still.
"We're taking the crunch out in 5e"
"That was load bearing crunch"
Imagine picking Deepgnome thinking you'll have something to contribute to the party...
There's a version in monsters of the multiverse where the stat increase can be chosen freely.
Advantage on Int/Wis/Cha saving throws against spells on martial characters is instant S Tier.
