So I am a new DM and last night we were doing the final Dungeon map of Dark Designs from the Wildemount book. I have a player who as he is playing a wizard often hangs back but as he has dark vision keeps insisting he should be able to see into rooms he is not in
being new I am not sure if I am managing this wrong.
My idea of how it should work- when a dungeon is split up into rooms, traps and encounters you need to go into an area to interact with it, or at least to start that encounter to a point they react to it.
My players idea of how things work - if he is in a hallway and there is a room that at the end he should be able to know what’s in the room from 30-50ft away because darkvision.
I feel like he is trying to outplay the room before he gets into it and metagaming a little to try to beat me. Which is not as fun as I am not trying to beat my players, I am routing for them to win. The other aspect is I am not taking the tiles to logical conclusion this player is. As an example my players all ended up in a room with a trap door that fell into a pool of sharks. I fudged a dice roll that was a natural twenty as a miss so not to Insta kill to parties medic on the opening turn, and I didn’t make the 4 kobolds and drow with a crossbow one room over suddenly come running around the corner and start hailing arrows on the players from a 10ft vantage point. Who would of logically heard the trap go off, the splash, the sound of the sharks attacking and the explosive magic the party was using not very stealthily.
if I had been following the logic my wizard is using though it probably would of been a TPK within the first 45 mins. instead I paced the encounters, allowed 2 short rests, and let the logic of trying to meta game them go.
First we'll assume that there is not a closed door.
In that case, the range of Darkvision is very clearly defined for a character. If the character has 60' darkvision, they can see 60' radius. However, how much of the room can they actually see? Welcome to DnD Geometry 101... Start with a 90 degree angle from the opening, so with a 5' opening into a 25'x25' room, standing before the opening a character can see the entire opposite wall, but only a 5' area on the other side of the door for 10', then 15' for 10' then the entire opposite wall. For every 10' they are back from there, reduce the spread of sight down a notch. So 10' from the door, they can still see the opposite wall, but only 15' of it, and if they are 20' or more, they can only see 5' of the opposite wall.
As far as your Kobolds and the trap, really the DM should decide if that is going to be a single encounter or not before the Party gets there and adjust it accordingly. (If a single encounter maybe there are only 2 Kobolds and a single shark with frikkin lasers.)
So doesn't sound like Meta, unless they are trying to see through doors/walls. Also, very common practice once one member of the party can see something that all players know about it, but should have the couth to not have their characters act upon the knowledge unless the other characters have sufficiently communicated the situation/environment.
Darkvision is not X-ray vision. It doesn't let him see around corners, through walls, or behind objects.
A simple way to prevent him from doing this is to put doors in the archway that leads to the rooms. But even if there are no doors, he's not going to be able to see the whole room from 50 feet away. Vision is blocked by wall edges and the like. So if we imagine a 5' wide door opening leading into say a 50' wide room, with 25' or so on either side of the door, the character with darkvision can only see a narrow line of sight about 5' wide back into the room. Anything on either side of the doorway would be invisible. And if there is, say, a statue right in the middle of the room just beyond that door, which is about 5' wide, then anything behind the statue would also be invisible.
Here's a simple example from Roll20 showing how their dynamic lighting works. The character is outside a building, the door is open, and he is looking in. Notice that only a strip down the center, slightly wider at the far end than at the door frame, is visible to the character inside the building. This is what the darkvision character could see. Anyone on either side of that area is in the "black" section and invisible. So, at best, he gets partial information, not the whole thing.
However, there is potentially a second issue here. You seem to have set up your dungeon so that if the players mess up, and you don't either fudge rolls or cheat, the party will TPK. Do your players know this? Have they had experience with this before? If so, it would explain the over-caution. Knowing the DM is going to attack you with very powerful things if you mess up, makes a party tentative and try to get the lay of the land much more so than otherwise.
Finally, not only is there nothing wrong with trying to find out what's in a room before you walk in but for decades it has been standard D&D practice. In the old days, if there was a closed door, you were asking for death if you didn't at least listen at the door before opening it. In those days, every time you encountered something, both sides would roll for surprise unless otherwise aware of each other beforehand. So listening at the door and hearing the orcs talking prevented you from being surprised, but let you surprise them. And one reason why undead were often considered quite deadly (esp. for low level parties) was that in the old days, the undead generally did not make any noise, so even if the room was full of skeletons, you didn't hear anything, which meant you could almost always suffer a surprise round against undead.
So.. him trying to look head with darkvision or listen at doors is correct behavior. Him claiming that he can see into the entire room and everything within it, is not. Also, with Darkvision, isn't a dark area treated as dim light, meaning things are "lightly obscured?" So not only can't he see around walls but he should be at disadvantage to perception checks unless there is some light source in the room conferring dim light (which to him would be bright light).
So I am a new DM and last night we were doing the final Dungeon map of Dark Designs from the Wildemount book. I have a player who as he is playing a wizard often hangs back but as he has dark vision keeps insisting he should be able to see into rooms he is not in
being new I am not sure if I am managing this wrong.
My idea of how it should work- when a dungeon is split up into rooms, traps and encounters you need to go into an area to interact with it, or at least to start that encounter to a point they react to it.
My players idea of how things work - if he is in a hallway and there is a room that at the end he should be able to know what’s in the room from 30-50ft away because darkvision.
I feel like he is trying to outplay the room before he gets into it and metagaming a little to try to beat me. Which is not as fun as I am not trying to beat my players, I am routing for them to win. The other aspect is I am not taking the tiles to logical conclusion this player is. As an example my players all ended up in a room with a trap door that fell into a pool of sharks. I fudged a dice roll that was a natural twenty as a miss so not to Insta kill to parties medic on the opening turn, and I didn’t make the 4 kobolds and drow with a crossbow one room over suddenly come running around the corner and start hailing arrows on the players from a 10ft vantage point. Who would of logically heard the trap go off, the splash, the sound of the sharks attacking and the explosive magic the party was using not very stealthily.
if I had been following the logic my wizard is using though it probably would of been a TPK within the first 45 mins. instead I paced the encounters, allowed 2 short rests, and let the logic of trying to meta game them go.
First we'll assume that there is not a closed door.
In that case, the range of Darkvision is very clearly defined for a character. If the character has 60' darkvision, they can see 60' radius. However, how much of the room can they actually see? Welcome to DnD Geometry 101... Start with a 90 degree angle from the opening, so with a 5' opening into a 25'x25' room, standing before the opening a character can see the entire opposite wall, but only a 5' area on the other side of the door for 10', then 15' for 10' then the entire opposite wall. For every 10' they are back from there, reduce the spread of sight down a notch. So 10' from the door, they can still see the opposite wall, but only 15' of it, and if they are 20' or more, they can only see 5' of the opposite wall.
As far as your Kobolds and the trap, really the DM should decide if that is going to be a single encounter or not before the Party gets there and adjust it accordingly. (If a single encounter maybe there are only 2 Kobolds and a single shark with frikkin lasers.)
So doesn't sound like Meta, unless they are trying to see through doors/walls. Also, very common practice once one member of the party can see something that all players know about it, but should have the couth to not have their characters act upon the knowledge unless the other characters have sufficiently communicated the situation/environment.
Darkvision is not X-ray vision. It doesn't let him see around corners, through walls, or behind objects.
A simple way to prevent him from doing this is to put doors in the archway that leads to the rooms. But even if there are no doors, he's not going to be able to see the whole room from 50 feet away. Vision is blocked by wall edges and the like. So if we imagine a 5' wide door opening leading into say a 50' wide room, with 25' or so on either side of the door, the character with darkvision can only see a narrow line of sight about 5' wide back into the room. Anything on either side of the doorway would be invisible. And if there is, say, a statue right in the middle of the room just beyond that door, which is about 5' wide, then anything behind the statue would also be invisible.
Here's a simple example from Roll20 showing how their dynamic lighting works. The character is outside a building, the door is open, and he is looking in. Notice that only a strip down the center, slightly wider at the far end than at the door frame, is visible to the character inside the building. This is what the darkvision character could see. Anyone on either side of that area is in the "black" section and invisible. So, at best, he gets partial information, not the whole thing.
However, there is potentially a second issue here. You seem to have set up your dungeon so that if the players mess up, and you don't either fudge rolls or cheat, the party will TPK. Do your players know this? Have they had experience with this before? If so, it would explain the over-caution. Knowing the DM is going to attack you with very powerful things if you mess up, makes a party tentative and try to get the lay of the land much more so than otherwise.
Finally, not only is there nothing wrong with trying to find out what's in a room before you walk in but for decades it has been standard D&D practice. In the old days, if there was a closed door, you were asking for death if you didn't at least listen at the door before opening it. In those days, every time you encountered something, both sides would roll for surprise unless otherwise aware of each other beforehand. So listening at the door and hearing the orcs talking prevented you from being surprised, but let you surprise them. And one reason why undead were often considered quite deadly (esp. for low level parties) was that in the old days, the undead generally did not make any noise, so even if the room was full of skeletons, you didn't hear anything, which meant you could almost always suffer a surprise round against undead.
So.. him trying to look head with darkvision or listen at doors is correct behavior. Him claiming that he can see into the entire room and everything within it, is not. Also, with Darkvision, isn't a dark area treated as dim light, meaning things are "lightly obscured?" So not only can't he see around walls but he should be at disadvantage to perception checks unless there is some light source in the room conferring dim light (which to him would be bright light).
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.