Any down sides to having DM fail to detect illusions?

[Arrowhawk]

So in my campaign I do away with "illusion/magic" transparancy, and call illusions, oh I dunno, psionics or something. I have now changed the physics of my game world (gasp!). Next I shall make all the elves have blue skin. Fear me!

Your response is disingenuous. Nobody is suggesting you are a tyrant and trying to mock my response as such is asinine and underscores you're not interested in an actual discussion when you've explicitly asked for downsides

Another example:

That is just how my crowd rolls. We still have fun somehow.

Right, because I've clearly alleged you can't be having any fun.

I am not wasting any more time responding to this.

 

[Arrowhawk]

This and

This are the same argument. You even say "compelling" and "argument/case".

The "Fourth" point may have been inartfuly worded, but it states that illusions are still effective as is. This is separate from the notion that changing the game is an improvement. So no, #1 and #4 are not the same argument, but the first sentence of #4 starts out that way.

You may not want to put DnD and Reality in the same sentence.

"D&D reality" refers to the game's own reality as it has been defined by the rules.

Change without real justification isn't good or bad, it's just change.

I disagree. Change has a transaction cost and in most cases causes stress to organisms.

In our campaign, we avoid changing rules unless we are convinced it is a net improvement for our experience and we've really taken the time to explore the greater implications. If we were to just decide that Elves have blue skin or Orcs were translucent, it would undermine the subjective feeling that we are playing D&D 3.5 and it would make the game trend toward someone's homebrew experiment. I personally am not interested in that.

IMO, changing rules arbitrarily is a bad precedent because it becomes a slippery slope. If one DM suddenly feels that illusions need protecting without any real justification? Where do we draw the line?

Change ... it is bad when it fundamentally changes the game.

This. The proposed rules fundamentally change the game, imo.

YMMV

 

[airwalkrr]

So this house rule is depriving the caster of a very important tool that is rarely going to work?

I believe you misunderstood. Illusion is a rewarding, but tricky school of magic. A master of illusion will leave few hints behind that something intended to deceive the senses is an illusion at all. Thus, the players will have to be intelligent and cunning to even have the inkling to cast detect magic in the first place. It is not that detect magic is rarely going to work, it is that it is rarely going to be used. Unless you are the type of Dungeon Master who puts illusion traps around every corner, your players are not going to cast detect magic unless they have a very good reason.

In the current 3.5 campaign I play, I have two characters, a death master and an assassin. Between my two characters, I do most of the grunt work that pertains to detecting traps, snares, illusions, and other such things that would hamper, maim, or otherwise slow the party down. Thus far, I have mostly seen fit to leave a single 0 level spell slot open most of the time on my death master and not prepare detect magic until the end of the day when we have gathered treasure and want to investigate it for magical properties. So basically, that is the primary use for the spell. And we have run into illusions before. But usually, by the time we would get the idea to cast detect magic, the damage has been done. We are often a pretty cautious group, as our Dungeon Master has a penchant for nasty traps. But we do not have the means to walk down every corridor of every dungeon with a detect magic spell active at all times.

The last illusion we discovered was an illusory wall that covered a trap which guarded a secret door. Talk about challenging! We had just defeated an efreeti guarding the final room (at least as far as we could tell) of a dungeon. We had seen some evidence in the dungeon that there should have been a treasure vault nearby. I had my assassin search the perimeter and floors of the room for secret passages, but to no avail. I then decided that I would take the time to prepare a detect magic spell and cast it with my death master. I detected the presence of two auras against the back wall, one of illusion and one of conjuration. Suspecting the conjuration aura to be tied to a trap, I had no intention of interacting with the wall to attempt to disbelieve the illusion. But my assassin could not see the trap because it was masked by an illusion. To make a long story short, we eventually found a way to remove the illusion, the trap, and find the secret door behind which was the treasure. But it took some teamwork and party resources in the form of various spells before we succeeded. The illusion was not foiled solely because of detect magic. Part of the puzzle relied on us figuring out there was an illusion there, but that would not have been possible without detect magic.

 

[bloodtide]

Detecting Illusions?

So have I missed the big deal about 'detecting magic'? Any good spellcaster, let alone illusionist, will have TONS of things that detect magic all over the place.

Does no one have Nystul's Magical Aura any more? Not the SRD one that hides magic, but the old 2E one that gives an an object aura that is noticed by someone using magic detection. Furthermore, the caster can specify the type of magical aura that is detected (alteration, conjuration, etc.).

I'd think that any place would have a fix of magical auras.

 

[Tovec]

The "Fourth" point may have been inartfuly worded, but it states that illusions are still effective as is. This is separate from the notion that changing the game is an improvement. So no, #1 and #4 are not the same argument, but the first sentence of #4 starts out that way.

"D&D reality" refers to the game's own reality as it has been defined by the rules.

I disagree. Change has a transaction cost and in most cases causes stress to organisms.

In our campaign, we avoid changing rules unless we are convinced it is a net improvement for our experience and we've really taken the time to explore the greater implications. If we were to just decide that Elves have blue skin or Orcs were translucent, it would undermine the subjective feeling that we are playing D&D 3.5 and it would make the game trend toward someone's homebrew experiment. I personally am not interested in that.

IMO, changing rules arbitrarily is a bad precedent because it becomes a slippery slope. If one DM suddenly feels that illusions need protecting without any real justification? Where do we draw the line?



This. The proposed rules fundamentally change the game, imo.

YMMV

We are on the same side here. I was just pointing out the fallacy in a few arguments. I'm not saying that DnD doesn't have its own rules or reality, I'm saying that using the two in a sentence leads to comical hilarity by accident.

I'm not saying many ARBITRARY changes aren't bad. I'm saying Change by itself is not bad. Many changes people make in games are foolhardy but there are many others that are brilliant. It is hard to say ALL change is bad just because of the majority of ill-conceived ideas.

And yes mine was in context, I realize the silliness of using the same words with a (slightly) different meaning in the same post.

Also, if all change was bad for all organisms we would never have evolution, just extinction.

 

[Arrowhawk]

Also, if all change was bad for all organisms we would never have evolution, just extinction.

So let's talk biology for second. Evolution isn't improvement, at it's best, it's adaptation and in most cases it's merely natural selection.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

What?

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Whole lot of "arbitrary" being tossed around.

In a different thread Arrowhawk commented that:

The mechanics in D&D are concoctions and in many cases wholly arbitrary.​

Then in this thread:

Changing DM to protect one school of magic is wholly arbitrary.​

The shorter version of all this is that the game authors and designers can be clearly arbitrary with rules, but when GM's venture on the course of "arbitrary" rules concoctions it risks all sorts of dangerous misunderstood gaming?

 

[Arrowhawk]

Whole lot of "arbitrary" being tossed around.

In a different thread Arrowhawk commented that:

The mechanics in D&D are concoctions and in many cases wholly arbitrary.​

Then in this thread:

Changing DM to protect one school of magic is wholly arbitrary.​

The shorter version of all this is that the game authors and designers can be clearly arbitrary with rules, but when GM's venture on the course of "arbitrary" rules concoctions it risks all sorts of dangerous misunderstood gaming?

Except you're overlooking one crucial fact: many of the decisions about how things should work in 3.5 are based on feedback from previous versions, to say nothing of play testing the rules specific to 3.5.

Someone's arbitrary rules changes will not have been play-tested and more to the point, are most likely not approached from an objective view point.

FYI, I'm quite flattered that you're giving me so much special attention by cross-referencing my posts.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Except you're overlooking one crucial fact: many of the decisions about how things should work in 3.5 are based on feedback from previous versions, to say nothing of play testing the rules specific to 3.5.

That would make those decisions non-arbitrary then, wouldn't it? "Based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system"

Yet there is nothing magical about "feedback" or "playtesting" that makes the resulting product good for everyone.

Someone's arbitrary rules changes will not have been play-tested and more to the point, are most likely not approached from an objective view point.

It seems you trust the designers more than the gamers. I trust the gamers as much as the designers to know what will work at their table. It seems you approach these house rule proposals as something different than a group's very own playtesting. The same playtesting you laud designers for doing. I see them as one and the same. I trust gamers to know what will work at their table and to fix it as soon it doesn't. There doesn't need to be some official procedure which rules must be sandboxed before allowed into a game. Everyone's game is a continuous playtest IMO, decisions for house rules that come from it are definitionally not arbitrary.