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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Persiflage" data-source="post: 5271221" data-attributes="member: 73597">Well that's fine.  I've probably helped to cause a hundred times as much carnage with Ghost Sound over the years than I ever have with Detect Magic, but fine.  Your mileage varies from mine, no biggie; some people clearly agree with you.  I think you've got a bit hung up on it; taking three rounds to determine that *something* magical is in a square seems a pretty weak-sauce ability to me.  You could argue that you can't even tell that it's illusion magic if it's invisible: you don't have line of sight to the invisible "items or creatures bearing the aura", by definition, so you probably shouldn't get the Spellcraft check.  Area damage spells are not powerful, at least not in comparison to the alternatives, that's just what I'm saying.  It was just a throw-away comment and I don't want to be guilty of a total thread derailment, but I'm perfectly happy to illustrate with examples in another thread if you're interested.Detecting MAGIC doesn't involve sight either: where in the Detect Magic spell description does it say that it does?Not if there's something between you and the spot ten feet southwest...  but anyway, how on earth is this statement relevant?No, there's not, and nobody is saying there is: or at least, I'm not.  Detect Magic detects magical auras.  It doesn't let you see anything.  Even when you've detected an invisible creature's magical aura - if it has one - you still can't see the invisible creature, you can just detect which square its aura is in. After three rounds. Provided it doesn't move out of the way.Are you saying that your objection to Detect Magic is that - unlike the other detect spells (in the PHB, at least: others vary) - it doesn't have a line saying "If an aura is outside your line of sight then you determine its direction but not its exact location"?If that's all, fair enough: house-rule it in, job done.  However, it's not in the description as written and I'm happy to play it as it lies.  As the spell stands, the qualification is "if the auras are in your line of sight, you can make Spellcraft skill checks to determine the school of magic involved in each".  It's pretty clear from this that - as written - you get the rest of the information whether or not the aura is in your line of sight.  House-ruling the spell to make it function as you want it to is perfectly reasonable, but it's not a "loophole" to suggest that the spell works the way it's written.It doesn't function anything like See Invisibility.  See Invisibility allows you to see invisible things.  Detect Magic allows you to tell which square a magical aura is in, and Arcane Sight does the same thing by means of visual information: See Invisibility and Arcane Sight are by no means equivalent, although they are nicely complementary.Unless you use, you know, magic or something.  Like Clairvoyance.  Or Scrying.  Besides which, a brick wall will usually block line-of-effect, unless otherwise stated:  And:All in all, there are probably as many cases of having line-of-sight without line-of-effect as there are the other way around... but that doesn't matter with respect to Detect Magic, because it relies on line-of-effect rather than line-of-sight, and its parameters for line-of-effect are well-specified in the spell description.True Seeing isn't mentioned there either.  Neither is Glitterdust.  Neither is Dust of Appearance.  Neither is Invisibility Purge.  Neither is Faerie Fire.  So what?I'm not even sure what you're arguing here.  On the one hand, you seem to be saying Detect Magic is too powerful because it lets you see invisible creatures (after three rounds of study) which we're all agreed it does not do.  All it does is tell you the square a magical aura is in, assuming there is one.  If the invisible creature doesn't have any magical auras on its person - and there are many ways for this to happen - or if there are more powerful effects in the area masking the aura, or if divination counter-magic is employed, it won't show you the creature.You're saying that it's madness for a 0th-level spell to allow you to detect the presence of something invisible (which, provided said something has a magical aura, Detect Magic will do - as will a decent Spot or Listen check in most cases), but your real problem with it seems to be because of Arcane Sight - a 3rd-level spell - allowing you to pull the same trick without taking three rounds...  Given that See Invisibility is a 2nd-level spell that actually does let you see invisible things, this seems a bit peculiar.  I'd pretty much expect an arcane spellcaster to get a Permanent See Invisible (or an item that does the same) as soon as possible: mine always have.If your objection is specifically to someone running around with Permanent spells, well, you've got an issue there with fundamental game balance.  The way to deal with that is to house-rule away what you see the problems are, not to deny that the spells work the way they say they work.  Radmod has the right idea:This is a house-rule, nobody's trying to pretend it's anything but, and it works for them.  Cool.In all of this, it's important to remember that the 3rd-level Arcane Sight is a pretty weak-sister substitute for the 2nd-level See Invisibility when it comes to detecting invisible creatures, but it's much better for detecting hiding creatures.  And, of course, there are as many strategies for foiling Arcane Sight as there are for Detect Magic, and if bad-guys are on their home turf they should be aware of the threat and deploy appropriate counter-measures.  For instance, you don't want to be relying on Arcane Sight if you're facing a Ninja   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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