How realistic is Night Vision?

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Anthony

That's a blind fighting skill, which I don't think costs 1 point per level.

It could, it if it turns out the unspecified time to adapt is around 9 months of earnest effort on your own, halved with a teacher.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Anthony

That's a blind fighting skill, which I don't think costs 1 point per level.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

It could, it if it turns out the unspecified time to adapt is around 9 months of earnest effort on your own, halved with a teacher.

How about a technique to buy off the darkness penalties?

So there seems to be some disagreement about what a normal limit of Night Vision should be...

[nik1979]

There rules for bringing the visibility range more towards dark. Basically the character has night vision 1-3 but has light sensitivity. Some astigmatic conditions endow some level of night vision.

An side affect you don't hear about when you get Lazik surgery is loss of Night Vision (which happened to me) and Possible Night Blindness (why my boss has) as well as light sensitivity.

[NineDaysDead]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

It should be at least 4 levels at the low end: the difference between -10 for a normally sighted attacker unable to see his target at all and -6 for a blind attacker who has become adapted to operating entirely without sight.

No. Blind people don't have Night Vision; if the penalty was -4 a blind person wouldn't suffer a -0 penalty would they? What they have is a penalty cap after all other modifiers, it's probably worth a perk.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by NineDaysDead

No. Blind people don't have Night Vision; if the penalty was -4 a blind person wouldn't suffer a -0 penalty would they? What they have is a penalty cap after all other modifiers, it's probably worth a perk.

I was referring to the limits for learning to do without visual information Anthony brought up. An improvement of 4 from -10 is the best a blind person can hope for. If you were not actually blind, but trained as if you were until you could fight at -6 in total darkness, then you might be able to fight at -5 or -4 or better in otherwise -9 darkness, since you have a chance to "peek" as it were.

[chris1982]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Yes. The major reason you buy night vision isn't to boost your vision roll at night, it's to eliminate the combat/DX penalty, and acute vision doesn't do that.

Yes, in GURPS RAW Nightvision is a killer. You get penalties of -3 or so really fast - when fighting in the night with torches -7 or so is not unreasonable. Any char with NV will destroy enemies with way higher combat skill at the cost of 1 point/level...

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by chris1982

Yes, in GURPS RAW Nightvision is a killer. You get penalties of -3 or so really fast - when fighting in the night with torches -7 or so is not unreasonable. Any char with NV will destroy enemies with way higher combat skill at the cost of 1 point/level...

I concur. If you play by the book, at least 50% of all fights has some kind of visibility penalties. I think Night Vision is overpowered for what it does and I houserule it at 2 pts/level in my campaign.
If I don't, ALL player characters will buy the maximum allowed Night vision with the very first earned points (or they won't for roleplaying reasons, but they will feel robbed afterwards).
Actually I can't understand why Night Vision was priced at only 1 point/level since it is essentially "+1 to all combat skills with Limitation (only to cancel darkness penalties)".
Even if you count that Limitation to be worth -80% (I would price it around -60%), and if you consider that it is actually used only on the 2-3 'favourite' combat skills, it should cost way more than 1 pt...

[Edges]

Originally Posted by Lupo

Actually I can't understand why Night Vision was priced at only 1 point/level since it is essentially "+1 to all combat skills with Limitation (only to cancel darkness penalties)".
Even if you count that Limitation to be worth -80% (I would price it around -60%), and if you consider that it is actually used only on the 2-3 'favourite' combat skills, it should cost way more than 1 pt...

Yeah, and it's actually even more than that. It's "+1 to all combat skills and vision checks with Limitation (only to cancel darkness penalties)".

There's a character in the game I'm running now with NV 6. I doubt he would trade it for TBaM.

IOW, I too concur.

[Anthony]

Originally (1st or 2nd edition), NV was 10 points and halved darkness modifiers. That was deemed too weak, or too complicated, or something, and it became a total negation of darkness modifiers in 3rd edition. Eventually, people noticed that this was lacking in granularity, and thus for 4th edition it was possible to take levels of NV, and since the max darkness penalty was 9 (and it was possible to cancel that for 10 points before), I guess 1/level seemed right.

NV is incredibly variable in value depending on the game, though.

[Edges]

It seems like in any game that doesn't feature Blindness or Dark Vision as a theme, NV is significant. I agree that in some games it's so significant, it applies to just about every scene. But I've never played a GURPS game in which the presence or absence of NV didn't make or break party success on multiple occasions. In fact, it strikes me as one of the most universally helpful advantages.

I'm inclined to call it 3/level and to remove Dark Vision as a separate advantage (i.e. make it 10 levels of NV). +1 to all attacks and (according to a recent thread IIRC) +1/2 to active defenses is like a 15 point talent IMO. Add to this +1 vision rolls and you've got a 17 point advantage. Even with -80% for Only to Reduce Darkness Penalties, that's still 3.4/level. 3/level seems pretty good.

I think if I charged 3/level for NV, my players would still be eager to buy it up.

Although having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if Kromm hopped on this thread with a solid argument to the contrary. I'd actually be more surprised if he didn't. : )