Consider the following two (extreme) individuals:
Bob is a 4th level rogue who happens to be a sadistic pedophile serial killer. He took levels in rogue to facilite being able to be successful with his depraved acts. So far he's abducted and murdered 23 children in his several years of activity.
Anthaldraxis is a great wyrm green dragon who spends most of his time holed up in his lair investigating various arcane persuits, as green dragons are wont to do. While he has no qualms with killing tresspassers in his territory, he would prefer to chase them away or get them to leave of their own volition as dead bodies have a habit of attracting further attention.
By RAW, Bob the sicko does not detect as evil at all while Anthal detects as strong evil.
What I'm strongly thinking of doing is including the relative "evilness" of creatures when someone uses detect evil on them. So in the example above Bob would detect as being very high in terms of evil intensity while being very feint on the existing chart, which I refer to as magnitude. While the dragon would be very strong on magnitude but low on intensity.
I don't think I need to create a mechanic for "evil intensity" since it's mostly a judgment call anyway, but I'm wondering if there are any unforseen conequences for including this information.
Thoughts?
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What if Bob only does that to children who are already of Evil alignment?
All I can say is... Apparently you don't feel that this game is easy enough for spellcasters as it is.
A GM has the license to vary the alignment aura rules IF he feels it's appropriate to the campaign world. In the Forgotten Realms, your suggestion might make sense. In Eberron though, it's completely against the spirit of the setting. Golarion and Greyhawk could go either way, and it might even vary on locality. In Ravenloft, for example the mists might have already claimed Bob for a realm of his own.
This is a homebrew world, but I don't follow how this makes things even easier for spellcasters - especially since the vast majority of the time it's a paladin or inquisitor using it because they get it as a class ability.
If you want to do this, I think the simplest way to implement it would be to shift the target by at most a single place on the chart to reflect particularly heinous evil vs. mostly passive evil.
The argument against doing things this way goes like this: "The spell doesn't detect a subject's past actions or current ethical code; it detects their connection to unholy forces. That's why evil clerics and undead are so much easier to detect - they're not necessarily any more cruel than the evil fighter overlord, or responsible for more murders than he; they have more readily noticeable evil auras due to their unholy natures."
An evil act doesn't become "good" because your target is politically acceptable.
What if Bob's Lawful Good god has a law that says otherwise?
You might consider, instead of what you suggest, simply using an alignment tracking system, or some form of Corruption or Taint mechanic, or a Sin Rating system such as that in the Infernum d20 series.
At a threshold you deem appropriate, an individual might radiate an aura of equivalent power, as per the cleric class feature and track along detect evil in that fashion.
However, this means the super-secret-evil-nasty guy might get ganked at the local grocery store while buying his radishes to go in that kiddie-stew. You'll want to include an "out" for your special bad guys to prevent them from getting killed too soon by premature attackulation.
Personally I feel like the entire alignment system is a bit rigid as written and requires some hand-waving to bring into line. RAW there may be evil auras but other than that any given evil being is just as evil (same intensity) as the next, IMO it would be more like a scale from slightly evil (the dragon in this case) to much worse (Bob), and I would have spells that detect alignment pick up on this.
I feel like the fact that only opponents with a reasonable degree of power (5hd or lower doesn't ping) show up limits the ability of alignment detectors enough to balance it out.
The Green Ronin's Advanced Players Guide bring a more simplistic alignment tracking system, but the spirit is the same:
-The system provides 21 points for each axis (Good/Evil and Law/Chaos).
-To be considered part of that alignment, you must have at least 14 in that trait. So, a character will be lawful if he has 14 or more points in the Law aspect. Correspondingly, that very same character will have 7 points in the Chaos trait.
-Only outsiders can have 21 points in a trait, and therefore, 0 in it's counterpart. (Like devils with 21 Law/ 0 Chaos and 0 Good/21 Evil)
-If you don't have at least 14 in either side of an axis, you are considered Neutral in that axis.
Then, while a character use a "detect alignment" spell or SLA, allow him/her to know, after enough concentration, to determine the alignment ratio in the relevant axis/trait.
Personally I feel like the entire alignment system is a bit rigid as written and requires some hand-waving to bring into line. RAW there may be evil auras but other than that any given evil being is just as evil (same intensity) as the next, IMO it would be more like a scale from slightly evil (the dragon in this case) to much worse (Bob), and I would have spells that detect alignment pick up on this.
Agreed. A lot of folks I know use a variety of systems, but most of them include a scale that include tendencies to gauge "degrees", i.e. Chaotic Neutral (with good tendencies) or a secondary supplement to alignment like corruption and so on.
Absolutism is a big problem in D&D (spells are the biggest offender) with outright immunity, auto-detect, and so on. I've considered in the past altering things to correct for it (really simple off-the-cuff-example: detect evil grants a +5 bonus to the caster's sense motive check, opposed by the target's bluff, to determine if the target is evil). Unfortunately, it is way too much work.