Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 5936445" data-attributes="member: 50987">In this most recent playtest, the wizard cast it nearly every single round.  Eventually, after about the fifteenth time he cast the spell, he told the DM to "just assume I am casting Detect Magic constantly, over and over again, unless I call another action."  She responded, "Okay, but you will be muttering incantations and waving your hands around the entire time, which will make hiding and sneaking difficult."  He decided to back down, and went back to just casting the spell at every whim.For the most part, it ended up working like a search check: if something in the room was magical, she added a brief description of it to the room.  "...and you sense a magical presence in the room."  After the game, I asked her how she quantified it, and she said that she just figured it was just another thing in the room that could be found if we looked hard enough for it.  Small things, like keys or coins, require a lot more effort to Search for.  So, likewise, small magical auras like a healing potion or a low-level scroll would require more effort to sense.  Obviously magical things, like a crackling magic portal to another world, would be overwhelmingly strong.It was sort of backwards from the way I would have handled it.  I would have regarded any magical aura to be as obvious as a lit torch unless it was intended to be hidden or misleading (a cursed item, or an illusion spell.)  The difference between detecting a magic potion on a shelf and an illusion, then, would be the difference between detecting a coin that is hidden under the ashes in the fireplace vs. a coin that is laying out in plain sight on the fireplace mantle.  But I digress.  I don't expect a quantified table of DCs for Search checks, so I don't expect one for Detect Magic either. I am curious about illusions, as well, and magical creatures like the medusa.  How do we describe them with Detect Magic?As much as I love this spell, I still wish it was not an at-will ability.  (I feel this way about all at-will superpowers, magical or otherwise.)  It's not grossly unbalanced the way Radiant Lance is, but it lacks a certain sense of mystery and sleuthing when you can just tell the DM that you are going to wander around the room like a Magic Metal Detector.  The way this spell is written, it would be perfect as a storytelling element...if it couldn't be spammed nonstop and totally kill any suspense or intrigue that the DM was building up to.It doesn't break the game mechanics, it just makes the game dull.</blockquote>

Verification