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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 982214" data-attributes="member: 3146">OT: I still don't get why people think this solves the "problem." When I'm running games, it doesn't ruin anything precisely because it detects so many people that it isn't a substitute for Detect Bad Guy. Any of the 5000+ people in the city (of 15000 people) radiating evil could be the bad guy (assuming he's evil) or they could just be average goon/drugdealers. However, as soon as you say "it only detects EVIL", then it is Detect Bad Guy and it's pretty much a license to smite.That problem has nothing to do with magic. It has to do with paranoia and the sense that the DM is not creating a world in which things are often as they seem but a world in which nothing can be trusted.Such deception is conceivable in mostly  or entirely non-magical milleaus as well.  Maybe the fabric fibres were deliberately left on the wound and the DNA was planted on the subject. Maybe the fingerprints were left intentionally and the window was smashed by a random vandal who came by 2 hours after the crime. You could go through the entire plot of any detective show spinning conspiracy theories like that. And you would probably have to come to the conclusion that they are all possible--if not likely.The same thing applies to the magical world. It's always possible that it's a set-up and the bad guys Scry-buff-teleported from a long ways away and used Nystul's antimagical aura to cover the effects of the teleport just like it's always possible that the victim of a more modern setting murder was really a secret agent perfectly living out a double identity and that he was killed by an Illuminati hit team that framed a local ne'er-do-well for the murder (leaving fingerprints, DNA evidence, etc on the scene) before they flew out on experimental silent black helicopters. However, investigators generally ignore that possibility and PCs should be able to ignore its magical equivalent unless the campaign is set up for them to expose the magical Illuminati in which case they will not ignore the possibility but look at it as the preferred hypothesis. Fox Mulder would always be wrong on CSI and the CSI characters would generally be wrong on the X-Files. It's a question of the campaign's assumptions not its magic level.</blockquote>

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