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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6291480" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>

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