Slightly Bad Sight

Bad Sight is tough on a PC. It’s a -25 point disadvantage and carries some serious ouch to it in either nearsighted or farsighted varieties.

What if you want to have just slightly bad vision?

Fairly easy: just make it leveled. I’m going to tweak point cost a bit as well.

Nearsighted (-3 per level)

You have issues reading things more than one yard away. You are -1 to your Vision roll per level of this advantage. Additionally, you are at -1 to hit for every three fractional levels of Nearsighted (so Nearsighted 2 gives -1 to hit, but Nearsighted 7 gives -3). Apply the same penalty to ranged attacks.

Why it’s different: This is just a straight-up scaling of Nearsighted, at 4 per level, with no cap on levels inherent. The “double range” thing is the exact same thing as a -2 penalty, which coincides with the -6/-2 for melee. So using the same penalty for all attacks works fine, I think.

Farsighted (-3 per level)


You have issues with very close objects. Each level gives you -1 to spot objects within one yard, and each two levels (or fraction thereof) gives -1 to DX on close manual tasks, and close combat. Rolls to maintain or improve a grapple, or execute grappling-based techniques (grapples, throws, locks, etc.) suffer penalties based on the best of your senses of touch and vision (so if your touch-based senses are unimpaired, so it is with your grappline). Any attack that bears a close resemblance to a strike (such as a Sweep that does not start from an already-established grapple) suffers full penalties.

Bad Sight ( -6 per level)


You have poor vision in general, suffering -1 to Vision per level of Bad Sight, -1 to melee and ranged attacks per 3 levels, -1 to DX for close manual tasks and close combat per two levels (or fraction thereof in both cases). 

Acute Vision (2 per level)


Acute vision is already leveled but doesn’t give bonuses for melee or ranged tasks, nor for close manual tasks, nor bonuses in close combat. So the price is fine as-is.

Parting Shot


This came up when my instant response to the question “can you be both nearsighted and farsighted” was “just buy Reduced Vision.” Turns out you can’t. Easy enough to tweak out. I didn’t feel like 6 levels of bad vision would be worth -48 points, though. Even with -6 to vision, -2 to melee and ranged attacks, and -3 to close manual tasks and close combat, which if “anti-Acute Vision” is -12 of those points, those penalties work out to another -35, which is about -2 to DX on all tasks. I suppose you could go either way, at -6 or -8 per level, but I chose to use the lower total. Nearly -50 points seems pretty catastrophic. On the other hand, if it’s correctable, it’s basically -20 or -15, which starts to feel about right.