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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhyrryl" data-source="post: 1082757" data-attributes="member: 6406">The first contingency you describe can be duplicated with one or more castings of lower-level spells, like commune or contact other plane.  They also have no saving throw and allow no SR.  "Is George attempting to overthrow the King?"  "Is Bob attempting to overthrow the King?" etc.  Admittedly, those lower-level spells have drawbacks (XP cost or chance of insanity), but again, they're lower-level spells.The atlas example is a good one, but it's likely to require several castings of the contingency as you narrow down the location (start with a planetary map, if any are available, move to map of the targeted country, if he's in a country, then a city, then a city block, then a blueprint of the building, again if any are even available), and you may never successfully point at Ike's location since he may be located someplace that's outside the regions covered by the atlas.  Or maybe the PCs run out of contingency spells for the day and by the time they memorize more, Ike's moved.  Or maybe Ike, being the powerful mage that he is, isn't even on the current plane of existence while the PCs are doing this.  All in all, this is a very easy example for the DM to pervert to his own ends in the name of story-telling.And speaking of story-telling, I'm quite happy to reward players for their clever uses of the resources they have available to them.  But they have to get those resources first.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Getting an accurate guild roster of a mage's guild (of any size) isn't going to be an easy task, and may flat out be impossible.  But if my party presented said plan of action and successfully accomplishes it without alerting Ike (unlikely, but if successful probably gaining them half a level's worth of experience in the process), I'd be more than happy to let them go through with it.Anyway, why would you present your party with the clue about an assassination attempt unless you wanted them to foil it?  Does it really matter how they foil it?  Hopefully you're not the kind of DM who spends weeks developing NPCs and specific encounters just to railroad the PCs down the adventure you want them to experience.And yes, I think it very appropriate for mind blank to be effective in foiling a contingency's trigger condition, and alarm's and magic mouth's for that matter; two more spells I feel should be Divinations.  Of course that prompts questions about other spells that leave effects behind with trigger mechanisms, like glyphs and symbols, to which I respond that the the detection abilities of those higher-level spells are minor compared to the triggered effect, therefore qualifying them for whatever school they may be a part of.Now, a question I do have though as a result of this dialog, is should mind blank result in answers of "Unknown" for questions posed through commune or contact other plane that relate to the subject of the mind blank?</blockquote>

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