Surely OpenGL has a way to set the vertex color mode. By default it is multiplication.
When I have an existing texture on a quad to represent a player in my game, I want to add color to it. As of now, doing so only multiplies the color with the texels on the quad. So if I have a color that represents bright light say (128,128,128) what I want is additive behavior: take the color in the texel and add the channels together.
I have not found anything to do this automatically in OpenGL without the use of shaders or including a second draw step on one sprite with a different blend mode to simulate this.