Thread by @Aclippinger, The utter MOOD of turning around in a Souls game and getting [...]

The utter MOOD of turning around in a Souls game and getting to see that you travelled about 4 miles

This kind of moment is a vibe I want to encourage in #DnD games. Oh no Alex don't thread again you stupid son of--

So anyway this is just gonna be me riffing momentarily on some D&D design stuff about vision as it exists as a mechanic and as a narrative tool and how it relates to exploration as a pillar. Just a few random things.

Most #DnD characters: I have 60 feet of darkvision

"How far can you see, like, normally?"

Player: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

This came up as a point of question/contention in my ToA campaign. The players climb up the high plateau of Mbala and the text says they can see the Heart of Ubtao, which is at a conservative estimate some 100 miles away. It completely broke their immersion.

I actually dipped into how far people can see because I was curious. Because of the curvature of the earth, we can see about 3 miles or so while not at elevation.

At elevation, we can obviously see much further. In cold areas, light refraction properties means we can see even further than that. People can see for miles and miles in Antarctica, no problem.

TEKNIKULLY Mbala is 1800 feet up. I know the curvature of Toril or whatever isn't the same as earth, but at 1800 feet players would actually be able to see about 50 miles.

I'm getting somewhere, I promise

#DnD does exploration a disservice by not having guidelines (mechanical and narrative) for how to describe vision at a distance further than the tactical combat level.

Do yourself a favor, silly weak human: turn off all the lights and describe what you see after 5 minutes. It's not much, but it's also not nothing. DMs have a weird/bad habit of treating anything beyond what I'll refer to as "tactical vision range" as impossible to see.

In darkness, there's always some ability of sensing the vague implication of shapes--a continuing hallway, the suggestion of tree trunks, and so on. It's more immersive to tease generalities about terrain and objects in darkness than to say it's either LIT or NOT LIT

This narrative tendency to focus on "tactical vision range" isn't exclusive to darkness, either.

Time to talk about barbarians.

"You can see up to 1 mile away with no difficulty, able to discern even fine details as though looking at something no more than 100 feet away from you."

Would anyone, especially a newcomer to DMing, know how to adjudicate this in context of the game rules?

First of all, what does "you can see up to 1 mile away with no difficulty" mean? You can already see 2-3 miles at base elevation without "difficulty."

The modifying addition here is "able to discern even fine details as though looking at something no more than 100 feet away."

Well

I do not have the eyes of the eagle, because even in the zoomed-in crop of that image I can't tell you shit about this guy

"He's wearing a white hat," the barbarian states proudly to the utter bafflement of the party

The unintentional joke here is that, after checking the source of the image again, the person in the photo is in fact a woman

I have some Opinions about some stuff with the totem barbarian, but the eagle-eyes feature is a very unusual one. If they'd left it as "you can make out fine details," I could see it being more popular. Adding a "100 feet away" actually gets in the way of narrative use.

As dumb or simple as it might sound, the PhB and/or DMG could have strongly benefitted from a short table of sight distance vs. elevation:
-Unobstructed Vision-
1. On the ground - 3 miles
2. 50 feet up - 8 mi.
3. 100 feet up - 12 miles
4. 500 feet up - 27 miles

etc, etc.

Note that this kind of table doesn't need to be very long; in the above offhand example, I used the kind of distances that would probably come up in tactical combat or casual play. How far can I see from the ground? How far can my Aaracockra see if it flies up for 1 round?

At maximum, this table would list something like 1000 feet (a high plateau or small mountain) and then 20 or 30,000 feet (looking from the top of an immense mountain like Everest).

To bring it back to the ToA story, the immersion-breakage wasn't because players had an intrinsic knowledge of how far they'd be able to see at a given elevation, it was because an adventure had never asked them to consider the concept of seeing more than 100 feet away.

Give

#DnD

characters

vista

moments

Vista moments are the places where they can do any combination of:
-See landmarks
-Get a sense of how far they've come
-Get a sense of how far they have to go

Now, there's a lot more to those points, mostly those second two, that I want to give examples for.

The tone and mood created by these vista moments are a delicate thing and can be encouraging, breathtaking, or even foreboding. They're narrative tools.

Who doesn't think about this shot and do a little hum to themselves when thinking about grand-scale views on big fantasy journeys? But Fellowship uses big vista-shots in a few ways, narratively.

When Frodo and Sam are traveling out of the Shire, we do get vista shots. But we're also given contextual scenes and shots that place these in a very agrarian and domestic context.

We get this wide shot (above) but this and most other scenes are shot very close; they're consistently walking through farmland. The scope of their journey, starting out, is "reach the next field."

As the movie (and series) progress, we start getting much broader views. Things start to feel bigger in scope because frankly, they ARE bigger in scope. Insert Hobbit-sized railing jokes here

From a #DnD perspective, this shot of Frodo in Rivendell is a "Get a sense of how far they've come" vista moment. This is early-game stuff where the folk-hero adventurer who's never left their little village gets a narrative moment to just take in the scope of this place.

And again, the context of the journey often dictates how these moments feel. A D&D player experiencing this screenshot's view might think "I've only gone four miles."

In the context of Dark Souls, it's "I can't believe I made it four miles." Those miles were precious.

By the time we get to the end of Fellowship, there's one more big vista shot. This is not a happy vista shot.

Frodo and Sam can still see for miles and miles. Just like some previous shots, they can see a long way and get a general sense of the lay of the land. But the mood here is completely different from those previous hero shots.

By this point, they've lost Gandalf. Boromir nearly went mad and tried to take the ring and (though they don't know it) was killed. Frodo's made the hard choice to leave everyone behind.

Now he's looking down at the path to Mordor and it's shadowed, it's mazelike, it's partially shrouded in fog. The road ahead, both metaphorically and quite literally, is unclear.

Let's do another LoTR-adjacent example, from the end of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Bilbo and Co. escape perilous danger and, at the very end, can see their destination on the far horizon.

This shot and scene literally hits all three:
-See landmarks
-Get a sense of how far they've come
-Get a sense of how far they have to go

Despite the fact that the mountain is literally 100 miles away or something, it's a hopeful scene, because it's contrasted against the peril they were up against only moments (from our perspective) before. The landmark acts as a visible reminder of their progress.

Let's also touch on vantage/vista reversal, especially in the context of everyone's favorite place to get a tan: Barovia!

Art credit to @JonPintar who needs some LOVE for this image

Most of the examples so far have been "How far can I see from a high elevation?"

#DnD's Barovia and Castle Ravenloft is the reversal of that: "How much does this castle at high elevation remain visible?"

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