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Message: <blockquote data-quote="airwalkrr" data-source="post: 5723583" data-attributes="member: 12460">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.</blockquote>

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