Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6124842" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 316: February 2004part 4/8Smoke and Mirrors: Good old Scry and remote nuke or teleport. If anything will wreck espionage games, it's cheap and easy divination magic. Look what Google and cheap surveillance cameras have done to information gathering in the real world. If it weren't for the sheer volume of information and number of false positives, most people would be all too easy to monitor these days. So any D&D focussed look at spying has to deal with this problem. Fortunately, Mike Mearls decides to tackle this in a fair manner, encouraging DM's to tackle this in-game, rather than nerfing powers. (after all, that's his job <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) After all, while there may not be as many counterspells as divinations, the ones there are tend to be broader in their application, to deal with a whole range of intrusions. The important thing if players are making intelligent use of divinations is to let the enemy have access to them too, and then fairly keep track of what each side knows about the other. Don't give the enemy an unlimited budget, but let them use what they have to it's full potential. Remember that you need to ask the right questions to get information that's actually useful. Take the sensible approach in a non sensible world, and hopefully you will still get a fun game. This all seems reasonable enough to me. Spies like us: Weirdly enough, we finish with a second bit of basic PC focussed advice, talking about how characters of all classes except paladins can find roles to disguise themselves and use their skills to help pull off a heist. The main difference is that while that concentrated on making new characters for an espionage focussed campaign, this is for existing ones suddenly plunged into the world of intrigue and trying to figure out how to be the playas and not the suckas. There is a fair bit of overlap though, enough that I wound up with a sense of deja vu when going through it. I suppose it is an old teaching technique. Tell people what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them, and hopefully it sticks in their brain.</blockquote>

Verification