D&D 3E/3.5 problem spells in 3.5

[Celebrim]

After over 20 years of playing and DMing (A)D&D, we agreed now in one 3.5 group after some intensive discussion a long list of spells that we considered story-breaking or simply overpowered. Plus, the selection of spells is limited to the PHB, ELH, FRCS, PGtF, Complete Scoundrel, Mage, Warrior, Adventurer, Divine, Arcane. The DM may allow a spell now and then from another source, but that is very rare.

To note, the group is not using the spell slot system, but instead uses spell point pools that tap the casters when they cast a spell. In fact, they can cast any spell they know as long as they have sufficient energy in their pools. In addition, all classes get +2 extra skill points at each level.

Criteria for a spell ban:
Casting time "immediate" or "swift": banned. Feather Fall is the only exception.
Is it a "Detect XYZ" spell: banned. Yes, that includes Detect Magic, Poison, Traps. And the Paladin ability as well. Use Sense Motive to get an idea of the alignment. And illusions and magical traps can be used. We had seen overuse of Detect Magic by our Warlock. Not nice.
Is it a "Discern XYZ" spell: banned. Now you can play a story around a kidnapped person even at higher levels.
Is it a "Speak with XYZ" spell: banned. Now you can develop a story about murder without resorting to several magical counter effects to let Speak with Dead fail...
Is it a "XYZ Lorecall" spell: banned. No cheesy extra skill boni please.
Is it a "Know XYZ" spell: banned. Use your skills instead.
Is it a "Locate XYZ" spell: banned. Use your skills instead, listen to the clues given by the DM.
Is it a spell with the [Scrying] descriptor: banned.
Is it a spell with the [Teleportation] descriptor: banned. Includes spell-like and supernatural effects as well. Exceptions are Planeshift and Maze.
Is it a spell that contacts a deity or its servitors: banned. In fact, Commune, Commune, with Nature, Augury, Omen of Peril, Divination, Contact other Plane are banned, i.e., all spells that may give an answer or idea to a problem that the players are unwilling to resolve by thinking and/or non-magical means.

Spells that do not fall into one of the above criteria are:
Comprehend Languages and Tongues: use your (extra) skills points.
Legend Lore, Vision: wizards = bards? Nope.
Windwalk: has seen too much abuse. Banned.
Arcane Sight (Greater): Both were just nasty, as Detect Magic. Banned.
Stone Tell: as Speak with XYZ. Banned.
Wieldskill, Warning: cheese = banned.
Weather Eye: use your Survival skill. Banned.
Zone of Truth: see Discern Lies. Banned.
Read Magic: banned. Use your extra skill points.

Shapechange, Polymorph any Object: under debate, possibly either to be banned or significantly reduced in duration.
Mind Blank: under debate, may be significantly reduced in duration.

On some level I agree with your overall desire to safe gaurd mystery, reduce the number of information based win buttons and silo skill monkey spotlight. However, I also think you've gone way way too far.

Basically you've banned the almost the entire divination subschool. There is really no need for that. If what you are interested in protecting are murder mysteries and kidnappings even at high level, you need to come to an important realization. If the murderer or the kidnapper is a person of fewer resources than the PC's, this isn't really a suitable heroic challenge for high level characters. In a world with resources like Speak with the Dead or Raise Dead and so forth, no body sets out to assassinate a king using less resources than what is trivially required to undo or solve their crime. Rather than banning these information seeking spells, I think its better to embrace them as being part of normal magical forensic technic. That is to say, powerful criminals capable of playing Moriarty to your Sherlock already know that you are going to cast Speak with the Dead, Stone Tell, Detect X, etc. Not only have they planned for it, they are counting on it. With some thought, it's quite possible to leave a highly misleading trail for such magic. A spell as simple as 'Disguise Self' will leave all sorts of false leads behind, as can anything else that alters apparant form. A Summoning spell allows you to literally have something other than you commit the actual act of violence. There are likewise many defensive spells and magical items available to worthy foes that can be used to thwart divination magic, and if you are creative you can easily invent many others. In terms of thwarting things like raise dead or speak with the dead, there are all sorts of options available - from a baneful polymorph (leaving the target alive but twarting all sorts of things) to having the body consumed by green slime or any of the other many such hazards, to inventing rare and deadly poisons that turn bodies into tar or incinerate them.

To a certain extent I think you are cheating your players out of a high level game of intrigue, forcing msysteries at high level between combatants of profound power to play out like murders and conspiracies by common street criminals. You are also I think damaging your own ability to imagine how a high level murder might be planned out and with it the oppurtunity to expand your creativity.

To be quite frank, what I see is less problems with the system than someone who is taking a rather lazy approach to their game planning, plotting and scenario design. For a high level character bent on kidnapping someone, it's rather inconcievable that they'd not have a special room lined with lead panels and made of bricks mortared with blood and further protected by wards that block teleportation and scrying... possibly leaving some innocous illusion in its place... or otherwise have prepared whatever basic preparations required to thwart equal or lower level characters easily thwarting their schemes. Baneful polymorph of the victim into a mouse, and placing them into a jar that has been magically protected to block discern location spells is trivially easy for a high level caster and makes an awesome reveal - the victim has been in plain sight all along, hidden among the other lab animals.

What I tend to do is rather than ban such information gathering devices, rebalance them so that they are closer in power to information seeking abilities you'd have via skills. In particular, I tend to rewrite anything that has an absolute effect. That tends to mean that they require an opposed skill check - detect evil is Scry vs. Bluff modified by the targets aura strength, for example. Or that if they effect an existing skill check, they tend to give a +5 enhancment bonus, requiring the caster to be something of a skill monkey themselves if they are to make the best use of a wide range of divinations. Zone of Truth doesn't prevent lies - it just causes the target to have a penalty on their bluff checks. Simple changes like that leave spells as a resource that can be employed creatively and selectively without making them simplistic win buttons.

And there are a wide variaty of other simple balancing techniques. I mean, there is literally no way at all Detect Evil or Know Alignment would normally be helpful in solving a problem in my games. A player attempting to use that as an 'I win' button and smiting literally or metaphorically the first evil character he came across would find it ending disasterously. Afterall, it's the innocent 'evil' person with nothing to hide that is the one doing the least to hide it. You'll end up smiting a random lecher with a gambling and substance abuse problem who sometimes cheats his customers by putting his thumb on the scale, while the actual murderer smirks behind your back safe in the knowledge he's prepared for such simple tricks. And now that you've played the buffoon, not only is the law unlikely to be on your side, but no one is going to trust you if you say, "It's the Lord Chamberlain. He's evil. We have to stop him!" And that's to say nothing of the fact that magical cooersion of any sort is highly unlikely to be legally admisable as evidence except in the most authoritarian regimes with the characters are actual agents of the regime... and of course in that case, it's likely that the authorities are the problem.

I guess what I'm sayings is that after 20 years of play, I'd expected you to have gotten past this phase of one's DMing. At some point I expect DMs to reach a sophistication level where all these 'win buttons' are something they know about, have planned for, can't be surprised with and in fact are assumed under the 'three clue rule' to be something that the players will do and likely need to do to have any chance of putting the peices together. It's all well and good to say, "Use your skill points.", because they should. But you don't want your game to stall just because they roll 3 1's in a roll any more than you want it truncated because they cast Discern Location and you'd not considered the possibility. It's far better to go, Skill X gets 1 clue, Skill Y gets another clue, Spell X gets a third clue, and Spell Y gets a 4th clue. And then think about what the villain might have done to block other techniques. But really, if you just want the villain to win, not only is this a boring outcome, it's trivially easy for a DM to produce. If you throw all possible resources at the problem, it should be trivially easy to imagine a scenario where the perfect villain commits the perfect crime and leaves zero clues behind. The real trick is to match the subtly of what the villains miss to the skill of the players and the capabilities of their characters.

 

[Celebrim]

Let me just briefly talk about murder mysteries in a high magic setting.

If you want to plan a great D&D murder mystery, you have to think like Agatha Christy. In an Agatha Christy story, the murder is hidden behind several layers of tricks and misdirections. The murderer plans a sophisticated plot to thwart criminal investigation, and the reader/investigator is expected to tease out what the actual method was from amongst the false leads. Far from making such plots more difficult to pull off, magic actually makes them far easier and more satisfying. In addition to standard Agatha Christy misdirection like - the murderer was one of the victims (and not necessarily the last one), there are mutliple murderers (thus giving everyone air tight alibi's), the first victim was not the intended victim (thus throwing off investigation of motive), and so forth - magic lets you convincingly pull of some Agatha Christy tricks that are otherwise implausible.

For example...

a) The murderer was polymorphed or otherwise completely disguised at the time of the killing. Viewing the murder through the eyes of any witness - nearby stones, plants, the murdered person themselves, produces false leads.
b) The murderer was a conjured/called creature employed by the murder plotter.
c) The murderer was mentally dominated at the time.
d) The murderer employed a modify memory spell on himself removing all memory of the crime, thereby allowing him to convincingly lie that, "He didn't do it." because he has zero memory of the event or of modifying his memory. You want to use Zone of Truth as a plot point... fine. Now you are playing the murder's game.
e) The murderer has switched bodies using magic jar, illusions polymorph any object, doppleganger, etc. The murderer faked his own death, and took over the identity of who he actually killed.
f) The murderer used magic or a potion to place himself in a death-like state as one of the apparant victims of the crime, hiding among the 4-5 other dead bodies. He then either has woken up and escaped from his burial place, or intends to do so in the future - with or without the aid of an accomplice.

And you can stack layers and layers of this sort of misdirection, carefully building up a real mystery at what ever depth you think your characters have the skill to reach. Magic is not your enemy in building murder mysteries. Agatha Christy would have loved to be able to employ magic I think, except that she probably would have found it made it just too easy.

 

[emanresu]

[h=1]celerity


vs....


Hustle[/h][h=4]Psychometabolism[/h]

Level:	Egoist 3, psychic warrior 2
Display:	Auditory
Manifesting Time:	1 swift action
Range:	Personal
Target:	You
Effect:	1 extra move action
Power Points:	Egoist 5, psychic warrior 3

You gain an additional move action in the current round. Taking a full round’s worth of attacks and then using this power to move away from your foe does provoke attacks of opportunity.
You can manifest this power with an instant thought, quickly enough to gain the benefit of the power before you move. Manifesting the power is a swift action You cannot manifest this power when it isn’t your turn.

oh you know I just noticed theres multiple pages of responses

alrighty

eman

​

 

[Dark Dragon]

Basically you've banned the almost the entire divination subschool. There is really no need for that. If what you are interested in protecting are murder mysteries and kidnappings even at high level, you need to come to an important realization. If the murderer or the kidnapper is a person of fewer resources than the PC's, this isn't really a suitable heroic challenge for high level characters. In a world with resources like Speak with the Dead or Raise Dead and so forth, no body sets out to assassinate a king using less resources than what is trivially required to undo or solve their crime. Rather than banning these information seeking spells, I think its better to embrace them as being part of normal magical forensic technic. That is to say, powerful criminals capable of playing Moriarty to your Sherlock already know that you are going to cast Speak with the Dead, Stone Tell, Detect X, etc. Not only have they planned for it, they are counting on it. With some thought, it's quite possible to leave a highly misleading trail for such magic. A spell as simple as 'Disguise Self' will leave all sorts of false leads behind, as can anything else that alters apparant form. A Summoning spell allows you to literally have something other than you commit the actual act of violence. There are likewise many defensive spells and magical items available to worthy foes that can be used to thwart divination magic, and if you are creative you can easily invent many others. In terms of thwarting things like raise dead or speak with the dead, there are all sorts of options available - from a baneful polymorph (leaving the target alive but twarting all sorts of things) to having the body consumed by green slime or any of the other many such hazards, to inventing rare and deadly poisons that turn bodies into tar or incinerate them.

To a certain extent I think you are cheating your players out of a high level game of intrigue, forcing msysteries at high level between combatants of profound power to play out like murders and conspiracies by common street criminals. You are also I think damaging your own ability to imagine how a high level murder might be planned out and with it the oppurtunity to expand your creativity.

True, the Divinition school in the group is now largely inaccessible for the PCs. But I have to clarify the term "banned" with respect of the Divination school. We agreed that the listed Divination spells are not entirely removed from game, but still accessible for NPC "oracle"-type guys. It is up to the DM to decide if the party meets an oracle or not, and the PCs still need to pay for the oracle's spellcasting (price at the DM's discretion).

I fully appreciate your comments and thoughts on the interplay between Diviniation and obscuring spells, and I understand your objections. Many of the tactics of the evil guys you have described were indeed used by the DMs of my group (we rotate DMing, so most players had to DM from time to time). But from my and from some other players impression it was a race of arms: a good divination spell is foiled by an obscuring spell. Or the murderer was disguised/polymorphed. Or he summoned/called a creature to do the job. Or ordered someone else to use poison (with ridiculous DCs, but that is another story), hoping that the victim is not paranoid to cast Detect Poison first... This foils simple or straight forward spells to gain some knowledge about the evil guy. Detect Evil is also easily foiled by using a number of evil NPCs who have nothing to do with the case at hand, but are an easy way to mark the wrong trail (and foil the paladin). But it boils down to a race of arms nevertheless, and this is in my opinion boring after a while.

As a result of this race of arms the players still have to use their brains and work with the clues given by the DM, because their magic is foiled by counter-magic or well-known stuff that blocks the simple divination spells.
You mention the Agatha Christie stories. I haven't read the books but I have seen some of the movies. The old lady simply uses her brains and puts the pieces of the puzzle together. The same for Hitchcock's Psycho: a surprising end simply because the murderer was disguised. The best way to represent some knowledge (or brains) that the PCs may use is the skill point system. If the player has a good idea or clue outside the skill point system they should go ahead and elaborate their thoughts. If that is the case, I as a DM would not block such thinking by refering to the skill system. If the players ask if a PC may use skill xyz to find out something, this is ok as well, and may provide food for more ideas.

In contrast to this thinking I really dislike it if the players return the answer to a question to the DM by e.g. casting "Commune". Why would the patron deity of a LG cleric deny a proper answer, if the cleric asks first the simple question "Was one of the family members - that I know by name - of Lord X's family involved in planning of the murder of Lord X?" If the answer is yes, he may proceed with 8 other questions asking involvement of specific family members. If the answer is no, he can replace ad hoc "family" with evil organisations or known enemies of Lord X for the remaining questions. Clever players write down the questions in advance with alternative questions depending on the previous answer. Good, but still it returns the overall answer to a question back to the DM. And other than by DM's decision this spell can't be foiled. If the DM denies an answer, it comes close to banning, IMHO.

To be quite frank, what I see is less problems with the system than someone who is taking a rather lazy approach to their game planning, plotting and scenario design. For a high level character bent on kidnapping someone, it's rather inconcievable that they'd not have a special room lined with lead panels and made of bricks mortared with blood and further protected by wards that block teleportation and scrying... possibly leaving some innocous illusion in its place... or otherwise have prepared whatever basic preparations required to thwart equal or lower level characters easily thwarting their schemes. Baneful polymorph of the victim into a mouse, and placing them into a jar that has been magically protected to block discern location spells is trivially easy for a high level caster and makes an awesome reveal - the victim has been in plain sight all along, hidden among the other lab animals.

Yes, it may be called lazy game planning and scenario design. It may be also called avoiding another race of arms. All the counter-measures you have described foil the divination capabilities of PCs involved in unraveling a crime. If you want that the PCs use their divination spells, why foiling than the effect? It is as good as banning the spells, and may leave some players frustrated about a DM blocking their PCs' abilities. So I wonder what hints and tips you as a DM would give to the party to unravel the true murderer or find a kidnapped person if all divination spells are blocked?

Even if a DM takes a lot of time in scenario planning, I doubt that the DM has all possible questions and ideas of the players in mind AND has an ad hoc fitting answer to possible questions.
This is especially true for spells that make predictions about the future (Augury, Divination, Weathereye), a larger area (Commune with Nature), or give knowledge about past events (Hindsight, Legend Lore, Vision). You never know if or when a PC spellcaster happens to cast these spells in a campaign.

Let me just briefly talk about murder mysteries in a high magic setting.

If you want to plan a great D&D murder mystery, you have to think like Agatha Christy. In an Agatha Christy story, the murder is hidden behind several layers of tricks and misdirections. The murderer plans a sophisticated plot to thwart criminal investigation, and the reader/investigator is expected to tease out what the actual method was from amongst the false leads. Far from making such plots more difficult to pull off, magic actually makes them far easier and more satisfying. In addition to standard Agatha Christy misdirection like - the murderer was one of the victims (and not necessarily the last one), there are mutliple murderers (thus giving everyone air tight alibi's), the first victim was not the intended victim (thus throwing off investigation of motive), and so forth - magic lets you convincingly pull of some Agatha Christy tricks that are otherwise implausible.

For example...

a) The murderer was polymorphed or otherwise completely disguised at the time of the killing. Viewing the murder through the eyes of any witness - nearby stones, plants, the murdered person themselves, produces false leads.
b) The murderer was a conjured/called creature employed by the murder plotter.
c) The murderer was mentally dominated at the time.
d) The murderer employed a modify memory spell on himself removing all memory of the crime, thereby allowing him to convincingly lie that, "He didn't do it." because he has zero memory of the event or of modifying his memory. You want to use Zone of Truth as a plot point... fine. Now you are playing the murder's game.
e) The murderer has switched bodies using magic jar, illusions polymorph any object, doppleganger, etc. The murderer faked his own death, and took over the identity of who he actually killed.
f) The murderer used magic or a potion to place himself in a death-like state as one of the apparant victims of the crime, hiding among the 4-5 other dead bodies. He then either has woken up and escaped from his burial place, or intends to do so in the future - with or without the aid of an accomplice.

And you can stack layers and layers of this sort of misdirection, carefully building up a real mystery at what ever depth you think your characters have the skill to reach. Magic is not your enemy in building murder mysteries. Agatha Christy would have loved to be able to employ magic I think, except that she probably would have found it made it just too easy.

Many of these points were indeed used against the party, sometimes even by some PCs (I played an assassin who relied a lot on disguise and/or killed over some distance). Your point f) is a nice idea, reminds me a bit of the movie "Pact of the Wolves". Your ideas work also well in a setting with a restricted use of divination spells, and may emphasise a use of social skills (Gather Information, Sense Motive, Bluff, Diplomacy, Heal (to investigate a corpse, find traces of poison), Intimidate).

I fully agree that magic strongly supports building a myth around e.g. a murder. I do not like it however how it is then so easily de-mythified by the system that has spells ready for a number of situations (for which the DM has to have a proper counter-measure prepared, sometimes the same again and again - like the sheet of lead). That's why we agreed to limit access to such spells; and others that were obvioulsy overused due to flaws in the design.

 

[Celebrim]

BTW, I love the good natured way you argue your reply.

But it boils down to a race of arms nevertheless, and this is in my opinion boring after a while.

I can understand the arms race objection, but I think it applies to any character ability and not just skills. What is sense motive but a lie dectection spell unless you counter it with runaway bluffing ability? What is Track and boundless skills in that regard but discern location unless you counter it in some fashion or just say 'no'? When your player can "Track a Falcon on a cloudy day", then you are in an arms race if you want the murderer to get away from the scene whether or not spells are involved.

As a result of this race of arms the players still have to use their brains and work with the clues given by the DM, because their magic is foiled by counter-magic or well-known stuff that blocks the simple divination spells.

Well sure, but that isn't problem limited to only magical forensics. The murderer wears ordinary disguises, tells ordinary lies, and wore gloves to avoid leaving finger prints. The arms race is still in place and is inevitable in any contest between a criminal and increasingly compotent investigators.

If the players ask if a PC may use skill xyz to find out something, this is ok as well, and may provide food for more ideas.

So why not spells to?

If you want that the PCs use their divination spells, why foiling than the effect? It is as good as banning the spells, and may leave some players frustrated about a DM blocking their PCs' abilities. So I wonder what hints and tips you as a DM would give to the party to unravel the true murderer or find a kidnapped person if all divination spells are blocked?

If your NPCs have +30 Bluff skill, what good is it in having a Sense Motive skill sense you are always blocking the PC's abilities? The answer to what hints and tips you give to the party to unravel the true murderer is, "The same you would give from search, sense motive, knowledge, appraise and spot checks." (Or whatever skill system you use.) Each followed up on avenue may (or may not) offer an additional insight as to what the whole picture looks like. For example, if they party uses stone tell to see the murder or hear about it, they get some insight as to what the murderer looked like. If they see that a person who looked like Tim the Enchanter did it, the clue might not be 'Tim did it, you win!'. The clue might actually be, "Either Tim did it, forebear the thought, or someone who knew Tim well enough to pull off a convincing disguise of Tim did it." Or supposing they don't get a face from the clue, the clue might be, "Someone wearing a blue cape with silver threads did the murder." Interrogating Tim's maidservant might discover that Tim had such a cloak, but it went missing (so she says) a few days before the murder.

In contrast to this thinking I really dislike it if the players return the answer to a question to the DM by e.g. casting "Commune". Why would the patron deity of a LG cleric deny a proper answer, if the cleric asks first the simple question "Was one of the family members - that I know by name - of Lord X's family involved in planning of the murder of Lord X?"

One possible answer is that the diety, being less than omniscient simply doesn't know. If the murder took place underground (or at night) it's rather unlikely that the cleric's patron sun diety actually knows the answer. The answer might well be, "I don't know." or "Ask again later." or as the spell suggests, "Unclear." One mistake I often see is attributing to dieties the knowledge of an omniscient monotheistic diety. In general, my advice with Commune is that if the question is outside of the purview of the deities sphere of influence, the deity certainly doesn't know and you should communicate this expectation to the players. And even if does fall in to the deities potential sphere of influence, only deities of the mightiest sort are very likely to have noticed. Commune is generally useful for asking the Sun deity about things that have happened in broad daylight to worshippers of the sun deity and so forth. The sun deity simply knows nothing about what has happened underground to the followers of the god of stonecutters, and would need to barter with another deity for that information. And if we are going to be a rules lawyer about this, if another diety is involved in the plot, examining the rules on deities perceptions, it's highly likely that if hitherto the incident was not brought to the dieties attention, that the whole incident has been cloaked by some other diety. It takes a standard action within a few hours of an incident and no other deity involved for the diety to discover something. If you were to go to your rank 6 sun deity and say, "I'd like to know what happened in the basement of the temple of the fire god 8 hours ago.", well good luck with that. "Me too.", is the appropriate response.

That question BTW is one that is terribly likely to go wrong in the short term, even if the diety does know, because you failed to actually ask about guilt, leading to a situation where both 'yes' and 'no' are wrong and the diety may respond, "Unclear." simply to avoid being misleading. Hope you have a high caster level and can think to ask the right questions if that's going to be your approach. However, in general, I agree, if the PC's are clever enough to ask the right questions and have a sufficiently high caster level and enough time to cast the spells then Commune can be a trivializing 'I win' button. But I'd also be looking for different restrictions regarding toning it down than simply making it something only NPCs did - which IMO is neither logically consistant nor particularly interesting nor particularly player protagonizing. For example, the 100XP surcharge for collect calls to ones diety is one such limitation that could be played with. If you were to up this to 100XP per answer, players would be very careful before placing the call. Or we could limit things like, "Please limit to one call per cleric per month. The deity is very busy right now and every moment they spend talking to you is a moment that they can't spend observing the world to get the answers you are looking for."

This is especially true for spells that make predictions about the future (Augury, Divination, Weathereye), a larger area (Commune with Nature), or give knowledge about past events (Hindsight, Legend Lore, Vision). You never know if or when a PC spellcaster happens to cast these spells in a campaign.

This is however I think a very different complaint than one that suggests divination spells are campaign wreckers, and would actually be closer to the one I've experienced as a player and a DM. Generic spells about the future or past are very hard to run in a way that they actually provide useful information even when you the DM want to empower the players to use them. Either nothing interesting has happened in the situation and you are struggling to find relevant events in a hitherto unimagined past, or else you are struggling to construct a prophesy for the future when the PC's decisions will have such a great impact on what that future is. This typically results in discouraging the player from further attempts to dip in the pool, because they think that they'll be blocked on every attempt even when you are actually prepared.

 

[Grogg of the North]

Perhaps I've been lucky with my groups but for most part my friends and I have treated spells like Commune and Divination as the equivalent of a punt. "I have no idea how to proceed so let's go ask our deities"

 

[dwayne]

On some level I agree with your overall desire to safe gaurd mystery, reduce the number of information based win buttons and silo skill monkey spotlight. However, I also think you've gone way way too far.

Basically you've banned the almost the entire divination subschool. There is really no need for that. If what you are interested in protecting are murder mysteries and kidnappings even at high level, you need to come to an important realization. If the murderer or the kidnapper is a person of fewer resources than the PC's, this isn't really a suitable heroic challenge for high level characters. In a world with resources like Speak with the Dead or Raise Dead and so forth, no body sets out to assassinate a king using less resources than what is trivially required to undo or solve their crime. Rather than banning these information seeking spells, I think its better to embrace them as being part of normal magical forensic technic. That is to say, powerful criminals capable of playing Moriarty to your Sherlock already know that you are going to cast Speak with the Dead, Stone Tell, Detect X, etc. Not only have they planned for it, they are counting on it. With some thought, it's quite possible to leave a highly misleading trail for such magic. A spell as simple as 'Disguise Self' will leave all sorts of false leads behind, as can anything else that alters apparant form. A Summoning spell allows you to literally have something other than you commit the actual act of violence. There are likewise many defensive spells and magical items available to worthy foes that can be used to thwart divination magic, and if you are creative you can easily invent many others. In terms of thwarting things like raise dead or speak with the dead, there are all sorts of options available - from a baneful polymorph (leaving the target alive but twarting all sorts of things) to having the body consumed by green slime or any of the other many such hazards, to inventing rare and deadly poisons that turn bodies into tar or incinerate them.

To a certain extent I think you are cheating your players out of a high level game of intrigue, forcing msysteries at high level between combatants of profound power to play out like murders and conspiracies by common street criminals. You are also I think damaging your own ability to imagine how a high level murder might be planned out and with it the oppurtunity to expand your creativity.

To be quite frank, what I see is less problems with the system than someone who is taking a rather lazy approach to their game planning, plotting and scenario design. For a high level character bent on kidnapping someone, it's rather inconcievable that they'd not have a special room lined with lead panels and made of bricks mortared with blood and further protected by wards that block teleportation and scrying... possibly leaving some innocous illusion in its place... or otherwise have prepared whatever basic preparations required to thwart equal or lower level characters easily thwarting their schemes. Baneful polymorph of the victim into a mouse, and placing them into a jar that has been magically protected to block discern location spells is trivially easy for a high level caster and makes an awesome reveal - the victim has been in plain sight all along, hidden among the other lab animals.

What I tend to do is rather than ban such information gathering devices, rebalance them so that they are closer in power to information seeking abilities you'd have via skills. In particular, I tend to rewrite anything that has an absolute effect. That tends to mean that they require an opposed skill check - detect evil is Scry vs. Bluff modified by the targets aura strength, for example. Or that if they effect an existing skill check, they tend to give a +5 enhancment bonus, requiring the caster to be something of a skill monkey themselves if they are to make the best use of a wide range of divinations. Zone of Truth doesn't prevent lies - it just causes the target to have a penalty on their bluff checks. Simple changes like that leave spells as a resource that can be employed creatively and selectively without making them simplistic win buttons.

And there are a wide variaty of other simple balancing techniques. I mean, there is literally no way at all Detect Evil or Know Alignment would normally be helpful in solving a problem in my games. A player attempting to use that as an 'I win' button and smiting literally or metaphorically the first evil character he came across would find it ending disasterously. Afterall, it's the innocent 'evil' person with nothing to hide that is the one doing the least to hide it. You'll end up smiting a random lecher with a gambling and substance abuse problem who sometimes cheats his customers by putting his thumb on the scale, while the actual murderer smirks behind your back safe in the knowledge he's prepared for such simple tricks. And now that you've played the buffoon, not only is the law unlikely to be on your side, but no one is going to trust you if you say, "It's the Lord Chamberlain. He's evil. We have to stop him!" And that's to say nothing of the fact that magical cooersion of any sort is highly unlikely to be legally admisable as evidence except in the most authoritarian regimes with the characters are actual agents of the regime... and of course in that case, it's likely that the authorities are the problem.

I guess what I'm sayings is that after 20 years of play, I'd expected you to have gotten past this phase of one's DMing. At some point I expect DMs to reach a sophistication level where all these 'win buttons' are something they know about, have planned for, can't be surprised with and in fact are assumed under the 'three clue rule' to be something that the players will do and likely need to do to have any chance of putting the peices together. It's all well and good to say, "Use your skill points.", because they should. But you don't want your game to stall just because they roll 3 1's in a roll any more than you want it truncated because they cast Discern Location and you'd not considered the possibility. It's far better to go, Skill X gets 1 clue, Skill Y gets another clue, Spell X gets a third clue, and Spell Y gets a 4th clue. And then think about what the villain might have done to block other techniques. But really, if you just want the villain to win, not only is this a boring outcome, it's trivially easy for a DM to produce. If you throw all possible resources at the problem, it should be trivially easy to imagine a scenario where the perfect villain commits the perfect crime and leaves zero clues behind. The real trick is to match the subtly of what the villains miss to the skill of the players and the capabilities of their characters.

Let me just briefly talk about murder mysteries in a high magic setting.

If you want to plan a great D&D murder mystery, you have to think like Agatha Christy. In an Agatha Christy story, the murder is hidden behind several layers of tricks and misdirections. The murderer plans a sophisticated plot to thwart criminal investigation, and the reader/investigator is expected to tease out what the actual method was from amongst the false leads. Far from making such plots more difficult to pull off, magic actually makes them far easier and more satisfying. In addition to standard Agatha Christy misdirection like - the murderer was one of the victims (and not necessarily the last one), there are mutliple murderers (thus giving everyone air tight alibi's), the first victim was not the intended victim (thus throwing off investigation of motive), and so forth - magic lets you convincingly pull of some Agatha Christy tricks that are otherwise implausible.

For example...

a) The murderer was polymorphed or otherwise completely disguised at the time of the killing. Viewing the murder through the eyes of any witness - nearby stones, plants, the murdered person themselves, produces false leads.
b) The murderer was a conjured/called creature employed by the murder plotter.
c) The murderer was mentally dominated at the time.
d) The murderer employed a modify memory spell on himself removing all memory of the crime, thereby allowing him to convincingly lie that, "He didn't do it." because he has zero memory of the event or of modifying his memory. You want to use Zone of Truth as a plot point... fine. Now you are playing the murder's game.
e) The murderer has switched bodies using magic jar, illusions polymorph any object, doppleganger, etc. The murderer faked his own death, and took over the identity of who he actually killed.
f) The murderer used magic or a potion to place himself in a death-like state as one of the apparant victims of the crime, hiding among the 4-5 other dead bodies. He then either has woken up and escaped from his burial place, or intends to do so in the future - with or without the aid of an accomplice.

And you can stack layers and layers of this sort of misdirection, carefully building up a real mystery at what ever depth you think your characters have the skill to reach. Magic is not your enemy in building murder mysteries. Agatha Christy would have loved to be able to employ magic I think, except that she probably would have found it made it just too easy.

Have to agree with these two, anyone else should take note.

 

[emanresu]

I think that most of these spells work against most of the populis most of the time. The cunning bad guys abilities work against most of the people most of the time. The endgame here is an elite small percentage of the people that have access to spells and abilities up and beyond the norm.

An elite bad guy that knows a party of spell casters / Paladins is hunting him down can set them up. Heres what I did to my gaming party.

Group is hot on the trail of an assassin they are trying to protect the princess. The Pali repeatedly informed me that he is detecting evil, and walking next to princess using the cover other but also trying to concentrate on detecting evil. The assassin is a Psion / rogue / assassin. He changed aura of Noble #1 standing in crowd and controlled body of #2 Noble...it looked like an ambush. The assassin knew the Paladin would sense evil on #1 one and whole party would see the rushing "bad guy" #2 complete with magic aura to satisfy the party warlock. Pali struck and killed noble after he "detected evil" party killed the rushing Noble...whos last words were actually ventriloquism via assassins "All I wanted was to give flowers aaahhh".

Now party was hated by all



sorry typing between phone calls!

eman

buuhahahahaha

 

[Dark Dragon]

BTW, I love the good natured way you argue your reply.

Thanks! I try to view a point from different angles before making a decision (been too much into scientific work, I guess )

I can understand the arms race objection, but I think it applies to any character ability and not just skills. What is sense motive but a lie dectection spell unless you counter it with runaway bluffing ability? What is Track and boundless skills in that regard but discern location unless you counter it in some fashion or just say 'no'? When your player can "Track a Falcon on a cloudy day", then you are in an arms race if you want the murderer to get away from the scene whether or not spells are involved.

Well sure, but that isn't problem limited to only magical forensics. The murderer wears ordinary disguises, tells ordinary lies, and wore gloves to avoid leaving finger prints. The arms race is still in place and is inevitable in any contest between a criminal and increasingly compotent investigators.

If your NPCs have +30 Bluff skill, what good is it in having a Sense Motive skill sense you are always blocking the PC's abilities? The answer to what hints and tips you give to the party to unravel the true murderer is, "The same you would give from search, sense motive, knowledge, appraise and spot checks." (Or whatever skill system you use.) Each followed up on avenue may (or may not) offer an additional insight as to what the whole picture looks like. For example, if they party uses stone tell to see the murder or hear about it, they get some insight as to what the murderer looked like. If they see that a person who looked like Tim the Enchanter did it, the clue might not be 'Tim did it, you win!'. The clue might actually be, "Either Tim did it, forebear the thought, or someone who knew Tim well enough to pull off a convincing disguise of Tim did it." Or supposing they don't get a face from the clue, the clue might be, "Someone wearing a blue cape with silver threads did the murder." Interrogating Tim's maidservant might discover that Tim had such a cloak, but it went missing (so she says) a few days before the murder.

Well put! But there is a difference between spellcasting and using skills. A spell provides some sort of answer, being right or just leading off the track, as we have discussed earlier. This answer is given by the DM (who needs to consider the limitations of the spell at that very moment!). Period. This strongly reminds me of some NCIS episodes, were a lot of the case is solved within the lab and using computers. All the technical equipment is somewhat parallel to spell casting. Yes, it can be foiled, but rarely is so, instead it depends on interpretation of the data. In the end, the NCIS team moves out and captures the evil guy. Little social interaction with outsiders, most of the funny social stuff is going on within the team. Still nice, and I suppose similar fun is going on within a party of adventurers.

This is the other point (the first is the race of arms) that I dislike about many divination spells: they remove some part of the role playing game, and simply serve as sort of a shortcut (my impression). This is even more tempting in my group, where we now use spell points instead of spell slots. Admittedly this is a weakness of our homebrew system (and forced some changes of certain spells), but divination magic was overused even when we played AD&D and D&D 3.x by the RAW.

Using skills may involve opposed checks like Bluff vs. Sense Motive, Intimidate vs. Will save, Diplomacy, Heal vs. Poison effects, and so on. In addition, it can be used more often than spells, and the DM is not forced to remember the limits of all divination spells, but may give more or less hints as he sees fit during social (i.e. skill-based) interaction. Of course the DM could give the evil guy a high rank in Bluff and other skills... but maybe one of the henchmen of the bad guy is not as good in Bluff, or is more easily intimidated. The increased competence of the PCs is represented by higher skill ranks plus a wider spell selection and special abilities.
It happened now and then that the PCs used disguising spells and/or familiars to observe potential suspects or even trick them into speaking about things that only the murderer or kidnapper could know. This required some good social skills and a proper spell for support now and then. If the selection of spells is reduced, players become more creative in using the remaining spells and skills to proceed; at least it is my impression. In earlier D&D 3.x days, social skills IMG were barely increased: Gather Information, Intimidate, Sense Motive, Diplomacy were mostly very low in ranks. At least some players now invest more ranks in these skills (also thanks to the extra +2 skill points per level, and removal of the cross-class skill barrier in our homebrew system).

One possible answer is that the diety, being less than omniscient simply doesn't know. If the murder took place underground (or at night) it's rather unlikely that the cleric's patron sun diety actually knows the answer. The answer might well be, "I don't know." or "Ask again later." or as the spell suggests, "Unclear." One mistake I often see is attributing to dieties the knowledge of an omniscient monotheistic diety. In general, my advice with Commune is that if the question is outside of the purview of the deities sphere of influence, the deity certainly doesn't know and you should communicate this expectation to the players. And even if does fall in to the deities potential sphere of influence, only deities of the mightiest sort are very likely to have noticed. Commune is generally useful for asking the Sun deity about things that have happened in broad daylight to worshippers of the sun deity and so forth. The sun deity simply knows nothing about what has happened underground to the followers of the god of stonecutters, and would need to barter with another deity for that information. And if we are going to be a rules lawyer about this, if another diety is involved in the plot, examining the rules on deities perceptions, it's highly likely that if hitherto the incident was not brought to the dieties attention, that the whole incident has been cloaked by some other diety. It takes a standard action within a few hours of an incident and no other deity involved for the diety to discover something. If you were to go to your rank 6 sun deity and say, "I'd like to know what happened in the basement of the temple of the fire god 8 hours ago.", well good luck with that. "Me too.", is the appropriate response.

Very good that you raised this point. Admittedly, I often forget that many deities are not of the "greater" status, and don't know everything. Your example lays it out in a very nice way.
The clerics IMG had often however a greater deity as a patron: Kelemvor, Lathander, Mystra, Tempus. I see that Lathander may not be interested that much about a guy murdered at night in a dark dungeon, but this is different if a cleric of Kelemvor investigates the case and uses a Commune spell. A cleric or paladin of Helm (the guardian) is also not that far away from unraveling crimes. If you DM a group with a high-priest of Kelemvor and a paladin/cleric of Helm, Commune is just a very handy spell to get some answers about the untimely death of a person.

That question BTW is one that is terribly likely to go wrong in the short term, even if the diety does know, because you failed to actually ask about guilt, leading to a situation where both 'yes' and 'no' are wrong and the diety may respond, "Unclear." simply to avoid being misleading.

Yes, if I would be interested in guilt in the first place, you are right. If I'm interested in who developed the plan to kill the person, I as a DM would give an answer other than "Unclear", i.e., "Yes", "No", or a cryptic answer. Depending on the scenario.

Hope you have a high caster level and can think to ask the right questions if that's going to be your approach. However, in general, I agree, if the PC's are clever enough to ask the right questions and have a sufficiently high caster level and enough time to cast the spells then Commune can be a trivializing 'I win' button.

At least it forces the DM to think quickly

But I'd also be looking for different restrictions regarding toning it down than simply making it something only NPCs did - which IMO is neither logically consistant nor particularly interesting nor particularly player protagonizing.

I have to disagree here. Visiting an oracle can be a side quest of its own, convincing it to help with answers involves role playing, and to use the answers given to achieve something important is again a different point. Oracles are a part of some fantasy stories, and even in real history they were consulted to help with problems, like the oracle of Delphi. Some movies gave impressions about oracles, like in 300, Serenity, or the 13th Warrior. The oracle of OotS is another nice idea, and even the evil guy involved in the murder may have asked an oracle before It does not need to be logically consistant, I tend to interpret an oracle as a gifted person, but less as a person with classes in x and y. They somehow have a different understanding about the world and time, which cannot be explained by logic.

For example, the 100XP surcharge for collect calls to ones diety is one such limitation that could be played with. If you were to up this to 100XP per answer, players would be very careful before placing the call. Or we could limit things like, "Please limit to one call per cleric per month. The deity is very busy right now and every moment they spend talking to you is a moment that they can't spend observing the world to get the answers you are looking for."

Good idea, XP loss is always a good way to make players thinking about if it is worth to use the spell. But as long as "win-button" spells are available, players will use it... especially if some players are infected by munchkinism again and again (as IMG). And they will be frustrated if the DM interprets the spell in a different way and is not giving the information the players asked for.

This is however I think a very different complaint than one that suggests divination spells are campaign wreckers, and would actually be closer to the one I've experienced as a player and a DM. Generic spells about the future or past are very hard to run in a way that they actually provide useful information even when you the DM want to empower the players to use them. Either nothing interesting has happened in the situation and you are struggling to find relevant events in a hitherto unimagined past, or else you are struggling to construct a prophesy for the future when the PC's decisions will have such a great impact on what that future is. This typically results in discouraging the player from further attempts to dip in the pool, because they think that they'll be blocked on every attempt even when you are actually prepared.

Agreed, and there was little discussion IMG about Augury, Omen of Peril, or Weather Eye. They weren't used for years, and restricting access didn't influence the game so far.