Pathfinder 1E As a GM, have you ever struggled against “easy magical solutions?"

[Fauchard1520]

Tell me if you've ever run into this one. You're in a murder mystery game, and you've got a corpse on your hands. And happily, since you're the luckiest mage in Golarion, you've got speak with dead prepped and ready to go. That's when your GM starts to get sweaty and nervous-looking.

"The jaw is missing," he says. "I mean... the victim didn't get a good look at their assailant. The corpse doesn't speak your language. All my answers are too cryptic to understand!"

To my way of thinking, this sort of blocking maneuver represents a game master struggling against the world established by the game rules, a world which makes it trivially easy for players to solve a murder mystery. The same holds true of spells like zone of truth, locate object, and (most generally) detect magic. There’s a balance to be found between clever antagonists who know to cover their tracks, and “irritating GMs who never let my freaking spells do what they’re supposed to do.”

So here's my question to the board. As a GM, have you ever struggled against “easy magical solutions?" What spell or ability was trivializing your encounters, and how did you deal with it? Should you deal with it? Or is it better practice to not plan around player abilities?

(Comic for illustrative purposes.)

 

[prabe]

Tell me if you've ever run into this one. You're in a murder mystery game, and you've got a corpse on your hands. And happily, since you're the luckiest mage in Golarion, you've got speak with dead prepped and ready to go. That's when your GM starts to get sweaty and nervous-looking.

"The jaw is missing," he says. "I mean... the victim didn't get a good look at their assailant. The corpse doesn't speak your language. All my answers are too cryptic to understand!"

To my way of thinking, this sort of blocking maneuver represents a game master struggling against the world established by the game rules, a world which makes it trivially easy for players to solve a murder mystery. The same holds true of spells like zone of truth, locate object, and (most generally) detect magic. There’s a balance to be found between clever antagonists who know to cover their tracks, and “irritating GMs who never let my freaking spells do what they’re supposed to do.”

So here's my question to the board. As a GM, have you ever struggled against “easy magical solutions?" What spell or ability was trivializing your encounters, and how did you deal with it? Should you deal with it? Or is it better practice to not plan around player abilities?

(Comic for illustrative purposes.)

I have never found it necessary to be so heavy-handed about blocking spells or other magical effects in my games. There is practically always a solution to one thing in another thing, if one looks hard enough.

The real challenge, IMO, is letting spells like speak with dead or whatever be useful, while still making the PCs work to solve the mystery.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

So here's my question to the board. As a GM, have you ever struggled against “easy magical solutions?" What spell or ability was trivializing your encounters, and how did you deal with it? Should you deal with it? Or is it better practice to not plan around player abilities?

(Comic for illustrative purposes.)

Struggled? Actually I have found that players are lacking creativity and innovation when it comes to using magic, perhaps because they have had previously bad experiences or fear to be shut down. I design adventure around the known capabilities of PCs. It doesn't mean it's a get-out-of-jail card, but its useful, much like expanding any other resources. You can do forensics with Medicine, you can cast speak with dead: both are ways to gather informations, and not to get the whole truth. I think struggling DM are those who didn't prepare a clue that could be given by the spell without giving away all the story. Or fear that "who did it?" would be obvious to the victim.

However... unless the assassin is clueless, he knows that (say) magic spells from level 1-3 are common. If they are common, there certainly is a specialized unit that can access them. And if the PCs are involved, chances are the victim would be worth sending a specialized unit. So if you're an assassin worth its salt, you take that into account. Killing doesn't silence. So you cast Darkness before killing your victim, rending its testimony less useful (but he could hear something, to give a clue to the PCs). And you cast speak with dead yourself so it renders the spell non-working for 10 days (and the less-intelligent-than-PCs policemen will just say "drat the magic doesn't work, we give up"). Or you disguise yourself as someone else (there are spells for that) so the victim is sure he was killed by a young actress from the Opera when he was in fact killed by an axe-wielding barbarian. If the victim is famous or noteworthy, Raise Dead is only a 5th level spell... so he'll probably defile the corpse to make it more difficult (just in case the PCs solve not the case but the problem by trivially chanting a few magic words and say to the family "yeah, yeah, he was dead, what's the fuss?").

As a GM, you know the players and their capabilities. If one decided to spend resources to acquire magic (Ok SWD is a clerical spell but in general), this choice should give them some edge at some point, an occasion to shine. The key to not making the magical solution moot is to simply consider that in a environment where such solutions are known, countermeasures exist. Making it interesting is that the solution was implemented sloppily, so the players still get an advantage, but without spoiling anything.

Fortresses changed a lot with the advent of the gunpowder. There is a strong chance they would be very different if they could be assaulted by the 347th griffon-mounted airborne regiment. Is it a struggle? I take it as an opportunity to ponder about the world design. There is no reason to limit magical investigation spells anymore than fireballs. Would one make all enemies resistant/immune to fire as soon as the characters hit 5h level? No, of course. Would trolls be instructed not to walk in close formation when operating near enemy spellcasters? That's Tactics 101 as taught at Howard's School of Torchbearing.

 

[Schmoe]

My general rule is to allow these things to always work the first time. I want the players being creatively engaged with the game! In fact, I usually struggle with players that just want to be spoon-fed. Getting the players to investigate anything is usually an exercise in frustration. I hope that by allowing creative applications of magic to work it starts to spark the possibilities that they have in the game. Afterward, if something starts to become a common tactic then I'll start introducing countermeasures when it's appropriate from a story perspective. I find that just about every magical tactic has a viable countermeasure, and I figure people in a magical world would certainly be smart enough to use the countermeasures when needed.

 

[bloodtide]

This really is not an issue any more then any other fictional thing. If a DM makes a "Scooby Do" level mystery, then sure lots of spells can ruin/solve things in seconds.

Of course, make a mystery a bit more hard then "silly cartoon for young kids" and you won't have a problem. There are only a couple million examples. Even just a glance a mystery books, TV shows and movies will show you tons of hard ones.

As you will see, it's quite common to have science/magic not help solve a mystery all that much. The Spell Speak with the Dead is not some all knowing all powerful spell. It's quite simple that the victim did NOT see how they were killed. Maybe they heard a noise or something...but that is just a clue. The victim might also be wrong or mistaken. Pathfinder even allows for the 'corpse' to refuse to answer and even bluff.

Once you get past super low level, you do have the trick of not killing someone to get them out of the way.

And you always have the twist that any bit of spell help won't help all that much. The 'corpse' might well say they were killed by person x. But there is no reason why. Person x is not around to ask. So you know who "killed" the guy...but not why, so it's not much help. A summoned monster is always fun too, as a target might well have no idea the person that sent the monster to kill them.

 

[GungHo]

No. If they outsmart me with simple magic that I forgot about, it's my problem.

 

[amethal]

I don't really care how the PCs solve the mystery. In Pathfinder, the mystery is only part of the adventure - if it's a murder mystery, they still have to find and confront the murderer, and maybe he has accomplices / employers who are still unknown.

If I wanted to run a long, drawn-out mystery scenario (which I don't!) then Pathfinder probably isn't the right system for it anyway.

If for some reason I decided to do it anyway, then I'd have to come up with counters for all the obvious ways of circumventing things whilst still running the risk that something I'd forgotten could still derail everything. And that's fine. (It's no different to when my tough boss monsters go down in 6 seconds despite the defences I've given them, which is also fine.)

 

[Fauchard1520]

My general rule is to allow these things to always work the first time. I want the players being creatively engaged with the game! In fact, I usually struggle with players that just want to be spoon-fed. Getting the players to investigate anything is usually an exercise in frustration. I hope that by allowing creative applications of magic to work it starts to spark the possibilities that they have in the game. Afterward, if something starts to become a common tactic then I'll start introducing countermeasures when it's appropriate from a story perspective. I find that just about every magical tactic has a viable countermeasure, and I figure people in a magical world would certainly be smart enough to use the countermeasures when needed.

I quite like this take. I've seen the "I'll let it work" mindset applied to oddball rulings and over the top stunts. It seems to work equally well here. The first zone of truth solves the problem, and so the player feels like their spells are valuable. The second may provide a minor clue. SPAM the tactic in every encounter and then workarounds and active countermeasures come online.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Lorefinder from Pelgrane Press provides a hack of the GUMSHOE investigation system for PF 1e, and has lots of useful advice for problem-solving spells (plus new spells) so that players can have meaningful options to help solve mysteries. It also gives useful GM advice so that they can structure mysteries and the information found in clues, so that players feel challenged, but are still empowered in using their skills and spells to help solve the mystery.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Tonguez]

But speak with dead states ‘The corpse knows only what it knew in life, including the languages it knew. Answers are usually brief, cryptic, or repetitive, and the corpse is under no compulsion to offer a truthful answer’
GMs who give erroneous cryptic one word answers are playing to the rules