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if you think bats are evil, just be an Albino bat.  Problem solved

Thank you for the additional information...this does changes things as we can now see that the DM has given you some other powers as a result of losing your sight.

Now, I dont rememeber the rules exactly for 3.5 but in 4E being blind does not prevent you from targeting creatures, you just may get a penalty to the attack depending on the type of attack you are making (area attacks do not receive the penelty but melee or ranged attacks do).  If the creature stealths this may make it hard to target as you do no know the square, but without stealth you can still pinpoint their location (square).

I think the DM should have spoken with you before making such a fundamental change to your character concept but it sounds like the DM did put some thought into this and may not have been doing it as a way to punish or nerf your character.  Though you mentioned it was your mentor that did this to you?  Not a very nice mentor to slaughter your family and rip your eyes out, may want to find another.

Hearing this new info, I think it best that you make it to your level up and retrain some feats so you are effective with your blindness.  The other thing you might consider, regarding the good/evil dichotomy and your preference for eagles (representing good)...maybe the slaughter of your family and the trauma of their bodies hanging above you and dripping blood might push you towards the other end of the spectrum and so taking on the form of a bat may actually be appropriate for the story.

Let us know how it turns out.

Hang on, you said that the other players 'characters got cool powers too. Did they have to also go through being captured, tortured, maimed, and having their loved ones that were their motivation to adventure destroyed? Or is that just your character?

So, why did the DM say this was your test, anyway? Why do you need a test.

Something sounds off about this whole thing.

Well, you did say you enjoy the campaign. but no wonder you are finding this exhausting.

Oct 26, 2012 -- 11:39AM, Featherheart wrote:

The idea of my character becoming evil actually appealed to me, despite my tendancy to play 'good' characters.  It just make sense, what is there to live for anymore? I had a talk with my DM about it earlier this week over the phone. He says I cannot be evil, no evil characters allowed in the campaign. I suggested re-rolling my character, since she is so devistated. He says "I will not let you re-roll."

He says that this is my test, to deal with this. My OOC trial, as it were.

Using the 3.5e rules, the closest thing I have gotten to is Listen checks.  The feat 'Alertness' (+2 to listen) plus Skill focus Listen(+3) then Keen-Eared Scout (+5 to listen against invisible characters... which ALL are now) would give me +10 feat bonus to my Listen skill to pinpoint the exact location of someone. Problem is STILL the blindness. 50% miss chance. 

Lets say someone is hurt. Unless they call out to me I dont know it, even if I can hear battle I cant 'see' a wound. But lets say i DO know exactly where they are and that they ARE hurt. I must move in close to touch them with a Cure ____ wounds spell (since they're touch), but, as per the rules even if i know EXACTLY what square they're in its a 50% miss chance. 

Ugh i just feel so exhausted. Its taking me all week to come up with some way to make my character playable in these peramiters. The story really is very good, and i was truly enjoying the campain. Since my friends around the table got something special I was hoping I'd get something equally as nice, but the benifits of this deformity I do not think outweigh the drawbacks. 

You dont necessarily need to go full evil, but maybe a transition to nuetral.  You have lost your reason to care, but does not mean that you want to inflict evil upon others and may even be willing to help those in need if properly motivated. 

Though, on the "you are not re-rolling" thing, this is bull.  If the DM does not want you to reroll your charcater he should not have put you in the situation that you are in, where you have to use your valuable feats to over come a limitation that he has arbitrarily placed on you.  It is the players choice whether they want to play their character any longer and if you are not enjoying your character then it is your right to create another - even if the DM would rather you stick with it.

It sounds like the DM is still picking on you knowing that the other players did not expereince any kind of negative effects for their powers, and in addition it sounds like their bonuses far outweigh yours.

As for feats - blindfighting or there may be some druid feats that allow a meta shift (getting abilities of creatures while not taking on the full form), I seem to remember some feats along this lines, look into it and maybe you can find away to get permanent blindsight or similiar senses.  The fact that you would have to use 2-3 feats to overcome this deficiency is obviously not fair and has ruined the fun you were having in the campaign - and maybe you should let the DM know this and see if you guys can work something a little fairer out that fits his vision and does take away from the fun you were having with your character.

I would also make the arguement that you can still target creatures (though still have the miss chance - reduced greatly with blind fighting), you have allies that can communicate their location to you and you only need to know the square they occupy.  The rules we play by is that unless they are using stealth you know their location (this is even true for invisible creatures) and can target them, the problem comes when they stealth.  This is standard for 4E but like I said I dont remember the 3.5 rules well enough to tell you if this may apply for that rule set - but it may still be a good point to bring up.

edit: Not sure if this is an option but there maybe a few magic items you can use to overcome your blindness (Robe of Eyes - though it is a pretty high level item - and there may be some others).

Well... the DM said it was permanent. I figured it was just a temporary thing... what with magic and all. But it sounds like the DM is dead-set on poking your eyes out. Not sure why. Maybe you'll luck out and encounter a medusa army, lol. How would the character you originally envisioned deal with being permanently blinded?

If you try to heal another player character and miss because of the blindness, you may have another player clamoring for the DM to make it not so permanent.

Sucky as the loss of sight seems, if the campaign is enjoyable, I'd keep playing the character. My thinking is that if you liked the character in the first place, the difficulties that this presents are worth dealing with. It cold be worse... at least you didn't get polymorphed into a gnome. You're still playing the same character. But he's now blind. Would he suddenly become evil? I doubt that. Would he decide that his blindness is a hindrance? Possibly. Would he try to overcompensate and get himself killed, pretending not to be affected at all? Possibly. A point to ponder... if the character were to, say.. not see the 100 foot spiked pit, he might accidentallly fall in it and die. That would totally suck. You may have to roll up a new character after all - wwwink.

I'm torn because I've seen some players throw in the towel over the slightest things when I DM (although, I generally avoid arbitrarily doing anything). One in particular was all about hack and slash and didn't care about anything else. There came a point in the game where he was captured by pirates who sold him as a slave to fight in a gladiator arena. The guy who took him would have to set him free after 10 fights as is custom in the land they were in. He had 1 fight and wanted to roll a "new" character. Same skills, feats, class, race, equipment....

I disrupted the game for everyone else so we could figure out the character's background and what-not. 1 session in he randomly attacks the city guard captain, who made short work of the level 1 guy. Then he makes another character and decides he didn't like that I told him that the culture he chose requires for his given name to have meaning. It wasn't a particularly heroic-sounding nickname, granted - Wet Basket (chosen by his mother because it was raining when he was born and she was so poor they had no crib and so she put him in an empty basket). He played the character for a long while and the only time anyone called him "Wet-Basket", was just prior to the grand finale of the first half of a major campaign... he meets an NPC who was a childhood friend from his village who calls him by his childhood nickname. He decided he wanted to play another character. Then. There.

I then disrupted yet another game for him to roll up a pet rock named Boulder because the character he was playing couldn't speak Terran during a brief encounter with an earth elemental on the prime.

But I also had an evil viking-style ice shaman forced to give up his frost-giant war gods and start worshipping elves. And forced to become a vegetarian and serve only oats and hard tack on his own longships and join an assassins guild where my job for the guild was barber and personal groomsman for the guildmaster.

BACK TO MY POINT:
I'm torn. I'm reluctant to tell you to just give up without making an honest effort to try playing the dude blind for a while because this doesn't sound like a game-breaker. But this being permanent doesn't sound fair either. By calling it a 'test', it sounds like the DM is just making a challenge for the character as a ways to engage you the player. I spend more of my time on the DM side of the screen, so I'm probably biased anyway. But the fact that the DM meta-gamed your blindness - coupled with explicitly calling it permanent - seems heavy-handed. But it all comes down to this: Is the DM generally what you call a good DM? If so, suck it up. He's probably got something cool in mind. If not, remind him that the challenges you are overcoming are greater than the rest of the party so you should get.. say twice the XP since your chance to hit is halved. If suggesting that to the DM doesn't at least open dialogue, I don't know what to tell you except find a way to accidentally fall in that pit... IF you still want to play in his campaign.