Ive been wanting to make a blind pc kind of like a old shaman or medicine man of sorts. I want to make the race either an Orc or half Orc. I am very unsure of how I would go about say having blind sight due to being born blind and you have learned how to get around through unusual means ie: blind stick or other senses. Im leaning towards nature cleric, druid or maybe even sorcer some how.
So...the thing about making a blind hero is most people do not want to make a blind hero, they just want to have the flavor without the penalty of being blind. First I would consider how much of a deficit you think you can handle and discuss it with your GM. I would ask to replace vision with blindsight with a 10' or 15' radius and maybe Keen Hearing. It will still hamper your character with all the penalties from blindness outside of that and you will be heavily reliant on your group to look out for you. Grab Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster under wizard and summon a helping familiar to guide you around. Using the familiar's senses takes an action, so it does not substitute and undermine the build.
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IMHO, Earthdawn is still the best fantasy realm, Shadowrun is the best Sci-Fi realm, and Dark Sun is the best D&D realm.
There is a blindsight fighting style now that gives you a 10 foot radius. If you’re looking for a way to have sight beyond that without Magic or high level class features, then what you really are asking for is not playing a blind character.
As to what you can expect to be granted at character creation in exchange for blindness? Probably anything from “nothing” to a starting feat, I’d wager.
+1 for not making a "fake blind" character. +1 for the Blind Fighting Fighting Style as a work around.
There are several threads on why this is a controversial idea, but if you decide to go with it anyway make sure you put lots of thought into how it may impact your fellow players/DM. A real disability in a mechanics driven game can become a significant burden on the group, and many of the cool tactics that you might employ, like Blindsight + Eversmoking Bottle/Darkness will directly disrupt your allies, so you won't have many opportunities to shine the way you may be hoping.
A lot is going to depend on what role you wish to fill in a party. It looks like you're looking for a support/healer type, and your ideas on that are fine. You're going to have problems targeting anything outside of hearing range, and my DM screen tells me that combat is pretty noisy, it will drown out anything to a minimum range of 100 feet, so you will need someone or something to guide you. A familiar, one of the other player characters, or a Seeing Eye Dog. Clerics make awesome support/healers, that's what they're designed for. Druids can do so as well, if perhaps not as well. Party composition matters a lot. If they already have a Cleric or Druid you'll want something else. Bards make awesome support characters and they do have some ability to heal, so you can imagine your wise old Shaman telling engaging stories or singing songs about their ancestors that magically do the things those songs and stories are about. I love the idea of casting Vicious Mockery and using Orcish to cast the spell, so that my cussing someone out in Orcish does actual damage.
If the DM lets you have Blindsight, of whatever range, that's great! Enjoy your character, whatever class you choose. I don't like the idea much, as Blindsight for a player character is far too close to Daredevil's Radar-Sense. D&D translates rather poorly into the superhero genre. Giving people superpowers so they can play a character concept that allows them to overcome their condition with little penalty is disrespectful to the people in the real world who have the same problems. What wouldn't a blind person give to be able to have blindsight?
Ive been wanting to make a blind pc kind of like a old shaman or medicine man of sorts. I want to make the race either an Orc or half Orc. I am very unsure of how I would go about say having blind sight due to being born blind and you have learned how to get around through unusual means ie: blind stick or other senses. Im leaning towards nature cleric, druid or maybe even sorcer some how.
If you stick to the rules, it's very difficult simply because a lot of the things characters can do state explicitly that you do them against a creature that you can see. Not perceive, but see. The two most obvious mechanics to compensate are Blindsight, but that requires the DM altering the rules to let you have it, and to me it feels like you're not actually building a blind character, you're building Daredevil. The other option is using Find Familiar, but keep in mind that seeing & hearing through your Familiar requires your action, so unless you're spending every turn casting Healing Word or tossing out Bardic Inspiration, you won't get to do much in combat.
Ive been wanting to make a blind pc kind of like a old shaman or medicine man of sorts. I want to make the race either an Orc or half Orc. I am very unsure of how I would go about say having blind sight due to being born blind and you have learned how to get around through unusual means ie: blind stick or other senses. Im leaning towards nature cleric, druid or maybe even sorcer some how.
Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see. So that you can function as well as possible while not Wild Shaped, you need the Blind Fighting fighting style, so probably Fighter 1/Druid 19, and you need a real Find Familiar familiar that doesn't cost you a Wild Shape. There are many ways to accomplish that, including having an artificer in the party with Spellwrought Tattoo infusions, so just make sure you do it. You'll still have the crippling deficit of 10 foot range on most of your spells, but it's the least bad option I can think of.
Ive been wanting to make a blind pc kind of like a old shaman or medicine man of sorts. I want to make the race either an Orc or half Orc. I am very unsure of how I would go about say having blind sight due to being born blind and you have learned how to get around through unusual means ie: blind stick or other senses. Im leaning towards nature cleric, druid or maybe even sorcer some how.
Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see. So that you can function as well as possible while not Wild Shaped, you need the Blind Fighting fighting style, so probably Fighter 1/Druid 19, and you need a real Find Familiar familiar that doesn't cost you a Wild Shape. There are many ways to accomplish that, including having an artificer in the party with Spellwrought Tattoo infusions, so just make sure you do it. You'll still have the crippling deficit of 10 foot range on most of your spells, but it's the least bad option I can think of.
Quindraco, you beat me to it. I was going to suggest the same thing with Moon Druid. Pick up blind fighting as multiclass fighter or at level 4 feat. It’s a delay, but only for a few levels when not wild shaped.
Guidance can help with skill checks if the DM has you roll with disadvantage. And primal savagery uses your spell attack modifier which will probably be your highest bonus to overcome disadvantage until you get blind sight. And thunderclap, primal savagery don’t require you to see the target. I’m sure some other spells, buff, heals, etc. can round out the character for the times wildshape is not up, without the “that you can see” rider in the description.
Edit: I wonder if you could convince the DM to allow the Darkvision spell to work as it says “You touch a willing creature to grant it the ability to see in the dark. For the duration, that creature has darkvision out to a range of 60 feet.“
Kind of cheesy I know, since I would assume it’s just meant to enhance vision you already have.
Edit 2: And take Perception as a skill. It keys off WIS and maybe the DM would let you roll perception to see if you can discern by sound where enemies are for AOE’s like Faerie Fire that you can cast. It, and other spells, don’t say you have to see the point of origin.
Do you want your character to be blind, or do you want them to be technically blind but supernatural abilities mean that they basically are not blind?
There are lots of places for fantastic blind characters in a DnD game, but they are rarely adventurers.
The blind wizard who has learned from brail-like ancient texts and has adapted their spells, but functions more as a scholar and researcher than adventurer
The blind fighter who lost his sight to a black dragon's acid breath, and now teaches pupils blindfighting
The blind druid who dwells in a feywild glade, communing with plants in a way most others couldn't perceive
All of these (and other limitless options) make for great characters. But they work because the character lives a life that takes into account their lack of sight, and which doesn't hinder them because they have adapted their surroundings.
If you want to run a PC who represents a blind person who has Daredevil style abilities, I'd simply ask the DM to consider it a roleplay element and allow the character to have it from the beginning of the game, treating them as though they can see and applying all rules normally. This doesn't represent a real blind person, but then, barbarians don't represent real people, and nor do wizards, or tieflings, or any of the rest of it. Talk to your DM.
"Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see." If you are blind, how do you see creatures you want to turn into?
"Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see." If you are blind, how do you see creatures you want to turn into?
One way is to use wild shape to summon a familiar, and look through the familiar's eyes - e.g. into a mirror.
"Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see." If you are blind, how do you see creatures you want to turn into?
One way is to use wild shape to summon a familiar, and look through the familiar's eyes - e.g. into a mirror.
I could also see, no pun intended, that a DM might allow, if as a child you grew up with a common house cat, you are so familiar with it that when you become a Druid you could wildshape into a cat and then see other things you could then turn into, etc. Not RAW as it does say you can wildshape into creatures you see. And quindraco’s idea is better.
I thought Shakäste from Critical Role was blind and used his familiar to see, but I may be mistaken on that. You can have a familiar that allows for that. As a druid, you might have an animal companion that operates in some capacity as a seeing-eye pet.
I can appreciate the community for trying to figure out a workaround to get this to happen. You guys are truly great and are a wonder for helping somebody to have fun.
But as a player or GM I would be annoyed.
As a player because somebody in the party INTENTIONALLY made themselves half as useful as a regular PC. Being blind is crippling. Simply moving about in an unfamiliar area is arduous. They would increase the danger or difficulty of almost every trap or enemy encounter. And why? Because they want to. They WANT to make things harder for everybody. That's selfish.
As a GM because I have to choose whether to keep encounters at the same difficulty or change them so I don't throw out a TPK every other session. You have to either moderate or trust the selfish player that they will not meta when giving descriptions. "There are three humanoids 40 feet away, two of them are armored, and one is wearing robes and carrying a skull topped staff." changes to "You think there might be three creatures ahead."
To be clear I'm NOT making statements against real life blind people. I have worked with kids that are blind and they are awesome beyond belief.
The problem, as I see it, yes, I'm making a small joke, is that one of the first things we are told is that the character was born blind. You can't wildshape into something you have never seen before. The original poster hasn't come back, so I can't ask if they would be willing to modify things. They want to play an Orc or Half-Orc Shaman or Medicine Man of sorts. The obvious choice would be some kind of Barbarian, but I don't know which myself. I didn't mention it because the original post didn't, and I was focused on their desire to play Daredevil the Orcish Shaman.
I guess the spirits can teach you class abilities and spells, but that only covers the verbal part and maybe the somatic, so if someone doesn't put the right material component into your hands, how do you cast the spell? Not all components can be distinguished just by touch.
In the real world, being blind is very hard and takes considerable accommodations. They had to develop Braille, for example before blind people could read, and they have to put up Braille on signs in public places, provide Braille documents, and so on. Coins can be a problem, and in the D&D rules they all are the same general size and weight, so they would all have to be shaped differently. Not even Daredevil can get around a lot of the problems blind people have, that's one of his weaknesses. Another is that his heightened senses can be overloaded. You'd need to have rules covering that, and those, along with Daredevil, belong in superhero games.
…doesn't hinder them because they have adapted their surroundings.
Agreed. A preindustrial society is an extremely dangerous place. With no smooth footpaths and pedestrian crossings, just getting from one side of town to the other is a major undertaking. Given all the dangers to children, such a character is unlikely to have survived into adulthood, unless their family can afford to pay for helpers to be with the character constantly. And if this is the case, the family probably has a dim view of the blind character deciding to be an adventurer.
Even with a helper, a blind character has low-to-zero chance of negotiating forest or scrub, let alone the rubble-strewn floors in a dungeon. Movement in combat is going to be impossible on anything other than smooth floors.
I can understand the problems of blindness in a character. At the same time, mechanically 5E doesn’t really put a lot of barriers in the way. Even with invisibility, PC’s and monsters basically know what square you are in, they just have disadvantage to attacking an invisible opponent. Same for blindness. The blinded condition has restrictions but basically you know where your targets are, I know it’s not realistic and a DM might have issues with it But by RAW there are some work arounds, like I mentioned earlier, spells that don’t have the “that you can see” rider.
If this is what the player wants to do, I wouldn’t get rid of all obstacles, but if they can wildshape and see, they are good. If they can’t then the suffer the penalties. If they get blind fighting, it will minimize it some. As long as the DM and other players are cool with it, go for it.
Blinded
A blinded creature can't see and automatically fails any ability check that requires sight.
Attack rolls against the creature have advantage, and the creature's attack rolls have disadvantage.
By the way, if I recall correctly, back in 1E AD&D, one of the “slaver” modules (I think it was an A something) had a enemy, Icor I think his name was, that was blind and had his eyes covered up. And was one hell of a fight. So it’s not unheard of. Of course this wasn’t a PC.
I can understand the problems of blindness in a character. At the same time, mechanically 5E doesn’t really put a lot of barriers in the way. Even with invisibility, PC’s and monsters basically know what square you are in, they just have disadvantage to attacking an invisible opponent. Same for blindness. The blinded condition has restrictions but basically you know where your targets are, I know it’s not realistic and a DM might have issues with it But by RAW there are some work arounds, like I mentioned earlier, spells that don’t have the “that you can see” rider.
The difficulties with playing a permanently blind character are not mainly related to combat. In combat, Blindfighting or shapeshifting might be a work around. But there are other far more difficult issues which can only be worked around by allowing the character to 'see' using another sense:
Unless the DM decides everyone across the planes uses a form of Braille, the character cannot read
When encountering other creatures, the blind character doesn't know who or what they are
The character cannot assess colour
The character cannot navigate a town and find places that they want to go unless they are completely familiar with it
The character has no way to judge distances to and from a place, e.g. how far away that mountain is, unless they are within touching distance
When describing anything, the standard way to do this is to describe what the characters see, hear and smell. This may need to be modified to take into account that one character cannot see.
Puzzles and traps that rely on sight to solve/avoid are things that the blind character cannot participate in
As I said above, if you want to run a blind character who can actually see everything (e.g. Daredevil) then you can do so just by saying "Their echo location is so good that they effectively see everything" but in doing so, the character actually gains a major advantage as they are no longer affected by things that would ordinarily be hindrances, and you aren't playing a blind character anyway.
The question is: can I build an effective blind character? And the answer (as far as I can see it, and I stand to be corrected) is yes, but only if you give them something that means that they are not actually blind.
I would allow a player to run a blind character if they wanted to, but I'd give them a Seeing Eye Familiar, or a magical tattoo that gives them sight, bionic eyes, or some other form of boon that makes their adventuring lifestyle possible. Technically they were blind once, but now they can see. Giving that character Blind Fighting or such to demonstrate skills that they had to learn in the past would add some depth.
While, like many others, I strongly suggest AGAINST this in almost every group.. Imo you need to ask everyone in the group, preferably anonymously so no one feels forced to answer something, and also make sure you don't get upset if anyone is against it. It WILL affect everyones playstyle A LOT. That said..
There's a feat to take any weapon style which let's you take the blind fighting style for 10' blind sense. This allows you to at least walk around without falling.
The find familiar spell route is somewhat cool, still limiting, but cool. Even born blind you could learn how to cast the spell, then having a familiar to see through.
The druid concept, is interesting for roleplay in one sense because I think the concept of a character that spends as much time as an animal as possible is kinda interesting. It still requires two feats, or multiclass, to work. I'd argue against the multiclass because the level 20 capstone is what enables 24/7 wildshape.
Another thing to consider is the warlock. It also makes for a cool concept where you basically swear yourself to another being, for the gift of sight. Pick the invocation that grants you darkvision, clearly swearing yourself to this creature grants you sight, even if normally darkvision is just supposed to enhance normal sight. You paid a high prize after all.
This way, you can be born blind and still see, even better than most.
Preferably you'd also take the rest of the invocations that enhance sight.
Now who's laughing.
Oh, and curse people with blindness for bonus story points!
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Ive been wanting to make a blind pc kind of like a old shaman or medicine man of sorts. I want to make the race either an Orc or half Orc. I am very unsure of how I would go about say having blind sight due to being born blind and you have learned how to get around through unusual means ie: blind stick or other senses. Im leaning towards nature cleric, druid or maybe even sorcer some how.
So...the thing about making a blind hero is most people do not want to make a blind hero, they just want to have the flavor without the penalty of being blind. First I would consider how much of a deficit you think you can handle and discuss it with your GM. I would ask to replace vision with blindsight with a 10' or 15' radius and maybe Keen Hearing. It will still hamper your character with all the penalties from blindness outside of that and you will be heavily reliant on your group to look out for you. Grab Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster under wizard and summon a helping familiar to guide you around. Using the familiar's senses takes an action, so it does not substitute and undermine the build.
IMHO, Earthdawn is still the best fantasy realm, Shadowrun is the best Sci-Fi realm, and Dark Sun is the best D&D realm.
There is a blindsight fighting style now that gives you a 10 foot radius. If you’re looking for a way to have sight beyond that without Magic or high level class features, then what you really are asking for is not playing a blind character.
As to what you can expect to be granted at character creation in exchange for blindness? Probably anything from “nothing” to a starting feat, I’d wager.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
+1 for not making a "fake blind" character.
+1 for the Blind Fighting Fighting Style as a work around.
There are several threads on why this is a controversial idea, but if you decide to go with it anyway make sure you put lots of thought into how it may impact your fellow players/DM. A real disability in a mechanics driven game can become a significant burden on the group, and many of the cool tactics that you might employ, like Blindsight + Eversmoking Bottle/Darkness will directly disrupt your allies, so you won't have many opportunities to shine the way you may be hoping.
A lot is going to depend on what role you wish to fill in a party. It looks like you're looking for a support/healer type, and your ideas on that are fine. You're going to have problems targeting anything outside of hearing range, and my DM screen tells me that combat is pretty noisy, it will drown out anything to a minimum range of 100 feet, so you will need someone or something to guide you. A familiar, one of the other player characters, or a Seeing Eye Dog. Clerics make awesome support/healers, that's what they're designed for. Druids can do so as well, if perhaps not as well. Party composition matters a lot. If they already have a Cleric or Druid you'll want something else. Bards make awesome support characters and they do have some ability to heal, so you can imagine your wise old Shaman telling engaging stories or singing songs about their ancestors that magically do the things those songs and stories are about. I love the idea of casting Vicious Mockery and using Orcish to cast the spell, so that my cussing someone out in Orcish does actual damage.
If the DM lets you have Blindsight, of whatever range, that's great! Enjoy your character, whatever class you choose. I don't like the idea much, as Blindsight for a player character is far too close to Daredevil's Radar-Sense. D&D translates rather poorly into the superhero genre. Giving people superpowers so they can play a character concept that allows them to overcome their condition with little penalty is disrespectful to the people in the real world who have the same problems. What wouldn't a blind person give to be able to have blindsight?
<Insert clever signature here>
If you stick to the rules, it's very difficult simply because a lot of the things characters can do state explicitly that you do them against a creature that you can see. Not perceive, but see. The two most obvious mechanics to compensate are Blindsight, but that requires the DM altering the rules to let you have it, and to me it feels like you're not actually building a blind character, you're building Daredevil. The other option is using Find Familiar, but keep in mind that seeing & hearing through your Familiar requires your action, so unless you're spending every turn casting Healing Word or tossing out Bardic Inspiration, you won't get to do much in combat.
It's selfishly crippling to your party. Don't do it.
Even if you think it's super cool, it is not.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see. So that you can function as well as possible while not Wild Shaped, you need the Blind Fighting fighting style, so probably Fighter 1/Druid 19, and you need a real Find Familiar familiar that doesn't cost you a Wild Shape. There are many ways to accomplish that, including having an artificer in the party with Spellwrought Tattoo infusions, so just make sure you do it. You'll still have the crippling deficit of 10 foot range on most of your spells, but it's the least bad option I can think of.
Quindraco, you beat me to it. I was going to suggest the same thing with Moon Druid. Pick up blind fighting as multiclass fighter or at level 4 feat. It’s a delay, but only for a few levels when not wild shaped.
Guidance can help with skill checks if the DM has you roll with disadvantage. And primal savagery uses your spell attack modifier which will probably be your highest bonus to overcome disadvantage until you get blind sight. And thunderclap, primal savagery don’t require you to see the target. I’m sure some other spells, buff, heals, etc. can round out the character for the times wildshape is not up, without the “that you can see” rider in the description.
Edit: I wonder if you could convince the DM to allow the Darkvision spell to work as it says “You touch a willing creature to grant it the ability to see in the dark. For the duration, that creature has darkvision out to a range of 60 feet.“
Kind of cheesy I know, since I would assume it’s just meant to enhance vision you already have.
Edit 2: And take Perception as a skill. It keys off WIS and maybe the DM would let you roll perception to see if you can discern by sound where enemies are for AOE’s like Faerie Fire that you can cast. It, and other spells, don’t say you have to see the point of origin.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
Do you want your character to be blind, or do you want them to be technically blind but supernatural abilities mean that they basically are not blind?
There are lots of places for fantastic blind characters in a DnD game, but they are rarely adventurers.
All of these (and other limitless options) make for great characters. But they work because the character lives a life that takes into account their lack of sight, and which doesn't hinder them because they have adapted their surroundings.
If you want to run a PC who represents a blind person who has Daredevil style abilities, I'd simply ask the DM to consider it a roleplay element and allow the character to have it from the beginning of the game, treating them as though they can see and applying all rules normally. This doesn't represent a real blind person, but then, barbarians don't represent real people, and nor do wizards, or tieflings, or any of the rest of it. Talk to your DM.
"Moon Druid is the way to go here, so you can Wild Shape into a creature that can see." If you are blind, how do you see creatures you want to turn into?
<Insert clever signature here>
One way is to use wild shape to summon a familiar, and look through the familiar's eyes - e.g. into a mirror.
I could also see, no pun intended, that a DM might allow, if as a child you grew up with a common house cat, you are so familiar with it that when you become a Druid you could wildshape into a cat and then see other things you could then turn into, etc. Not RAW as it does say you can wildshape into creatures you see. And quindraco’s idea is better.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
I thought Shakäste from Critical Role was blind and used his familiar to see, but I may be mistaken on that.
You can have a familiar that allows for that.
As a druid, you might have an animal companion that operates in some capacity as a seeing-eye pet.
I can appreciate the community for trying to figure out a workaround to get this to happen. You guys are truly great and are a wonder for helping somebody to have fun.
But as a player or GM I would be annoyed.
As a player because somebody in the party INTENTIONALLY made themselves half as useful as a regular PC. Being blind is crippling. Simply moving about in an unfamiliar area is arduous. They would increase the danger or difficulty of almost every trap or enemy encounter. And why? Because they want to. They WANT to make things harder for everybody. That's selfish.
As a GM because I have to choose whether to keep encounters at the same difficulty or change them so I don't throw out a TPK every other session. You have to either moderate or trust the selfish player that they will not meta when giving descriptions. "There are three humanoids 40 feet away, two of them are armored, and one is wearing robes and carrying a skull topped staff." changes to "You think there might be three creatures ahead."
To be clear I'm NOT making statements against real life blind people. I have worked with kids that are blind and they are awesome beyond belief.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
The problem, as I see it, yes, I'm making a small joke, is that one of the first things we are told is that the character was born blind. You can't wildshape into something you have never seen before. The original poster hasn't come back, so I can't ask if they would be willing to modify things. They want to play an Orc or Half-Orc Shaman or Medicine Man of sorts. The obvious choice would be some kind of Barbarian, but I don't know which myself. I didn't mention it because the original post didn't, and I was focused on their desire to play Daredevil the Orcish Shaman.
I guess the spirits can teach you class abilities and spells, but that only covers the verbal part and maybe the somatic, so if someone doesn't put the right material component into your hands, how do you cast the spell? Not all components can be distinguished just by touch.
In the real world, being blind is very hard and takes considerable accommodations. They had to develop Braille, for example before blind people could read, and they have to put up Braille on signs in public places, provide Braille documents, and so on. Coins can be a problem, and in the D&D rules they all are the same general size and weight, so they would all have to be shaped differently. Not even Daredevil can get around a lot of the problems blind people have, that's one of his weaknesses. Another is that his heightened senses can be overloaded. You'd need to have rules covering that, and those, along with Daredevil, belong in superhero games.
<Insert clever signature here>
Agreed. A preindustrial society is an extremely dangerous place. With no smooth footpaths and pedestrian crossings, just getting from one side of town to the other is a major undertaking. Given all the dangers to children, such a character is unlikely to have survived into adulthood, unless their family can afford to pay for helpers to be with the character constantly. And if this is the case, the family probably has a dim view of the blind character deciding to be an adventurer.
Even with a helper, a blind character has low-to-zero chance of negotiating forest or scrub, let alone the rubble-strewn floors in a dungeon. Movement in combat is going to be impossible on anything other than smooth floors.
I can understand the problems of blindness in a character. At the same time, mechanically 5E doesn’t really put a lot of barriers in the way. Even with invisibility, PC’s and monsters basically know what square you are in, they just have disadvantage to attacking an invisible opponent. Same for blindness. The blinded condition has restrictions but basically you know where your targets are, I know it’s not realistic and a DM might have issues with it But by RAW there are some work arounds, like I mentioned earlier, spells that don’t have the “that you can see” rider.
If this is what the player wants to do, I wouldn’t get rid of all obstacles, but if they can wildshape and see, they are good. If they can’t then the suffer the penalties. If they get blind fighting, it will minimize it some. As long as the DM and other players are cool with it, go for it.
By the way, if I recall correctly, back in 1E AD&D, one of the “slaver” modules (I think it was an A something) had a enemy, Icor I think his name was, that was blind and had his eyes covered up. And was one hell of a fight. So it’s not unheard of. Of course this wasn’t a PC.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
The difficulties with playing a permanently blind character are not mainly related to combat. In combat, Blindfighting or shapeshifting might be a work around. But there are other far more difficult issues which can only be worked around by allowing the character to 'see' using another sense:
As I said above, if you want to run a blind character who can actually see everything (e.g. Daredevil) then you can do so just by saying "Their echo location is so good that they effectively see everything" but in doing so, the character actually gains a major advantage as they are no longer affected by things that would ordinarily be hindrances, and you aren't playing a blind character anyway.
The question is: can I build an effective blind character? And the answer (as far as I can see it, and I stand to be corrected) is yes, but only if you give them something that means that they are not actually blind.
I would allow a player to run a blind character if they wanted to, but I'd give them a Seeing Eye Familiar, or a magical tattoo that gives them sight, bionic eyes, or some other form of boon that makes their adventuring lifestyle possible. Technically they were blind once, but now they can see. Giving that character Blind Fighting or such to demonstrate skills that they had to learn in the past would add some depth.
While, like many others, I strongly suggest AGAINST this in almost every group.. Imo you need to ask everyone in the group, preferably anonymously so no one feels forced to answer something, and also make sure you don't get upset if anyone is against it. It WILL affect everyones playstyle A LOT. That said..
There's a feat to take any weapon style which let's you take the blind fighting style for 10' blind sense. This allows you to at least walk around without falling.
The find familiar spell route is somewhat cool, still limiting, but cool. Even born blind you could learn how to cast the spell, then having a familiar to see through.
The druid concept, is interesting for roleplay in one sense because I think the concept of a character that spends as much time as an animal as possible is kinda interesting. It still requires two feats, or multiclass, to work. I'd argue against the multiclass because the level 20 capstone is what enables 24/7 wildshape.
Another thing to consider is the warlock. It also makes for a cool concept where you basically swear yourself to another being, for the gift of sight. Pick the invocation that grants you darkvision, clearly swearing yourself to this creature grants you sight, even if normally darkvision is just supposed to enhance normal sight. You paid a high prize after all.
This way, you can be born blind and still see, even better than most.
Preferably you'd also take the rest of the invocations that enhance sight.
Now who's laughing.
Oh, and curse people with blindness for bonus story points!