Characters with a disability and Sensory 'feats' (scent, sight, hearing) and

[Tonguez]

I started thinking about scent and then got onto thinking about blind or deaf characters and how they could work. Has anyone ever run a blind or deaf character - how did it go?

Anyway I got to thinking if we extrapolate from the Scent feat and the newly created (by me) smell skill we can assume that both Sight and Hearing are automatic feats which all races get - granting access to the Spot and Listen skills respectively.
We should thus expand this to cover ALL senses

Ergo we have four new feats (assuming smell/taste are combined)

Scent/Taste - smell skill
Sight - spot skill
Heraring - listen skill
Touch - feel skill

Now a Blind character loses the Sight feat (and spot) and has the choice of either another sensory feat (say Touch to emulate increase reliance on that sense) or another feat (eg alertness +3 to Listen checks - to emulate increase hearing sensitivity)

The character can also develop Blindsight (provided prereqs are imposed eg Alertness + 5 ranks Listen for instance)

thoughts?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Not really a bad idea...

It's largely unnessecary, though. Most blind heroes I knew had something like blindsight, and a feat that allows that is already in existence.

Otherwise, I'd just give a blind guy a +4 (or something) to Listen, and a deaf guy a +4 to Spot.

You loose one sense, one grows sharper...but probably not *extremely* sharper.

 

[Rune]

As a matter of fact, The barbarian in my current campaign is blind. I let him take blindsight as a starting feat on a few conditions.

First, he starts out at old age. I normally wouldn't allow it, but he's a barbarian. He has a 10 in all of his physical stats.

Second, when he rages, he loses the blindsight ability. The harshness of this is somewhat softened by the Blind-Fight feat, but it's still a major drawback.

If I were to offer blindsight for blind characters more generically, I do think I would just give it some stiff prerequisites and treat it as a feat.

I don't really like the idea of just giving bonuses to skills, because that still makes any warrior type half as effective as they would normally be, without crippling the other classes nearly as much.

So far, it's worked out pretty well.

 

[KnowTheToe]

I don't think it is a bad idea. I wanted to make a retch of a man into a Psionic Warrior. The concept was he lost his hand due to being caught stealing from a nobel. Later in life he lost tongue due being a poor con man and he losses his eyes for peeping in on a merchants wife or some such.

Anyway he get pulled out of prison by the military to help with menial tasks and there he comes into his psionic warrior powers and uses feats to overcome his handicaps. He would have to start around 5th lvl for it to work, but I may still try this one day.

 

[the Jester]

There was a pc in my game for a really long time who developed into the Jesus figure of the major monotheistic religion of the campaign (everyone invokes his name now, and there are churches, pc clerics of him, etc). He was blinded by a vicious critical hit by a battleaxe. He played on for about another 5 levels of psionicist and about 8 levels of cleric before he finally got them regerated (dual classed human, this was 2e)... it was awesome! He started out as evil, gave his soul to Bleak (the devil figure), ended up captured by the church of Galador, converted under duress and torture, had a strange, fevered dream in which Galador said, "Forgive them, my son- they know not what they do," and ended up changing the face of the world as a force for good.

Dexter adapted to blindness by taking the sight link power, which he used hardly at all, and by having his buddy Malford make him a homunculus, through whose eyes Dexter could see.

That was Dexter Nadly, who started off as a punk 16-year-old snotty kid (NE, cha8 or thereabouts). Shows ya how things can change...