Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Harzel" data-source="post: 7331123" data-attributes="member: 6857506">I would rule that detect good and evil does detect the ghost.&nbsp; The use of the word &quot;target&quot; in the 5e rules is, IMO, horribly fraught and muddled, as sometimes it is used in the narrow mechanical sense of something designated by a spell caster and sometimes in the more natural sense of something affected by a spell.&nbsp; In the case of a ghost's possession, the way I think it ought to work is that nothing except turning can have an effect on the ghost.&nbsp; However, there is no restriction on the ghost having an effect on other things.&nbsp; Thus all divination and divination-like effects would work, including, for example, triggering a glyph set to activate on undead.*As to whether the ghost is 'present', I would just fall back on the common conception of possession, which is that the possessing spirit is somehow 'inside' or fused with the possessed.&nbsp; The description of D&amp;D ghost possession otherwise conforms to this - when possession begins the ghost 'disappears', and when it ceases the ghost reappears nearby the formerly possessed - so I don't see any reason to deviate from the common conception as to where the ghost is located during possession.* Yeah, yeah, you can't observe something without having an effect on it. Whatever.&nbsp; This is D&amp;D. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue&nbsp; &nbsp; :p"&nbsp; data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Harzel, post: 7331123, member: 6857506"] I would rule that [I]detect good and evil[/I] does detect the ghost. The use of the word "target" in the 5e rules is, IMO, horribly fraught and muddled, as sometimes it is used in the narrow mechanical sense of something designated by a spell caster and sometimes in the more natural sense of something affected by a spell. In the case of a ghost's possession, the way I think it ought to work is that nothing except turning can have an effect on the ghost. However, there is no restriction on the ghost having an effect on other things. Thus all divination and divination-like effects would work, including, for example, triggering a glyph set to activate on undead.* As to whether the ghost is 'present', I would just fall back on the common conception of possession, which is that the possessing spirit is somehow 'inside' or fused with the possessed. The description of D&D ghost possession otherwise conforms to this - when possession begins the ghost 'disappears', and when it ceases the ghost reappears nearby the formerly possessed - so I don't see any reason to deviate from the common conception as to where the ghost is located during possession. * Yeah, yeah, you can't observe something without having an effect on it. Whatever. This is D&D. :p [/QUOTE]

Verification