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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1924326" data-attributes="member: 15470">At +5, if the priests have only secondhand knowledge of the subjects.Definitely. Remember, the NPC's won't have 24/7 coverage (or whatever hour/day combination your campaign uses) - they certainly won't hear every conversation the PC's hold.3.5 scrying takes an hour to cast and provides only 1 minute/level of sight and sound; plus its fifth level, so a 10th-level cleric can only cast it twice per day.Not every scry spell will be able to give the NPC a read on where the PC's are; again, 3.5 scrying only shows a 10' radius around the subject, which definitely isn't enough to identify nearby landmarks, etc; in many cases, it may not even be enough to detemine who the PC is speaking with!Great idea, and one you could have a ton of fun with: your Bad Guys start laying traps for the *wrong series* of party actions, based on overhearing part of a discussion, where the party sounded like it was leaning towards plan A, but missed the part where they changed their minds and switched to plan B: which will have the added effect of giving your players the feeling that they 'outsmarted' the Bad Guys by coming up with a 'better' plan."Any creature with an Intelligence score of 12 or higher can notice the sensor by making a DC 20 Intelligence check." That's up to your interpretation as DM, but I might rule that everyone nearby gets that chance automatically, without having to 'declare' that action; and to award Circumstance bonuses for actively declaring that they were scanning for such a scry sensor in advance of having a particular conversation; you might also award the 'synergistic skill' +2 for particularly high ranks in Spot, Spellcraft, or Knowledge (Arcana) - (but remember that whatever you give your PC's today you ought to give your NPC's tomorrow). And of course, the sensor would show up on detect magic, once your PC's have figured out that the enemy is scrying you. In a campaign I'm a player in, a powerful NPC wizard chided us about how somebody else (not him) was scrying on us, and how we needed to be more careful; he wasn't somebody we trusted, but on that he was correct. That's just one of a number of things you could do to 'tip your hand' to the PC's: there might be any number of NPC's who could warn the PC's what's going on, if properly motivated.Heck, I heard a player recently complain that he'd never seen a DM arbitrarily award 'insight' to the character which he-the-player hadn't thought of; this is especially the case for an average person trying to role-play an exceptionally smart or exceptionally wise character: it is reasonable to think that the character, whose subconscious mind has many more hours to devote to the problem than the player does, might think of something the player hasn't. You might decide that any character who makes a DC 20 Wisdom check thinks of the enemy scrying on them, even if the player hasn't. "You wake up in the middle of the night, startled awake by the realization that...."And of course, there's the old standby of having the cleric or (pseudo?) paladin's diety appear to them in a dream, etc.I think your problem is just getting the players started thinking about the problem, and let their creativity run with it.</blockquote>

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