Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
I would disagree with that assessment, as you can develop the equivalent of Night Vision through operating regularly at night. If we assume that -5 vision penalty is the brightness of a crescent moon (since -7 is starlight), I learned to be quite functional in that light while I was a child because I had to feed and care for animals on a farm without artificial light (I found that flashlights were fairly useless for such activities because they ruined my night vision). Even though it was a routine activity for me, I found that many of my friends were hopelessly incapable of functioning in that level of light. Of course, that changed as I developed vision issues, but I was quite found of the night for a time.
From a technical point of view, humans actually have quite good night vision, as we can maintain visual acuity down to what GURPS would classify as a -9 (overcast moonless night). What would define advantageous night vision, would be rapid adaptation to differences in light, as it can take hours for people to achieve complete night vision. With the plethora of artifical lights though, most people have not been forced to operate in darkness during their childhood long enough to develop the proper visual pathways, so I would not be surprised if most people raised in urban environments suffer from a quirk level of night blindness.
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I agree that it should be possible to reduce penalties for some or even many tasks with training at performing them in low-light conditions, but that's not what Night Vision represents. Night Vision 2 represents being able to resolve tiny details at twice the distance in low-light conditions and is a fairly optimistic treatment of the maximum variation in human night vision.
Techniques for working in low light might be more expensive than Night Vision, but they are the canonical way to represent training in low-light operations. Granted, I think that buying such a technique for all combat skills quickly gets too expensive and I would totally support a leveled trait that reduced darkness penalties to multiple related skills, like for example combat skills.
But Night Vision is really too cheap for the purpose and, importantly, also allows the character to
see as well in the dark as a cat. Which is a cool superpower, but not actually realistic.