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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elethiomel" data-source="post: 4840768" data-attributes="member: 49897">Knowledge (arcana), Spellcraft, other knowledge skills, and roleplaying can all make for a character that is suspicious about a certain situation. Wait... roleplaying? Yes. There's no game mechanic that tells you that if you have int above say 2, you can remember that someone walked through a doorway and figure out that if you want to reach them you should also go through that doorway. In the absence of such a mechanic you have to consider your character's stats and personality and then pose the question, "could my character reason that out?".You are not the only one to have memories of previous campaign events. Your character also has these memories. If your character has a decent intelligence and/or wisdom score they should be able to apply the same thought processes to those memories as you can, without of course including any out-of-character knowledge.I think this is the place for another example.An Arcane Trickster is on a solo adventure hunting a bad guy who has done evil deeds. She has learned that he's made his lair under an abandoned temple to an ancient, forgotten god.Situation A:The bad guy, who is a mage, has hidden the main entrance to his basement lair behind a Permanent Image of a statue (cast from a scroll, the highest level spells he can cast himself is 4th level spells). The Arcane Trickster searches the temple for secret entrances. During this search she examines the statue closely (as she's searching for secret entrances) and fails her will save. As she has no other suspicions about the statue at this time she believes that it is real.Situation B:Having found the rear entrance to the mage's lair the Arcane Trickster has entered the lair and confronted the mage about his wicked deeds. Instead of meekly coming along he decided to try to kill the Arcane Trickster. There was a prolonged battle, and both characters exhausted most of their spells. At the end, most of the Arcane Trickster's buffs were dispelled and she had to cast See Invisible to go after the mage who'd just cast Greater Invisibility. She has very few other spells left, among them not a single divination. The mage casts his ace-in-the-hole, Evard's Black Tentacles, trapping the Arcane Trickster in place while he makes his escape. He runs through a hallway the Arcane Trickster has yet to enter. After a while, the Arcane Trickster gets loose from the black tentacles and follows the mage through the hallway. See invisibility is still up and she hasn't seen the mage escape through any other doors. The hallway ends in what appears to be a small, empty room. This makes the Arcane Trickster consider several possibilities. Among them are: - There is a secret exit somewhere in this room. - There is an illusion covering some part of the room and the mage is hiding in the other part of the room. - The mage has fled by magical means (teleport, dimension door, etc).To make sure none of the two first possibilities are true, she decides to examine the room in this order: 1) Search the room for secret doors and traps. 2) Poke the walls with a stick to make sure they aren't illusory (she doesn't want to poke the walls first because that may set off any traps that are there).Scenario 1:There are no secret doors or illusory walls. The mage has fled via Dimension Door (again off a scroll, which he had stashed here for just such an eventuality). The Arcane Trickster searches all the walls for secrets and traps and find none. She then proceeds to poke all the walls, and finding them solid is forced to conclude that the evil mage has gotten away.Scenario 2:The mage has cast Silence and then (metamagic-silent) Silent Image to cover up the whole half of the room that the Silence effect covers. He's desperately staring at the searching Arcane Trickster, hoping she doesn't find him. The Arcane Trickster searches all the walls for secret doors and traps. In doing so she triggers the "closely studying" clause of Illusions and Saving Throws, fails her Will save and thus does not notice anything amiss with the wall that happens to be a Silent Image. She then proceeds to the second stage of her plan, which is to poke all the walls with a stick to make sure they're not illusory. Only, according to some posters in this thread she doesn't get to do that, because it would be metagaming - she's already failed her Will save and is so convinced the silent image of a wall is actually a real wall she won't actually bother to check that wall... she'll just check the other walls which aren't illusory.I hold that "doesn't notice anything amiss" means that she doesn't notice the wall is an illusion by searching it for traps, but that does not mean she is more convinced that it is not illusory than she is about any of the other three walls in the room.</blockquote>

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