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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Havrik Stoneskimmer" data-source="post: 5595553" data-attributes="member: 6670929">Thanks to everyone who commented. There are a lot of great ideas here!I think in retrospect the problem was that I didn't really anticipate them asking for something like this and I was caught off guard without a clear idea of what rituals might be available.In hindsight, I should have let them cast "Detect Object" and reading the ritual description I don't think it would have given them much information that they couldn't get in other ways. Actual scrying and divination is pretty high-level in D&D 4e and pretty much out of range of heroic tier characters.Just to clarify my setting, I'm starting with the default Nentir Vale setting. The university is one of the most acclaimed in the Nentir Vale region. In this setting, there was once a great empire (like the Roman Empire) which fell about 100 years ago, and the current age is essentially a Dark Age. So my take on this is that once upon a time there were incredibly powerful wizards and magic (in my mind, this was when the famous AD&D wizards lived) and there are relics of such magic lingering around today but now there are very few if any who can harness such power. So in the natural world, I don't think even a great university of sages and scholars would be able to perform rituals over say level 10.One of my players said afterwards that he felt a little bit railroaded because he felt that clairvoyance spells would logically be available (even though in 4e I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption). I guess that goes to show that railroading is more about perception that actual game design, because I really didn't have any set chain of events that I wanted to happen; I was really just improvising off of what actions the players took to solve the mystery. In fact I went to particular length to design a situation rather than a story. It's just that I was caught unprepared on this issue that made me discourage them from getting the NPCs to figure it out for them. My fault, sure. Although sometimes it seems like players and DMs may have different perspectives on what the PCs ought to be capable of doing and what resources they have available, leading players to feel constrained and grumpy even when given a logical in-game reason why something isn't available to them.It's funny, isn't it? Nobody likes an Elminster that fights off the BBEG while the PCs stand on the sidelines and watched, but when an Elminster appears in the story, the players are not unlikely to ask him to help them fight the BBEG!</blockquote>

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