Blind

Version 0.32: This article is up to date for the latest stable release of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Blind is a status effect which causes the victim to treat the player and all other creatures as if they were invisible, whether or not they actually are. See invisible is rendered useless while blinded. Dazzled is a similar effect which causes all the same debuffs, but with a shorter duration.

Blindness

The effects of blindness vary if the victim is a monster or player:

Monsters: Monster behavior is the same as if the player goes invisible and the monster cannot see invisible.

• Blind attackers receive a -35% penalty to to-hit rolls
• Blind enemies cannot perform attacks of opportunity.
• Blind ranged attackers will often target the wrong tile, potentially hitting other targets or missing entirely.
• Anything with animal intelligence or worse will occasionally move as though confused, rather than pursuing or attacking you. Anything of human intelligence can still track you normally, however.
• Blind enemies are be susceptible to low-tier stabbing attacks.

Players:

• Players suffer a 15 * (distance + 1)% miss chance penalty to all attacks that check EV, where distance is how many tiles away the target is.
  • The maximum miss chance from this penalty is 90%
• The screen gains a filter depending on the source.

Sources

Player and monster:

• Atropa darts
• Wand of light
• The Dazzling Flash spell (player ghosts can use it)
• Chaos weapons

Players only:

• Wearing the Cloak of Starlight
• Ru's Aura of Power and Apocalypse
• Zin's Recite (when used against heretics)
• The Shining One's Divine Shield ability

Against the player:

• Gozag wrath (chance to trigger when seeing gold)
• Zin wrath
• Throw Klown Pie
• Being hit by a melee attack after being afflicted with the Black Mark

Some monsters, e.g., wargs and bats, cannot be blinded by any means. Only monsters of natural, demonic, and holy holiness can be blinded (non-living and plant creatures are immune). On the other hand, only undead players (not counting living vampires) are unblindable and undazzleable.

History

• Prior to 0.32, blindness against players simply caused confusion. Many new sources of player blindness were added in this version.
• Prior to 0.31, creatures with non-living and plant holiness could be blinded by wands of light.
• Wands of light were added in 0.29.
• The cloak of Starlight gained *Dazzle in 0.26.
• Prior to 0.16, the sense invisible monster intrinsic would stop blindness.
• During the brief period in which jesters existed, you could also temporarily blind monsters by hitting them with pies.