Detect Magic is Dead

[Scribble]

Eh, somewhat. The artist in me wants to agree, but saying that one image and a paragraph is enough to get across even the fundamentals of a race is seriously stretching it at best.

Hrmm... that gives me an idea... perhaps there would be some way to give people more knowledge about a race... Something that would maybe give us the Ecology of a certain monster... hrmm... what could we do... I need to think...

 

[WalterKovacs]

It does beg the question of whether or not detect magic is still necessary though. If I can identify everything a magic item does, do I know if its magical just by picking it up? I assume not, because I think they said detect magic was a ritual.

Likely do the same thing the non-magic users do in a few of the campaigns I've seen. They look for the stuff that is of "high quality". Masterwork items are still worth enough money to toss them into the loot pile, and magic items have to be masterwork ... so that's generally their basic trick, with the wizard then taking out the artificer's monocle to identify any item.

Odds are they can easily justify it with the old 3.5 DMG note about making magic items obvious.

The flaming sword has rubies, or a reddish tinge, or something that hints at it's nature. And, the "trial and error" method can easily be part of the one rest. Just as with the Book of Nine Swords, you can attune yourself to a new weapon for the purpose of weapon focus, or get back expended maneuvers by doing some simple weapon excersises for 5 minutes [a rest] ... you could have the same thing with a magic weapon.

A wizard or warlock, or heck even a cleric or paladin, could spend the rest in meditation to find out about the item. A martial character could spend the rest "testing" the item and figure it out in the time. You try out another of things until you find out how to 'activate' the sword.

Then again, magic may have some sort of low level 'intelligent item' feel, that merely holding an item for a certain ammount of time gives you an empathic link to find out what it does.

 

[drjones]

It looks like from KotS the arcane skill can allow one to 'detect magic' witha skill check. I have not seen in the actual module where it said to have the PCs roll for it but the skill description infers that.

Personally I would tailor it to the party, if they have a wizard anyway say it is a very low arcane check to spot the good stuff that is not obvious (ornate, fancy items I would poitn out anyway). If they don't have one I would give other hints so as not to punish for not choosing a wiz.