Flashlights in combat

[Der Wanderer]

Lets start over

Problem: Flat rules for resisting Flashlights (High-Tech pg 52)
- You can only blind an enemy if he is taken by surprise. Why? What is the reasoning. I'm pretty sure if I look into a welding spark I will be blinded even if I do it on purpose.
- Flat penalty. Any model tactical Flashlight will do, no matter how good, no matter the condition of the batteries, no matter the TL its totally digital yes/no. That is like saying that a blunt dagger or a sharp sword deal the same amount of damage. Your either blinded or you are good, nothing in between. How about being dazzled / distracted / confused / have limited vision.
- Flat resist, see flat penalty.

Assuming short range (less than 5 meter)
Q1: Why can't you continuously irritate/blind/annoy an enemy?
Q2: How bright does a flashlight have to be to blind an enemy during a bright day?
Q3: How does/should the resisting scale? Brighter flashlights should be harder to resist.
Q4: How does/should the penalty scale? Brighter flashlights should be more irritating.

Some Rant:
In most parts of Europe you can't carry a gun (especially a handgun) as a civilian and you are only allowed to carry tiny knifes. If you carry a baseball-bat in Germany you better be going or coming from baseball training or you are considered illegally armed. As for now flashlights are not restricted AND are of the most commonly carried items. It is therefore a logical conclusion to consider a flashlight as a weapon (and not just to whack on someones head, if your flashlight is that big it might be considered a weapon again). I think it is therefore important to have more detailed rules on how flashlight beams/cones behave in combat. Flashlights are also ever evolving and every generation gets more powerful. And honestly why stop there, what does the next TL bring?

[Kallatari]

The house rules I use - which I adapted from someone else's page... Anthony's I think - might not address all your issues, but I find they work well enough.

First, all light sources are given an "illumination value" roughly based on their lux values, at roughly a +3 for every 2 magnitudes of increase. Commonly used sources and their illumination value are: floodlight +6; large tactical flashlight +5; midday sun* +3; small tactical flashlight +3; sunrise/sunset* 0; average flashlight -1; mini-flashlight -2; bright streetlights -2; lantern -3 or -2 if you focus the light into a beam; torch -3; average streetlights -3; micro-flashlight -4; full moon -5; candle -5; chemlight -7; starlight -8.

Light sources reduce the darkness penalty immediately beside them to their level of illumination. As you get further away from the source, reduce the effective illumination by 1/2 the penalty of the Range/Speed Table. So, for example, 10 yards is -4 on the table, so the brightness that is 10 yards away from a source is reduced by (-4/2 =) -2.

So, a torch normally illuminates to -3 right beside, and will illuminate to -5 at 10 yards away. A small tactical flashlight illuminates at +3 right beside it and would only illuminate to +1 at 10 yards away.

Now, a result of -1 to -9 is effectively the Darkness Penalty. A result of -10 or worse means total darkness; you simply cannot see. A result of 0 means full lighting, and there's no penalty.

An illumination of +1 or more means it's a blinding light. If you're not looking right at it, no problem. You see normally, with no darkness penalty. If you're looking toward the light source, you might be temporarily blinded at worse, and suffer a penalty to vision/attacks at best.

First, you need to make a HT roll, with a penalty equal to the positive modifier. On a failure, you're temporarily blinded for margin of failure x 10 seconds. On a success, or when the blindness ends, you still have a penalty to all vision rolls - and any attack roll based on using Vision as your targeting sense - equal to the modifier while looking in the direction of the light source.

Going back to the small tactical flashlight with someone at 10 yards away from it. At that range, the light goes from +3 illumination to +1; it's still potentially blinding. You shine it in the target's face, so he has to make a HT -1 roll or go blind. Even if not blinded, he'll have a -1 penalty to his attack rolls to aim or shoot at anything in the rough direction of the light.

So, that's my house rule.

I admit there's still room for tweaking.

For one, I've toyed around with the idea of changing the penalty to HT rolls to the absolute change in brightness, which probably make more sense as I don't see why a flashlight at +1 would cause much trouble if you're already in a very bright sunny day. On the other hand, if you've been running around in total darkness and get that light flashed in your eyes, you'd roll at -11 to avoid temporarily blindness. It sounds reasonable, and I'll likely implement it soon enough, but I haven't actually tested it yet.

The second issue is how often do you make a HT roll? Right now, I only require the roll when you first look at it. Works good enough for a flashlight shined in your face in combat... but I'm not entirely convinced it shouldn't be every turn you look directly at the light (as opposed to roughly in its direction).



*With respect to sunlight, my math is probably a bit off, but I think I determined the sun itself would be a +38 light source, then half the range penalty from the sun to the Earth would bring it down to +5. I fudged in atmospheric distortion of light to drop it down to +3 with midday sun straight above, and down to 0 at sunset/sunrise when the angle results in plenty more atmosphere to go through to disperse the light. Oh, and just reduce the light value of sunlight/moonlight/starlight by an additional -1 with light overcast, or -2 with heavy overcast.

[Phoenix_Dragon]

Originally Posted by Der Wanderer

You can only blind an enemy if he is taken by surprise.

No, you can only stun people if you catch them by surprise. The blinding rules in HT have no such limitation.

Flat penalty. Any model tactical Flashlight will do, no matter how good, no matter the condition of the batteries, no matter the TL its totally digital yes/no. That is like saying that a blunt dagger or a sharp sword deal the same amount of damage. Your either blinded or you are good, nothing in between. How about being dazzled / distracted / confused / have limited vision.

Tactical Shooting has more details, including dazzling and limited vision, particularly for night-adapted eyes. Distracted/confused are other ways of phrasing mental stun, which is already included in the HT rules.

Flat resist, see flat penalty.

Tactical Shooting has a more detailed range of modifiers for dazzling, including different types of flashlights. They top out at a bit higher than the HT rules, but the rules are for ruining the dark adaptation. TS's rules are probably quite a bit more realistic.

Q1: Why can't you continuously irritate/blind/annoy an enemy?

Who says you can't? It's not like exposure gives them immunity.

Q2: How bright does a flashlight have to be to blind an enemy during a bright day?

To completely blind 90% of people for an average of 4 seconds? Brighter than any flashlight I've ever encountered. Even the really bright LED tactical light flashed in my face by surprise from about 3 feet away didn't leave me blind for any period of time. Ruined my night vision, made everything look a good bit darker, and left a ghost image behind, all of which matches well with Tactical Shooting, but I could still see. Impaired vision, but not complete blindness, or about what I would expect from the TS rules.

Q3: How does/should the resisting scale? Brighter flashlights should be harder to resist.
Q4: How does/should the penalty scale? Brighter flashlights should be more irritating.

See Tactical Shooting. Newer flashlight tech has higher penalties, and being margin-based makes the effect worse (Or at least longer) when higher penalties are involved.

The TS rules are still somewhat vague on some matters (A flashlight in the face is just as capable of blinding in a dimly-lit room as it is a pitch-black cave, range is not accounted for, etc), but it's a good starting point, and probably much closer to realism than the HT rules.

[Der Wanderer]

Thanks Kallatari & Phoenix_Dragon, that was most helpful.
It appears I need tactical shooting not just a quote over the phone-line :(. I also looked at Magic but it was not very helpful (Continuous light is not scale-able and a quite focused beam).

Some internet research has given me additional relevant info.
- LED Flashlights have only little UV light so permanent damage (as in looking into a welding arc or the sun) should not occur.

When shining it into your eyes. This were mostly accidents, described on flashlight fori. No precise mentioning of flashlight / environmental light and distance.
- It actually can hurt (one described it as more painful than looking into the sun for one second. Yes, why would you do that???).
- Effects range from burnt spots to red fog to complete loss of sight, tearing up and headache.
- Effects usually improved within minutes up to an hour but in some cases minor effect (and burned spots) lasted for days.

Other notable stuff
- Lots of animals freeze when hit by a bright light (in the dark). Dogs seem less susceptible to flashlight beams but can be confused by strobe light. Something that one could probably train them for.

Things I will consider for the rules:
- HT-roll and effect should be depending on the absolute difference in brightness (environmental vs. flashlight at given distance)
- I will consider having to HT-rolls (one for each eye), the nose could play a role here, so this seems fair.
- While its fairly easy to block (dodge??) a light-flash, avoiding a continuous light should have similar effect as fighting someone with the blur spell.
- "Attacking" with a flashlight beam is of course depending on the beam with (which influences range) and range. Maintaining it is really easy at short range. Tried that with a friend, while sparring with swords (very weak flashlight of course), that is a extremely easy technique. Also fencing masks make you more vulnerable to flashlight because the reflection on the mesh is very annoying ;).

The detail of this rules make only sense if flashlight in combat is a common occurrence.

Of course all the details have to be worked out and those house-rules will be a great help.
I'm still struggling with sun-glasses. Theoretically they reduce both environmental and flashlight, so the relative brightness remains the same. That at least should hold true for completely closed sunglasses, regular sunglasses should have environmental light spilling in from the sides but will be more effective at blocking light-beams from the front.

[davidtmoore]

From what I remember, luminous intensity is non-linear. I think 3000 appears about twice as bright as 800. 1500 appears maybe ten times as bright as 1.5.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Der Wanderer

Assuming short range (less than 5 meter)
Q1: Why can't you continuously irritate/blind/annoy an enemy?

Because they'll look away or squint. The long term effect is a glare penalty to vision, rather than a specific attack effect.

Originally Posted by Der Wanderer

Q2: How bright does a flashlight have to be to blind an enemy during a bright day?

Same general scale as a blinding laser -- a class II laser is supposed to be eye-safe due to the blink effect, and is capped at 1 mW -- which is really the amount of power that can enter the retina, which during full daylight is about 5mm^2, so that requires a power level of 200W/m^2 (with a sun-like spectrum, that's about 40,000 lux).

Originally Posted by Der Wanderer

Q3: How does/should the resisting scale? Brighter flashlights should be harder to resist.

Easiest way is to base it on the light level generated by the flashlight.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by gilbertocarlos

Incapacitating god seems awfully powerful.

Maybe that's what Moses used in Exodus 4.

[Figleaf23]

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but if you don't like Aiming rules and are looking at melee situations, what about treating the beam as a Jet?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

I don't know if it's been mentioned, but if you don't like Aiming rules and are looking at melee situations, what about treating the beam as a Jet?

Treating as? A wide continuous/non-burst beam IS a Jet.

[Der Wanderer]

Just stumbled on this:
WristLight