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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgoroth" data-source="post: 6089946" data-attributes="member: 6674889">Fair enough, I concede the points you've all made and apologize for the snark in my tone (don't know what came over me). I am not a hypocrite, however, if Pathfinder allows a huge amount of tricorder-esque scanning (I mean by that, that you don't need to roll to succeed to detect whether something is magical at all, and I still maintain that that's a huge gift towards the PC side of the table), then I disagree with Pathfinder's approach too. However, I've never seen that particular spell or cantrip used nearly so often as arcana, which is basically a swiss army knife for all things magical (traps, detections, dispelling, lore, spellcraft type checks, etc). It's just too many really good uses all rolled up into one, and probably the reason why other editions' frequency never bothered me (including pathfinder), was because the spellcasters had other cool things to do such as cast their spells, i.e. weren't limited to 1 or 2 utility spells per day and weren't spamming the red button (arcana) all the time like I saw in 4e over the years. It gets old after a while. If the first edition ten-foot-pole + listen for noise/detect traps routine was annoying, then 4e had Arcana checks ad nauseum. Again, there was just more variety of stuff to do, both in and out of combat, I found. I'm not saying let's make casters uber powerful, let's just make them have to pick and chose when to know for sure whether there is a magical effect. After playing AD&D for 20 years, it now seems like just another thing they had right before that they mucked up. Probably why there will still be more AD&D players 20 years from now than 4e ones. I just find grittiness and deadliness and difficulty is more central to the experience...and I don't want D&D to mimick the EZ life we have IRL where if you take one feat, suddenly it's like owning an iphone with google maps on it and wikipedia too. Maybe a high level wizard can do that, but you should have to earn those things...a crystal ball or crystal-ball type effect should not be easy to come by, nor common IMO.</blockquote>

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