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Dungeons & Dragonshas limited mechanics for representing characters with disabilities. Even books that specifically mention them, such as Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, are somewhat shallow. A character who loses a limb can gain a prosthetic limb for a couple hundred gold that functions identically with no adjustment period.
Blind characters are especially difficult to homebrew mechanics for. So many class abilities and features rely on line-of-sight that a character without sight is heavily constrained in what the system allows them to do. For a heroic fantasy game, we want to see characters who represent ourselves, and here are a few ways to make blind characters playable.
How To Run Blind NPCs
A lot of the time, when blind characters appear in the media, they are completely incapable of sight. Perhaps they don’t even have eyeballs. This gives us alimited range of examples to draw fromwhen looking for inspiration, but it’s important toconsider the breadth of experience faced by blind people.
Mechanics
Partial/Legal Blindness
Between varying definitions of legal blindness,the simplest one is a visual impairment that cannot be fully corrected with lenses. A legally blind person can still navigate the world around them and still interact with visual media, such as reading.
Corrective lenses might improve their sight enough to have relatively low impact on daily life.
A character with partial blindness might havedisadvantage on perception checksbut suffer no penalty in combat.
Characters Born Blind
A character who is born without sight is going to be adept at working without it. Allow them to use hearing to identify the locations of people in combat and let them navigate most situations without a penalty.
They don’t need to have Daredevil’s echolocation, butknowing imprecisely where people are is enough to throw fireballs at them.
Characters Who Lose Their Sight
A character who loses their sight later in life will navigate the world differently and face many unique struggles. Many character arcs can grow from coming to terms with a loss of sight, but it’s also thehardest to represent mechanically while keeping the game balanced.
You might start them with astrong penalty that lessens as they adapt and learn new techniques. Disadvantage when attacking is typical of a recently blinded character.
Balancing Games With Blind PCs
There are a few different ways of including blind characters in your game without compromising on balance. Most involvegiving some feature or mechanic that carries out the role of vision.Here are some options:
Balance
Seeing-Eye Familiars
An often neglected part of the Find Familiar Spell is that the castercan numb their own senses tosee through the eyes of the summoned creature. As written, this lasts for one turn and requires an action, but if you allow it to be toggled instead, a blind person can havethe magical equivalent of a seeing-eyedog.
Giving blind characters Find Familiar as a free spell is not going to damage the balance of your game.
An intelligent opponent might choose to destroy familiar,leaving the character unable to see until they recast the spell.
Spotters
An alternative to having a familiar take the place of your eyes is tohave another party member relay visual information. In this case, the character could target spells and attacks while not deafened and close to another party member.
How extensively this interaction is roleplayed is up to the players. It might be as simple as “throw a lightning bolt at 11 o’clock” or as precise as describing the exact distances and angles between people on the battlefield.
This doesn’t grant any new abilities to the characters, so it shouldn’t impact balance.
Blindsight
The blind-fighting style gives blindsight to a range of ten feet. This lets a character navigate and engage in combat but also gives a pronounced vulnerability to anything beyond this area.
Make sure toclarify where this blindsight comes from: Are you sensing auras, feeling movements in the wind, or determining directions and locations purely by divination magic?
Giving the fighting style for freewon’t break your game.
You could allow a feat to be invested into this starting blindsight to upgrade it to about 30ft.
Tremorsense
Tremorsense is almost exclusively given to burrowing creatures, so it isn’t designed with player use in mind. One way to make it distinct as a sense is to emphasize that it relies on movement and contact with the ground.
A character with tremorsense might know exactly where a person is moving behind a wallbut miss something suspended in the air or carried by that person.
Allowing tremorsense as an alternative to equivalent blindsight abilitiesshould be fair in most scenarios as it has its own strengths and weaknesses.
When DMing for alternate senses like blindsight and tremorsense, it can help to allow their use beyond the listed range but at lower precision. It can be a bit weird immersion-wise if a player can see perfectly for ten feet and their senses abruptly cut off beyond this.
The rules on blindsight are sometimes disputed aboutwhether it allows the use of abilities that require vision (such as targeted spells). Check where your table stands on the topic before building a character who relies on blindsight.
If you’re unsure about the balance of a homebrew, it’s better to lean towardsmaking an option on the strong but limiting who can access it.The goal is to have people be represented first rather than account for fringe cases involving specially optimised character builds.
How To Roleplay A Blind Characters
Roleplaying a character without sight can be complicated. Most DMs aren’t used to describing the world without using framing devices such as colour and lines of sight, so you may need to take on some extra work in roleplay. It is also going to depend on what your roleplaying and mechanical goals are for choosing to play this character.
Representing keen hearing requires you to ask questions of the DM, and you may have to roll perception checks at different points compared to a sighted character.
A person using a disguise to present as a different person might be easily identified by a blind character if they don’t change their stride, voice, and other signifiers. The DM might allow you to roll a mucheasier investigation check to see through disguises.
Magical disguises, such as those provided by the Crown of Lies (which can only be perceived through by a Wish spell) haveno mention of disguising the character’s body language and gait.
At the same time, other situations would be much harder to navigate. Any scene taking place in a crowded location is going to make perception checks more difficult due to the abundance of background noise.
Deafening spells are normally a minor nuisance or a way to negate thunder damage, but for a character who relies heavily on hearing they become much more debilitating.
