How good is infravision

[ArchonShiva]

On the one hand, it says “eliminates vision penalties”, but on the other hand it says stuff about themperature differences.

The way I understand this:

Infravision is as good as daylight, for the purposes of combat and scouting and finding traps and tracking. Air is a different temperature from walls and ceilings and skeletons and weapons and plants.

The only downsides are:
a) you can’t read;
b) you can’t tell colors;
c) you can’t see some stuff such as Simple Illusion;
d) you *might not* see an earth elemental hidden against a rock wall.

On the other hand, there are no real bonus upsides (examples):
a) you don’t get to see invisible stuff;
b) it won’t help defeat stealth beyond the darkness penalty;
c) it won’t tell you whether something is alive or dead;
d) it won’t help with tracking.

It *would* tell you which of three stoves was recently on, because that’s just super obvious.

Is this the intended effect?

[Anthony]

I would say that DF prefers to make abilities straightforward to deal with, so the default treatment is just those effects, but a GM who wants to go to the effort can apply more effects (both positive and negative).

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Anthony

I would say that DF prefers to make abilities straightforward to deal with, so the default treatment is just those effects, but a GM who wants to go to the effort can apply more effects (both positive and negative).

Yep. The only thing that officially matters is "Eliminates darkness penalties completely when dealing with things that aren't thermalized – or that are, but that are also within two yards of a heat source." It's really just a way of saying that you'll ignore darkness in a fight unless the GM feels like saying you can't. Whereas Dark Vision is really just a way of saying that you'll ignore darkness, period.