Board Thread:Midian Q&A/@comment-24302820-20151007205135/@comment-24302820-20151023060701

Welcome back. It's always good to get your input on these things.

By 'secondary confirmation roll' do you mean that whatever die was rolled--to attack, for example--would need to be made twice? Two mandatory successes are pretty much the same as a -5 (overall, when looking at the total graph of all outcomes) compared to the effective -3 from taking the worst of two rolls (disadvantage in D&D terms from 5e, maybe 4e, I don't remember). Stacking this onto a -20 penalty is pretty harsh, but that is effective in making blindness something to fear. It severely hampers even the most effective characters, and cripples almost everyone. Blindness is like that.

Mitigating blindness, for someone blind since birth, or otherwise having come to grips with long-term sightlessness, is pretty simple. The blindfighting skill covers that rather well, I believe, without us needing to further complicate things mechanically.

How well would your proposal play at the table? Would either a stiff penalty (-20) or a double-success roll be sufficient? Doing both combines a math step with an additional roll, slowing game play. Admittedly, it's not slowed by much.

An argument in favour of both a -20 and confirmation roll is that being blind is substantially more problematic than not seeing your target. This is also a point in favour of leaving the mechanics of transparency. That is, it's one thing to swing at the space where you are assuming a body is, and another thing entirely to not be able to see what you are doing.

Thank you for weighing in on this topic.