I can see

I am building a new character for my DnD campaign with Naked Man.  Our last group got wiped out by a particularly devastating hobgoblin spellcaster so we are starting fresh.  I decided to go with a crossbow specialist to try out the Crossbow Expert feat, and fighter seemed like the best class to do that with.  I had in mind a character who was a military engineer who loved to build and tinker with things, as this seemed to fit with crossbow usage nicely.

The real choice was what race I would play.  I defaulted to human thematically, but I wasn't sure I should do that because being human is often a huge liability in modules.  You always end up in dungeon crawls, and dungeon crawls really punish people who can't see in the dark.  Sometimes you have a spellcaster who can cover that sort of thing with Light spells, but even then it means that the enemies can spot your group from far away, stealth is nearly impossible, and anything that knocks out that light also knocks out your character.

If you don't have a spellcaster to provide a Light spell things get even worse - somebody has to hold a torch, and often there is nobody who can do that easily.  Torches also have problems with running out of fuel, getting wet, or being knocked away down a hole.

Many times I have groaned as I realized we had a human in our group and so we would have to keep track of light sources and fuel and all that other nonsense that goes along with it.

I find the whole thing so ridiculous.  I looked through the monster manual and in the first 50 monsters 45 of them can see in the dark.  The great majority of player characters can see in the dark too.  Why is it that everybody can see in the dark?!?

The answer of course is that back in the day DnD was just endless dungeon crawls.  You can't put monsters in a dungeon where they are blind, so they all need darkvision, ridiculous as that sounds.  They aren't going to be sitting down there completely blind, nor are they going to have enormous mounds of torches to burn while they wait to be slaughtered by murder hobos.  Everything has to be able to see in the dark to make the dungeon thing workable.

Except for humans, of course, because we actually know that humans can't see in the dark.  We can launch fireballs and survive falling in pits of acid, but see in the dark?  No way!

Thankfully when Naked Man rolled up some magic items we would have available to our characters some goggles that grant darkvision were among them.  I grabbed those right away both because it seemed fantastic to avoid the whole blindness thing, and also because magic goggles seemed a perfect thematic fit for my character.

I just shake my head looking at all of it.  The legacy elements of the old school DnD games continue to echo on down to our current games and there is nothing I can do to stem that flood of silliness.

I suppose I should be careful about getting up too high on my horse though.  I am playing a character that can shoot a crossbow five times in six seconds, and that is just as absurd as any of the blindness / darkvision nonsense.