Are scry durations too short?

[theNater]

Okay, how about virtually every campaign i have made when dealing with a villain who was more than a one shot.

Every BBEG in my games has an overall goal, sub goals, and multiple plans in order to reach those goals and plans. Each plan frequently has multiple parts and frequently has distractions built into it.

So if you ask what is mr big planing, you might get he's sending fat tony over to the lucky duck tavern to burn it down. And hooray your players are there to stop Mr. Bigs distraction which is well away from his actual target.

Or you find out the other end the overarching goal. What is Mr. Bigs plan, "to overthrow the kingdom" great..I now know what I already knew.

In this situation, "what is Mr. Big planning" certainly fails. But is that the best question to ask? Are these plans vulnerable to "what is the most vital sub goal in Mr. Big's overall plan that is actively being pursued"?

Note that if Mr. Big explains all details of his plan to Fat Tony, once the PCs capture Fat Tony they know the entire plan. So Mr. Big needs to keep his information spread out, meaning he can't afford to lay out the entirety of his plans in any single meeting. Why is it easier to find an hour in which Mr. Big explains all of his plans than it is to find an appropriate question for the oracles?

 

[Ahglock]

In this situation, "what is Mr. Big planning" certainly fails. But is that the best question to ask? Are these plans vulnerable to "what is the most vital sub goal in Mr. Big's overall plan that is actively being pursued"?

Note that if Mr. Big explains all details of his plan to Fat Tony, once the PCs capture Fat Tony they know the entire plan. So Mr. Big needs to keep his information spread out, meaning he can't afford to lay out the entirety of his plans in any single meeting. Why is it easier to find an hour in which Mr. Big explains all of his plans than it is to find an appropriate question for the oracles?

Because appropriate questions are very hard to come up with and the answers are very much up for interpretation.

It is cheaper than scry so they could use the ritual multiple times to refine questions and follow up on answers. But it is hard to adjudicate the fine line between plot breaking reveals and useful expenditure of money.

With a reasonable scrying spell you can give useful information and not have a chain of follow ups getting to the plot breaking questions. Do a follow up scry and oh so sad the meeting is over now.
Don't get me wrong i can probably stretch out consult oracle to a lame level, but its small amounts of money to break the plot.
Lets say the players know enough to ask this "what is the most vital sub goal in Mr. Big's overall plan that is actively being pursued?

I can say takeover
follow up in Mr bigs most vital sub-plot what is he planning to takeover?
The utilities

Etc.
But still as slow as it is dished out more money can get more and more questions answered, and eventually you reach plot break. So you either get ambiguous only somewhat helpful answers as I think oracle was intended, or it breaks the plot.

With scry which costs more you get basically nothing, you can maybe find someone if someone who you are willing to drop 20k+ in GP on is not willing ot defend themselves against scrying and that is about it. Though I suppose you could dodge a lot of these things by scrying for something like the Mom of the person who murdered the king. Which brings us back to plot breakers.

If it was a somewhat effective spying spell you could use it to get a wide variety of information but not break large plots with a single spell. Further more with a longer duration you can use it against targets that you would not expect to have scry protection and still get some useful information.

what they really needed was a decent duration scry spell with limitations on the target, like you have to actually have some specific knowledge of who they are, not generalized who killed the king stuff. Then its just an alternate method of spying, and providing that is a good thing since having a ninja on the team should not be required. Basically they gave us two choices useless rituals or break the plot ritual, I don't think either of those is a good thing to have in a game.

 

[Lord_Q]

It seems to me that scry just has a different use than it did in the old days, which is good considering it's power.

Now view object is great since if a plan is written down somewhere, you can just view copy of secret plans. View location is great since if you need to see if a distant fortress is being fortified in time of war, you can just scry it. Observe creature gives me a distinct Bourne feeling, where you get a snapshot of a target with subtle clues around that might give you a hint of where they are.

Rituals as a whole seem to follow the Discworld magic principle where the option through mundane means is almost always simpler but magic can do in a pinch. You're supposed to have spies and informants to find out plots, not rely on scry.

Some rituals do feel helplessly depowered, Wizard's Sight is hopelessly hard to use (10 minute casting time, seriously?), same with Knock. I wouldn't be surprised if later books include feats that reduce casting time or increase duration though.

sure the uses you described are awsum, but with the exception of the "Bourne" example you'd always want to be able to observe fore more than 30 seconds. An houre may be unesessary, but a few minutes at least. for example:

view object on the big bad's seceret plan outline: how much text can you realistically read in 30 seconds? what if the document in question isn't the only one in view? it'd be universally more wortwhile to view the document for 5 minutes than 30 seconds, and you still wouldn't be able yo use it for the sort of long term spying that it wasn't intended for

I can understand why they'd make the duration short, but 5 rounds max is too short, not because it's inposible to find uses for the ritual that way but because it's damaging to suspencion of disbelief that anyone would bother lerarning how to perform those rituals given the cost, and the amount of time required compared with the length of time viewing the target. again, even a short time frame like 1-5 minutes instead of 6-30 seconds is a conciderable inprovment.

 

[DracoSuave]

I don't understand tho what the problem is with scry durations being shorter. I'm -thankful- for it. When I want to learn the entirety of a villain's plot, I'll cast the ritual 'case the joint' which costs nothing but perhaps the payroll of a spy into their midst. Perhaps I'll cast 'capture an underling and interrogate them.' Or, if I'm feeling like something a bit more exact, I'll cast 'Go beat the big bad up and wrest the answer from him with justice.' If the scry duration is long enough for me to effectively use 'mundane' means as above then it's long enough. But then, I -like- adventuring, and would rather adventure to accomplish a goal than simply have the wizard cast a spell and make the entire question moot in one go. And that's if I'm playing a wizard. Seriously, this baaaaawwww about the scry durations is missing the point. The new game doesn't want you to have all the answers handed to you at the beginning for the plot, you actually have to get up, and go -discover- them during game play. In otherwords, Good Storytelling as opposed to Terrible Storytelling.

 

[Stalker0]

I can understand why they'd make the duration short, but 5 rounds max is too short, not because it's inposible to find uses for the ritual that way but because it's damaging to suspencion of disbelief that anyone would bother lerarning how to perform those rituals given the cost, and the amount of time required compared with the length of time viewing the target. again, even a short time frame like 1-5 minutes instead of 6-30 seconds is a conciderable inprovment.

This is a good response, and echoes my beliefs as well. There's just something a little...lame about spending an hour ritual full of big motions and lots of expensive components to get 12 seconds worth of mojo. That's something out of a funny cartoon, not an epic quest.

To me, if WOTC feels that the current scrying ritual is too powerful with a longer duration, I can understand that. Make it harder to scry, force me to have a bit of hair from the person I want to see, make it so I can only do the ritual under the light of a full moon or something. I can accept that, and to me that just heightens the flavor of the ritual. But give me those restrictions and then give me my scry!

Further, as others have mentioned, the current ritual isn't useless, its just not good for traditional scrying. I'm fine with that too, but don't call it scry, because scry in dnd has always been about watching (I'm assuming, I'll let Diaglo come around and bonk me on the head and then tell me that in 1e you had to scry uphill both ways and you felt lucky casting the spell didn't send you to the negative energy plane).

So if the current ritual isn't meant to be scrying, don't call it scrying. Its just a fact finding divination, and again I have no problem with that. So give me my longer duration, harder to use scry, and then rename this fact finding spell into something else. (Of course, I still think its a bit expensive even for that, but that's my personal belief).

But the bottom line is, 30 seconds of time for a 1 hour ritual and a boatload of magic components isn't scrying.