How do other DMs handle lighting, darkness, and darkvision?
This hasn't been as much of an issue before, but I'm grappling with how to approach using darkness and lighting in a map from a conceptual standpoint, and I'm wondering if maybe I'm just missing something mechanical that may be a solution. Here's the situation.
My players are headed to the docks district of a city to try to get some information about a particular warehouse and possibly destroy it.
When they approach, it will be the dead of night. The warehouse is lit from inside of it and I've set up windows so that the light can spill out on to the surrounding street. One or two NPC guards around the warehouse have torches or light cantrips on them (i.e., token light set to "torch").
The party will start probably about 150 feet from the warehouse on the map. Some of the party members have darkvision (one out to 120 feet), and several do not. If they're going to remain stealthy, they'll likely want to douse all lights, which is fine.
What I'm grappling with, though, is how to balance the vision issues from the actual tabletop functions.
If I set the ambient light to something like "Moonlight," it casts a cool, light blue dim light on everything, which means the entire map is visible, but some areas are better lit than others. BUT, I think that this will kind of defeat that whole "You can't see in the dark, and these guys can" aspect of the game. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, the only alternative is to actually kill ALL ambient light, at which point the players are mostly blind with the exception of the light sources they can see in the distance. They can't see 2" in front of them.
Is there some kind of setting where you can make it so that PCs without darkvision can still kind of make out what's near them, but not what's farther away in the dark, without just giving them darkvision? How do folks tend to handle this?