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Altair_the_Vexed
2009-09-24, 07:22 AM
I was thinking about a trick for a wizard with a bat familiar: cast Obscuring Mist or Darkness or something similar to mess up vision, and send your bat to deliver touch spells.

So, I looked up bat in the SRD. In D&D 3.5, the bat is listed as having blindsense, rather than blindsight. Blindsense means they still have a 50% miss chance when they attack.

This doesn't seem right to me. I remember seeing footage of a bat plucking a spider off a web without breaking the web or getting stuck.
I looked up echolocation and saw some scholarly papers that reckon bats can range-find with +/- 0.7mm accuracy.

With that in mind, is it too much to give bats (or at least, the microbats, rather than the keen-eyed fruitbats) blindsight instead of blindsense?

Eloel
2009-09-24, 08:28 AM
Seeing as how that would also give Blindsight to the already-good Bat Swarm, yes, it would be too much.

Another_Poet
2009-09-24, 08:51 AM
Agreed with Ozgun.

If you'e the GM, it might be a fun thing to do for a single bat if you raise the wizard's CR to compensate.

If you are a PC, ask your GM if you can replace one of the bat's feats with Blind Fight. This will effectively reduce the miss chance to 25%. That would mean your bat is far more likely to land a hit than anyone else is inside of that Obscuring Mist.

Volkov
2009-09-24, 08:54 AM
I am a personal fan of realism over balance so I'd approve.