Forum: Public Forum

Bat Vision - (when reading imagine a nice tone of voice)

Just being looking through the beastiary and realised that although I've been using the correct modify statistics for being diminutive/tiny, I had perhaps being using the wrong bestiary reference for the bat. As the bat is diminutive, it is the same as a bat familiar. The bat familiar has low-light vision, so I would guess that having low-light vision would also mean that they have normal vision. (Real life bats can see, just not very well). However I would argue that even dire bats would have normal vision as there is no note saying that they only use blindsense.

Blindsense, as was pointed out is fairly weak. It gives a small advantage in certain instances, i.e. where I can't use sight I can use echolocation (30m) to get a rough estimate of where people/things/monsters are. This still gives the concealment bonus to that player, but would stop people sneaking up on the bat (doesn't happen very often) ie I know they're in that 5m square but not quite sure where if it's my turn I can try get away and/or risk an attack missing. In specific cases I would not be able to use blindsense if there are instances where special sound affects are in use.

As a general point, my AC is still fairly low 21 even with the size bonuses it only rises to 25, so I'm easy to hit when targeted. The other advantage is as long as I act like a bat, I'm not suspicious looking as soon as I'm un-bat like, attacks on me could soon take me out. However, in the session, we were made aware that someone/thing was viewing the proceedings, they would be weary of suspicious bats having seen one recently attemp to kill a number of his monsters, loosing me that initial advantage. This suspision would probably pass onto all animal forms, as they'd be aware there is a druid in town.

So to conclude, I believe a druid in the form of a bat can see in normal conditions, blindsense isn't great, and if targeted I'll get my bat ass handed to me on a plate.