The first part of the first sentence is wrong because it restricts blindsight, and packs together things which have not the same "value" in game terms, while still being incomplete (what about other level of obscurement, for example).
The second part of the first sentence is useless because obviously a sense is useless if someone uses something specifically designed to foil it.
And the second sentence does not bring anything of value, as it is only a rehash of the "specific beats general" view of 5e.
The fact that you can disagree about a core function of an ability is proof enough that it should have been better written up.
People are pedants, deal with it. If not specified, people will argue otherwise.
The primary function of the second sentence is to clarify that it does not see through walls.
If WotC doubled the description of every rule that's ever had a thread on this forum I wonder who'd be able to afford the book.
And here you go, I completely agree with this, and in addition to the price, it would make the book much harder to read and much less player-friendly, resulting in a game with the same level of success as previous editions, at best.
Most of the rules in 5e are fine, but some cases, such as the perception rules, are just a gigantic mess.
I do think stealth, hiding, senses (all of them), and how invisibility applies to these could have used an extra section in a book somewhere. Every DM just kind of wings these for better or worse, often worse.
Well, it seems that none of the players in the groups I play with argue, so at least there are some people who are not pedants, draw your own conclusions from this.
The primary function of the second sentence is to clarify that it does not see through walls.
And why shouldn't it, in some cases ?
I didn't say everyone was pedants. Just that there's more than enough of them to be worth the extra verbiage. As for your second point, blindsight is a specific thing, it should behave in a consistent manner. If you want your monster to see through walls, give it a trait that says it can.
The primary function of the second sentence is to clarify that it does not see through walls.
And why shouldn't it, in some cases ?
For one, sensing via vibration through walls fits better with Tremorsense.
For another, while Truesight can allow sight into the ethereal plane, even it cannot go through walls.
Yet again though, that you have to ask about Blindsight seeing through walls in some cases (in other words, depending on extra abilities) is further evidence that it is poorly written.
For one, sensing via vibration through walls fits better with Tremorsense.
For another, while Truesight can allow sight into the ethereal plane, even it cannot go through walls.
Yet again though, that you have to ask about Blindsight seeing through walls in some cases (in other words, depending on extra abilities) is further evidence that it is poorly written.
I honestly think they should have subtyped Blindsight so you could easily tell at a glance what it was intended to be. People in this thread have hyped 5E being rules-light, but a DM needs some idea of a creature descriptively to run with that, and many monsters don't have that. If I'm DMing, it's a lot easier to decide how I want bat blindsight to work, because I can assume D&D bats are like real world bats and I'll have a framework to work from, but how the heck am I supposed to do that for a black pudding? I have no idea what black pudding blindsight is supposed to be conveying, so I have no idea what the intent is for it interacting with its environment, and it's a big ask asking me to decide on the fly e.g. if peppermint oil confuses its senses because its blindsight partially relies on smell.
Another direction WOTC could have taken and generally didn't was to include enough descriptive text for every blindsight monster so that I could hazard a guess as to their intent. Or they could offer me guidance in the form of "here are various interpretations of blindsight, and we have included a synopsis of how each interpretation impacts game balance, so you can reasonably pick one based on how challenging you want your blindsight creatures to be".
But we have what we have. So 5E Blindsight can be based on anything at all, including e.g. emitting divination magic that goes through walls but bounces off creatures, and the answer to questions like "can it go through total cover?" is "ask your DM". If you are a DM and all you want to do is run a module the way WOTC intended, without mucking up game balance, all you can do is guess and hope your players survive. And you'll need to keep copious notes, because your players will expect a given creature's blindsight to be consistent - it should generally behave the same way the next time they encounter one.
And yes, the 4e way was lame, because, as many things with 4e, it restricted imagination and created a formal boardgame instead of a true roleplaying game where almost everything can happen.
What the 4e way did is clearly tell you what the ability did. You apparently object to rules that actually function. Just because a previous edition did something does not mean it was wrong (or right).
No, on 4e I object to rules that strongly restrict the possibilities and the imagination of the DM. For example, the 4e rules do not even properly account for echolocation, even if you use what you have put in this post. Because I looked at my 4e MM, and the description is actually fairly different and certainly not that precise either: "Blindsight: A monster with blindsight can perceive creatures and objects within the stated number of squares, making Perception checks as normal. The creature automatically fails Perception checks to notice things outside the range of its blindsight. A monster with blindsight suffers no ill effects while blinded."
I was quoting Monster Vault, as that was what I had at hand. I agree that the MM version you quote above is poor quality. And yes, the rules I quoted do handle echolocation just fine. Echolocation does not go through walls. And clear rules don't limit the DM, because the DM can always just add custom traits to any monster so it behaves the way he wants it to work.
I'm sorry, but at this stage, I'm a bit tired of people slagging of 5e when in fact previous editions were not better, the official 4e description that I put above does not even speak about invisibility, obscurement, silence for echolocation, etc., and you trying to pass off another description as 4e makes it even worse. It's actually arguably worse than the 5e one. And 4e bats don't even have blindsight, which is a clear example of 4e oversimplifying things so that it fits in the neat little boxes that they created to box in our imagination. Which is why I'm always happy to remind people that 4e is generally considered one of the worst editions ever, whereas 5e is by a wide margin considered the best ever, seeing its huge popular success.
People are not criticizing 5e for being different from prior editions. They are criticizing it for bad rules. I have no problem with criticizing prior editions for their own bad rules, but a rule being bad does not depend on a different rule being bad, and it certainly doesn't depend on a different ruleset being superior as a group. How is it a problem to say "Overall, I prefer 5e, but in this particular case <insert previous edition> did a better job"?
Due to this discussion, I took a look through the Monster Manual for notable examples of creatures with Blindsight. Here is what I found:
Due to the Intellect Devourer: Detect Sentience https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/intellect-devourer Blindsight does not work through barriers. Otherwise its Blindsight would be 300 ft, not 60 ft (& blind beyond).
Why these 4? Each has details that help to define Blindsight. Also, each was released alongside the sense, being more likely to be in line with intent.
So, taken together:
Blindsight is line of effect (like vision), blocked by barriers (same as vision, except vision isn't blocked by clear barriers), ignores things that only affect vision (invisibility, visual illusions, darkness), and is sometimes limited by another non-codified sense.
I always imagined blindsight to be something like echo-location. The "monster" can use the ambient sounds to locate the origins of the sounds and imagine what type of thing makes that sound, and also understand a "room" by listening to the way the sound is reflected in the room. So while such a "monster" might be able to feel a wooden floor under their feet, they would also have an idea of how high the ceiling is, and about how long and wide the room is. They should know if the room is empty or is cluttered with much furniture. However, they would have difficulty locating closed doors and they would know almost nothing about anything on the other side of "that wall", even if it is within the effective range.
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As I quoted, echolocation does exist, but while echolocation is blindsight, blindsight doesn't have to be echolocation.
It seems the closest real-world analog would be thermal detection + proximity detection. Interestingly, neither of which can readily detect through barriers.
There are many options for what blindsight could be, which is why game systems that want to do a remotely serious job of modeling senses will either have multiple senses or a sense with an additional descriptor.
There are a lot of real world or similar to real world beasts with blindsight. It seems to be used as a catch all for senses other than sight that creatures can use to locate objects and creatures. Bats and killer whales have echolocation. Snakes can detect infrared radiation from heat. Sharks have an ability to sense electric fields. Most of these would probably be blocked by solid objects, but electric fields might not (although they would be blocked by metal).
Then there are creatures that seem to just have blindsight because they obviously need some sensory ability to function in combat, but it doesn't make sense for them to have eyes, like animated armor or violet fungus. In the former case, it seems to make the most sense that it's just magical sight. Since various divination spells are able to penetrate solid materials up to a certain thickness, it could be reasonable to assume such magical creatures are aware of your presence unless you are behind say thick stone or thin lead.
They don't as they don't take into account (for example) the effect of a silence spell. They are still incomplete, and I'm pretty sure that I could poke many more holes in there if I looked a bit deeper.
The basic rules for blindsight have no reason to take into account silence, since blindsight does not have a specified sense type. If a creature has blindsight of a type that will be affected by silence, it should have a trait saying so (which is what 5e does). The fact that the Bat writeup in 4e was bad is not relevant to whether the trait description itself is bad.
And I have shown to you that the 3e and 4e a rules were, if you look at them with the same level of criticism, "bad", so where does that leave you ?
With the impression that you're bringing up irrelevant issues? It doesn't matter if other editions also did things badly, because we're not criticizing 5e relative to other editions.
First, because it's not the case, as demonstrated here, and your version of "doing a job better" is extremely subjective, compared to YOUR preferences which are for a tight system, which does not exist anyway while still preserving a DM's freedom. This has been demonstrated time and time again, and is the design principle of 5e.
Nothing of the sort has been demonstrated. Having well-defined terminology merely aids communication; it has no effect on what the DM can do unless you also try to claim that that the DM is not allowed to use anything outside of that dictionary, which is not what I was claiming.
Clarity in rules does not harm DM freedom, and vagueness does not help. It just means that the DM knows what the authors were trying to say.
To each their own is what they are saying....you don't HAVE to memorize the rules or even read them (which is terrible advice I personally would never suggest to anyone) to play it well but you certainly can.
If you play a lax game its completely fine to not get into the nitty gritty of the rules and just let things slide.
If 5e was ONLY designed to be like this then we would have this medium level of crunch on combat features and other mechanical interactions. They would not need a Sage Advice Compendium as they would simply just say "hey you do what you want to do!"
We would not have long discussions for pages on intent and how people feel they should run it based on the perceived balance created by the designers of the game.
We would not have the designers of the game having hour long conversations on basic rules of the game and how RAI it is supposed to work.
5e exists in a realm that not many games go into which is it has a "rules-medium" approach that mixes those who go with crunch (4e folks) and those who like open form gaming (Dungeon World) and they are both drawn because the game offers something those rulesets do not inherently include.
This is why we find ourselves with situations like Blindsight....the designers state the rule do exactly what they say they do....so these things just work and its up to you as a DM to decide if that works for your group or not.
"Blindsight
A monster with blindsight can perceive its surroundings without relying on sight, within a specific radius.
Creatures without eyes, such as grimlocks and gray oozes, typically have this special sense, as do creatures with echolocation or heightened senses, such as bats and true dragons.
If a monster is naturally blind, it has a parenthetical note to this effect, indicating that the radius of its blindsight defines the maximum range of its perception."
Seeing as how they did not include much guidance beyond (they see but without eyes) it does not leave you much to work with other than what you can reasonable justify for the creature.
Just do what you feel works for the creature and it will likely be fine!
Because echolocation is ONE of the possible sources for blindsight (but certainly not the only one), omitting it (and its specificities) both limits the game and makes the description "bad" according to your own criterions.
No, you're failing to distinguish between clarity and completeness. Rules need to be clear, they do not need to be complete. Specific rules such as echolocution can be given in a monster writeup, given in a generic place if they're common enough to deserve it, or just noted in the creature description if there aren't particularly common situations that affect it, though it is helpful to at a minimum give the DM some descriptive information so they can rule sensibly in edge cases.
To each their own is what they are saying....you don't HAVE to memorize the rules or even read them (which is terrible advice I personally would never suggest to anyone) to play it well but you certainly can.
You can, but just note the words of the designers themselves and their clearly stated intention with this edition of the game: "None of those things have any bearing on what’s best about the game."
Again, "the best" is subjective, of course, and for others "the best" will be something else, but it gives a really clear picture of what they have in mind.
If you play a lax game its completely fine to not get into the nitty gritty of the rules and just let things slide.
No insults, please, playing as the rules intend you to is NOT running a lax game, that is clearly deprecatory.
If 5e was ONLY designed to be like this then we would have this medium level of crunch on combat features and other mechanical interactions. They would not need a Sage Advice Compendium as they would simply just say "hey you do what you want to do!"
And yes, the FIRST words of the SAC are: "A Dungeon Master adjudicates the game and determines whether to use an official ruling in play. The DM always has the final say on rules questions." And WotC consistently refuses to add more crunch to the game...
So yes, although the game can be played in other ways than the intention, which is great and certainly not wrong, once more, the game was NOT designed for people running a game based on heavy, complex and precise rulings.
We would not have long discussions for pages on intent and how people feel they should run it based on the perceived balance created by the designers of the game.
That is your feeling, and I completely, and totally disagree. For me, the intent is much more important than the details of the rules, and this is why the designers themselves placed it at the beginning of all their publication.
And understanding the intent also allows mature people to refrain their criticism to what is proper and reasonable instead of just accepting that the design intent being as it is, it is THEIR JOB to make it crunch heavy if it is what they enjoy. It is not what they have bought, that's all.
We would not have the designers of the game having hour long conversations on basic rules of the game and how RAI it is supposed to work.
It's interesting that in one sentence you say that we should not discuss intent and at the same time you are interested in RAI, which clearly shows the intent.
5e exists in a realm that not many games go into
And here, I again totally disagree. Most games actually are in this middle area. For example most of Chaosium games are in there except Runequest. If I look at the favourite games in the recent thread, a lot of them are in this "middle crunch" area. There are very few in the "extremely light" area (I think I'm the only one who has mentioned a diceless purely narrative game in there), and I think there are almost none in the "really crunchy" area except again for me mentioning Runequest, because Pathfinder is not in the list of possible choices.
which is it has a "rules-medium" approach that mixes those who go with crunch (4e folks) and those who like open form gaming (Dungeon World) and they are both drawn because the game offers something those rulesets do not inherently include.
And it's good that it's in this "middle" area, don't you think ? And I have absolutely NOTHING against people wanting to make it more crunchy in their own games. What I object to are people criticising it for being "medium-crunch" and saying that it's badly written against standards of "heavy crunch".
This is why we find ourselves with situations like Blindsight....the designers state the rule do exactly what they say they do....so these things just work and its up to you as a DM to decide if that works for your group or not.
Exactly, and I'm all up for the discussion, as long as people understand that the designers are not to blame for creating a medium-crunch game that is open ended to favor imagination rather than a heavy-crunch game that stifles it. I will even (as I've done a lot of time in the past) help them design various types of blindsight (who knows, I might even use some of the ideas in my games, not necessary technically, but if someone creates a very imaginative version of blindsight that works through walls, I might enjoy surprising my players with it). But as long as people acknowledge that it's not "bad design", "badly written" to have written the game the way it is (or at least not mandatorily, there are certainly a few areas - for example the use of the word "concealed" in the cover rules - where it could of course be improved).
"Blindsight
A monster with blindsight can perceive its surroundings without relying on sight, within a specific radius.
Creatures without eyes, such as grimlocks and gray oozes, typically have this special sense, as do creatures with echolocation or heightened senses, such as bats and true dragons.
If a monster is naturally blind, it has a parenthetical note to this effect, indicating that the radius of its blindsight defines the maximum range of its perception."
Seeing as how they did not include much guidance beyond (they see but without eyes) it does not leave you much to work with other than what you can reasonable justify for the creature.
Just do what you feel works for the creature and it will likely be fine!
Exactly, be imaginative, just picture in your mind what the creature should be able to do and how it will surprise and delight your players and you are more than halfway there.
No insult intended and I am not sure how you could even infer an insult from simply saying "if you are lax on rules'" as that is just simply stating the situation.
Overall 5e has rules if you want to use them and they interact in specific ways that attempt a balance of actions and effects. They go into this a lot on their design workshops with guys like Mike Mearls.
They have suggestions for creating "balanced" spells in the DMG and make suggestions on how not break the bounded accuracy of the game. They definitely support the idea of "Crunch if you want"
Lax is not an insult, it basically means ease or low effort. Basically, you prefer interpretive rules over rigid ones. That is perfectly valid, and excellent for fast narrative play.
The problem is, you are confusing crunch (the quantity and rigidity of rules) with clarity (how much you must rely upon one rule to understand another).
Blindsight suffers from a lack of clarity, by requiring the reader to search for examples that set its rough boundaries, as I did for a previous comment.
Lax is not an insult, it basically means ease or low effort. Basically, you prefer interpretive rules over rigid ones. That is perfectly valid, and excellent for fast narrative play.
The problem is, you are confusing crunch (the quantity and rigidity of rules) with clarity (how much you must rely upon one rule to understand another).
Blindsight suffers from a lack of clarity, by requiring the reader to search for examples that set its rough boundaries, as I did for a previous comment.
Thats a fair point....I usually associate the two too much likely.
Clarity of rules does not necessarily need crunch...but it does seem to go that way when you look at systems with more clear explanations of how things work (PF2e for example).
How would you word it to be more clear but still have some flex for different creature types?
How would you word it to be more clear but still have some flex for different creature types?
Just add the sentence which you already complained about above? The way you add flex for different creature types is by just adding additional traits for creatures whose senses work in unusual ways, such as "Echolocation. The bat can’t use its blindsight while deafened." (which is a bit flawed but that's off topic).
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If WotC doubled the description of every rule that's ever had a thread on this forum I wonder who'd be able to afford the book.
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Most of the rules in 5e are fine, but some cases, such as the perception rules, are just a gigantic mess.
I do think stealth, hiding, senses (all of them), and how invisibility applies to these could have used an extra section in a book somewhere. Every DM just kind of wings these for better or worse, often worse.
I didn't say everyone was pedants. Just that there's more than enough of them to be worth the extra verbiage. As for your second point, blindsight is a specific thing, it should behave in a consistent manner. If you want your monster to see through walls, give it a trait that says it can.
For one, sensing via vibration through walls fits better with Tremorsense.
For another, while Truesight can allow sight into the ethereal plane, even it cannot go through walls.
Yet again though, that you have to ask about Blindsight seeing through walls in some cases (in other words, depending on extra abilities) is further evidence that it is poorly written.
I honestly think they should have subtyped Blindsight so you could easily tell at a glance what it was intended to be. People in this thread have hyped 5E being rules-light, but a DM needs some idea of a creature descriptively to run with that, and many monsters don't have that. If I'm DMing, it's a lot easier to decide how I want bat blindsight to work, because I can assume D&D bats are like real world bats and I'll have a framework to work from, but how the heck am I supposed to do that for a black pudding? I have no idea what black pudding blindsight is supposed to be conveying, so I have no idea what the intent is for it interacting with its environment, and it's a big ask asking me to decide on the fly e.g. if peppermint oil confuses its senses because its blindsight partially relies on smell.
Another direction WOTC could have taken and generally didn't was to include enough descriptive text for every blindsight monster so that I could hazard a guess as to their intent. Or they could offer me guidance in the form of "here are various interpretations of blindsight, and we have included a synopsis of how each interpretation impacts game balance, so you can reasonably pick one based on how challenging you want your blindsight creatures to be".
But we have what we have. So 5E Blindsight can be based on anything at all, including e.g. emitting divination magic that goes through walls but bounces off creatures, and the answer to questions like "can it go through total cover?" is "ask your DM". If you are a DM and all you want to do is run a module the way WOTC intended, without mucking up game balance, all you can do is guess and hope your players survive. And you'll need to keep copious notes, because your players will expect a given creature's blindsight to be consistent - it should generally behave the same way the next time they encounter one.
You didn't say anything about 3e, you said something about 4e.
What the 4e way did is clearly tell you what the ability did. You apparently object to rules that actually function. Just because a previous edition did something does not mean it was wrong (or right).
I was quoting Monster Vault, as that was what I had at hand. I agree that the MM version you quote above is poor quality. And yes, the rules I quoted do handle echolocation just fine. Echolocation does not go through walls. And clear rules don't limit the DM, because the DM can always just add custom traits to any monster so it behaves the way he wants it to work.
People are not criticizing 5e for being different from prior editions. They are criticizing it for bad rules. I have no problem with criticizing prior editions for their own bad rules, but a rule being bad does not depend on a different rule being bad, and it certainly doesn't depend on a different ruleset being superior as a group. How is it a problem to say "Overall, I prefer 5e, but in this particular case <insert previous edition> did a better job"?
Due to this discussion, I took a look through the Monster Manual for notable examples of creatures with Blindsight. Here is what I found:
Due to the Intellect Devourer: Detect Sentience https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/intellect-devourer Blindsight does not work through barriers. Otherwise its Blindsight would be 300 ft, not 60 ft (& blind beyond).
Due to the Bat: Echolocation https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/bat Blindsight can be limited to sound.
Due to the Grimlock: Blind Senses https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/grimlock it can also be limited by smell.
Due to the Tarrasque https://www.dndbeyond.com/monsters/tarrasque Blindsight can be a long range.
Why these 4? Each has details that help to define Blindsight. Also, each was released alongside the sense, being more likely to be in line with intent.
So, taken together:
Blindsight is line of effect (like vision), blocked by barriers (same as vision, except vision isn't blocked by clear barriers), ignores things that only affect vision (invisibility, visual illusions, darkness), and is sometimes limited by another non-codified sense.
I always imagined blindsight to be something like echo-location. The "monster" can use the ambient sounds to locate the origins of the sounds and imagine what type of thing makes that sound, and also understand a "room" by listening to the way the sound is reflected in the room. So while such a "monster" might be able to feel a wooden floor under their feet, they would also have an idea of how high the ceiling is, and about how long and wide the room is. They should know if the room is empty or is cluttered with much furniture. However, they would have difficulty locating closed doors and they would know almost nothing about anything on the other side of "that wall", even if it is within the effective range.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt
As I quoted, echolocation does exist, but while echolocation is blindsight, blindsight doesn't have to be echolocation.
It seems the closest real-world analog would be thermal detection + proximity detection. Interestingly, neither of which can readily detect through barriers.
There are many options for what blindsight could be, which is why game systems that want to do a remotely serious job of modeling senses will either have multiple senses or a sense with an additional descriptor.
There are a lot of real world or similar to real world beasts with blindsight. It seems to be used as a catch all for senses other than sight that creatures can use to locate objects and creatures. Bats and killer whales have echolocation. Snakes can detect infrared radiation from heat. Sharks have an ability to sense electric fields. Most of these would probably be blocked by solid objects, but electric fields might not (although they would be blocked by metal).
Then there are creatures that seem to just have blindsight because they obviously need some sensory ability to function in combat, but it doesn't make sense for them to have eyes, like animated armor or violet fungus. In the former case, it seems to make the most sense that it's just magical sight. Since various divination spells are able to penetrate solid materials up to a certain thickness, it could be reasonable to assume such magical creatures are aware of your presence unless you are behind say thick stone or thin lead.
The basic rules for blindsight have no reason to take into account silence, since blindsight does not have a specified sense type. If a creature has blindsight of a type that will be affected by silence, it should have a trait saying so (which is what 5e does). The fact that the Bat writeup in 4e was bad is not relevant to whether the trait description itself is bad.
With the impression that you're bringing up irrelevant issues? It doesn't matter if other editions also did things badly, because we're not criticizing 5e relative to other editions.
Nothing of the sort has been demonstrated. Having well-defined terminology merely aids communication; it has no effect on what the DM can do unless you also try to claim that that the DM is not allowed to use anything outside of that dictionary, which is not what I was claiming.
Clarity in rules does not harm DM freedom, and vagueness does not help. It just means that the DM knows what the authors were trying to say.
To each their own is what they are saying....you don't HAVE to memorize the rules or even read them (which is terrible advice I personally would never suggest to anyone) to play it well but you certainly can.
If you play a lax game its completely fine to not get into the nitty gritty of the rules and just let things slide.
If 5e was ONLY designed to be like this then we would have this medium level of crunch on combat features and other mechanical interactions. They would not need a Sage Advice Compendium as they would simply just say "hey you do what you want to do!"
We would not have long discussions for pages on intent and how people feel they should run it based on the perceived balance created by the designers of the game.
We would not have the designers of the game having hour long conversations on basic rules of the game and how RAI it is supposed to work.
5e exists in a realm that not many games go into which is it has a "rules-medium" approach that mixes those who go with crunch (4e folks) and those who like open form gaming (Dungeon World) and they are both drawn because the game offers something those rulesets do not inherently include.
This is why we find ourselves with situations like Blindsight....the designers state the rule do exactly what they say they do....so these things just work and its up to you as a DM to decide if that works for your group or not.
"Blindsight
A monster with blindsight can perceive its surroundings without relying on sight, within a specific radius.
Creatures without eyes, such as grimlocks and gray oozes, typically have this special sense, as do creatures with echolocation or heightened senses, such as bats and true dragons.
If a monster is naturally blind, it has a parenthetical note to this effect, indicating that the radius of its blindsight defines the maximum range of its perception."
Seeing as how they did not include much guidance beyond (they see but without eyes) it does not leave you much to work with other than what you can reasonable justify for the creature.
Just do what you feel works for the creature and it will likely be fine!
No, you're failing to distinguish between clarity and completeness. Rules need to be clear, they do not need to be complete. Specific rules such as echolocution can be given in a monster writeup, given in a generic place if they're common enough to deserve it, or just noted in the creature description if there aren't particularly common situations that affect it, though it is helpful to at a minimum give the DM some descriptive information so they can rule sensibly in edge cases.
No insult intended and I am not sure how you could even infer an insult from simply saying "if you are lax on rules'" as that is just simply stating the situation.
Overall 5e has rules if you want to use them and they interact in specific ways that attempt a balance of actions and effects. They go into this a lot on their design workshops with guys like Mike Mearls.
They have suggestions for creating "balanced" spells in the DMG and make suggestions on how not break the bounded accuracy of the game. They definitely support the idea of "Crunch if you want"
Lax is not an insult, it basically means ease or low effort. Basically, you prefer interpretive rules over rigid ones. That is perfectly valid, and excellent for fast narrative play.
The problem is, you are confusing crunch (the quantity and rigidity of rules) with clarity (how much you must rely upon one rule to understand another).
Blindsight suffers from a lack of clarity, by requiring the reader to search for examples that set its rough boundaries, as I did for a previous comment.
Thats a fair point....I usually associate the two too much likely.
Clarity of rules does not necessarily need crunch...but it does seem to go that way when you look at systems with more clear explanations of how things work (PF2e for example).
How would you word it to be more clear but still have some flex for different creature types?
Just add the sentence which you already complained about above? The way you add flex for different creature types is by just adding additional traits for creatures whose senses work in unusual ways, such as "Echolocation. The bat can’t use its blindsight while deafened." (which is a bit flawed but that's off topic).