Glyph of Warding

[Shadow145]

It's coming up in an adventure and I was looking for some clarifications on how it worked. Okay, so the door is warded. There are no visible symbols or marks on the door. To the untrained eye it is a plain door that when opened goes boom. If a Rogue searches the door for traps and finds it, he sees the "almost invisible" tracing and recognizes it as a glyph of warding, but not the specific features of the glyph. He can disable it if he so chooses with a disable device check.

Now I get confused by this line:

From SRD:
Glyphs cannot be affected or bypassed by such means as physical or magical probing, though they can be dispelled. Mislead, polymorph, and nondetection (and similar magical effects) can fool a glyph, though nonmagical disguises and the like can’t. Read magic allows you to identify a glyph of warding with a DC 13 Spellcraft check. Identifying the glyph does not discharge it and allows you to know the basic nature of the glyph (version, type of damage caused, what spell is stored).

Could a Rogue who has seen it point it out to a wizard who could then determine the features of it with "Read Magic" and/or Dispel it? But you need to be able to see the glyph to cast read magic on it.

So can you detect a Glyph of Warding with Detect Magic? I guess I am confused by the whole "Glyphs cannot be affected or bypassed by such means as physical or magical probing, though they can be dispelled. " Would you detect that there was an abjuration Aura on the door, or nothing at all? And if they did detect it I am assuming it will not be fine enough to then cast read magic on it.

Or does that line just mean you can't scrape off, zap off, or set off the glyph with either magical or physical means.

Thanks.

 

[Bladesong]

I can only tell you how I handle it as DM though I too have been "frustrated" dealing with glyphs. Rogues can detect and deactivate a Glyph, but the rolls are much higher than mechanical traps (the books talk about magical traps, so you have that info already). If a rogue successfully detects it, but cannot deactivate it, he could say "I believe there is a magical trap on this door" and ask a caster to cast Detect Magic which should reveal the glyph to the caster. Now that he can see it (and he would be the only one that could) he can cast Read Magic to identify it with a successful Spellcraft check. That will tell the caster the version type, and the caster could then try to Dispell it or at least cast a spell that will reduce the damage it inflicts. Uses up lots of spells, but if it was not so hard to remove, no one would bother placing the glyph in the first place.

Hope this helps.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Couldn't you put the glyph on the inside of the door? Making finding and removing it impossible without getting past the door.

 

[Shadow145]

Thanks for the input. Much appreciated.

I'm not sure if putting one on the inside of a door would work, I always envisioned the glyph exploding out and hitting the PC. That, and I'm likely to get lynched by my players for a trick like that. However if it didn't go off going into the room no one would expect to get hit by the glyph on the way out of the room.

The adventure I'm running says the door is supposed to have two glyphs that do negative energy damage, and in 3.5 you can't put two on a single door, and they can't be negative energy either. I'm thinking about changing it to either put one on the door and one on a chest in the room, or put on on the door and one on the 5' square just on the other side of the door, which could also lead to the aforementioned lynching, as well as making the party overparanoid of anywhere they step. Very annoying when that happens. I guess I might as well go sonic, they would resist it as well as they would have resisted the negatve energy.

Most likely what will happen is the ranger (acting as rogue since the last rogue bought it) will not find it, and take the damage. Cleric will heal ranger, they will go in the room and set off the one on the chest. Cleric will heal ranger. Then they go and fight the rest of the baddies, minus some healing spells.

But reading up on Glyph made me want to ask these questions.