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So started "The Lost Star" (TLS) today. Have an Elven Wizards with Detect Magic cantrip. He expects it to work like 1E. I explain it just lets him know if there is magic within a 30' radius. He thinks a bit and comes up with the following.
1. Cast Detect Magic
2. Move 5 ft. cast it again.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Essential if you can cast it enough and move around enough you can figure out the square with the magic in it.
In TLS room A2 this was used to narrow down the fact that there was something magical in the north of the room. Due to being unable to move to the side enough he couldn't put down the exact square but it gave everyone else a specific area to look in.
I feel like this is the tactic that will be used with detect magic and is that desired. Seems silly but RAW its the way to go. As it is its sorta a time tax. Given enough time and enough castings you can narrow things down to the square.
It seems like a reasonable tactic, there are even some rules about doing this in the exploration section. The real intent seems to be to prevent combat useful information when swords and arrows are flying around.
Can you explain "combat useful" information? I'm guessing this was a tactic in PF1E that I'm unaware of? Thanks.
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Can you explain "combat useful" information? I'm guessing this was a tactic in PF1E that I'm unaware of? Thanks.
Based on forums reports a lot of people (like, a lot) ignored or didn't understand the three rounds of concentration and used it for things like finding the square of invisible opponents.
The main thing to note is that repeatedly casting a spell for 10 minutes inflicts Fatigued until you "take a significant break".
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My group did something similar to OP... for the items we found. I sat in a room with no unknown magic, and other PC's carted in the items we found one at a time to determine if they were magic.
Felt really gamey, and everyone hated it.
We also really hated how long it took to identify the items. Even with Quick Identification, 10 minutes per item. It felt off to have to roll to identify when spending time with the item.
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The main thing to note is that repeatedly casting a spell for 10 minutes inflicts Fatigued until you "take a significant break".That's 100 castings, should be perfectly fine for most rooms and once you get 4th level spells you find out the 5ft cube anyways.
10 minutes isn't 100 casting. The mode of plays specifically explains that under exploration mode, characters don't have 3 actions/6 seconds since that would be too exhausting. Encounter mode is a special mode that you can't keep forever and thus we shouldn't try to apply encounter logic in exploration mode.
After some testing, I agree that concentration mechanics would benefit the spell, including ability to localize magic. The way it is now, people are just triangulating continuously to identify sources of magic.
Bumping this to mention that this is exactly what happened with my group. The cleric player was a math major. It was a time tax basically until I eventually relented and just told them where magic squares were immediately for the sake of my sanity.
The main thing to note is that repeatedly casting a spell for 10 minutes inflicts Fatigued until you "take a significant break".
While this is true for most spells, on page 317 there's a special exploration tactic called Detecting Magic. "Unlike most types of repeated spellcasting, detecting magic is not a fatiguing tactic."
The intent for this tactic is listed on 330 under Game Mastering, in a section about handling the exploration tactics of players.
This tactic doesn’t enable characters to automatically find every single magical aura or object during travel. As noted in their respective rules, illusions and magic traps of a high enough level can’t be found with detect magic.
When characters find something magical using this tactic, let them know and give them the option to stop and explore further or to continue moving on. Stopping brings you into a more roleplay-heavy scene, where players can search through an area, assess different items, or otherwise try to figure out the source of the magic and what it does. Continuing on might cause the group to miss out on beneficial magic items or face the consequences of triggering a magic trap.
The problem, of course, is that sufficiently intelligent players will optimize the fun out of this. Not once did my players bother to search for anything by actually interacting with the environment. No beds were searched, no nooks or crannies were poked in, nobody looked into the pools of water to see if there was something inside there. They just used magic sonar, the exact same way every time.
The main issue is that players can use either the presence or absence of a positive result to determine the range, and since they don't even need to cast it a whole bunch it wouldn't even be any more tiring than regular combat even if it was treated as fatiguing. It's 6 seconds per casting, maybe 5 or so castings to determine the range and find a point, 3 or so points is enough so like 15 castings over the course of a couple minutes, fewer if the party uses the barest context clues ("Oh, I'm standing about 30 feet away from the source of magic and I know it could be anywhere in this vague direction, oh look I'm exactly 30 feet from that statue, that's probably where it's coming from").
My group did something similar to OP... for the items we found. I sat in a room with no unknown magic, and other PC's carted in the items we found one at a time to determine if they were magic.
Felt really gamey, and everyone hated it.
We also really hated how long it took to identify the items. Even with Quick Identification, 10 minutes per item. It felt off to have to roll to identify when spending time with the item.
And this is the other thing that can happen, even if the GM tries to restrict the number of castings to avoid traingulation or tried to use fuzzy randomized ranges to make triangulation take longer. It's still tedious and boring and basically forces the GM to tell the players where stuff is.
It wouldn't be as bad if both of these techniques worked 100% of the time, but due to dungeon layouts or the need to pick up the right thing and bring it into the aura and the need to track (or give the illusion you're tracking) whether enemies are noticing this means you can't even just handwave it all the time. It takes something that should be a fun hint to really take a room in and explore and instead encourages the players to inundate the GM with a bunch of menial bullshit.
What we'd want from a fix is something that under no circumstances rewards players for standing in a precise location or repeatedly casting the spell when they already know there's magic around. Any clever usage is going to be extremely annoying and unfun, and since it takes no resources it can and will be repeated endlessly. There should be absolutely no math or geometry involved, players shouldn't be detecting stuff in other rooms, they shouldn't be arguing that it goes through floors and can detect stuff at higher or lower levels. All of that stuff assumes and requires the GM even knows what those are, which makes ad-libbing a dungeon basically impossible. The mere fact that the GM would even be willing to check instead of just immediately saying no is itself going to give players meta knowledge about the locations of magic items.
I don't want it to cost resources because having the opportunity to stop the players for a second to have them explore to find treasure without the possibility of them getting absolutely nothing for their efforts is cool, but it has to resolve quickly. Something like "The GM specifies a possible location where the magic might be hidden" or similar with the expectation that the GM just specifies a room or a randomized 30 foot radius area that happens to contain the source of the magic, with no way to change that area. But I can already think of ways to f$@~ that up with multiple casters.
If it can't be fixed, give up and make it a 1st level spell or just tell them the 5 foot square it's in immediately, or at least specify in the spell exactly how long magically-assisted triangulation will take even though that requires IC time pressure to be an effective deterrent. Nobody wants to deal with that bullshit but it's something so common sense and intuitive that humans have been using it for millenia. It's literally BC shit, there's no way you can claim someone's character isn't smart enough to at least play magical hot and cold. The best you can hope for is a truce with your players with the understanding that if they pull that shit you're just going to cover all their loot in high level illusion spells so their trick stops working.
After some testing, I agree that concentration mechanics would benefit the spell, including ability to localize magic. The way it is now, people are just triangulating continuously to identify sources of magic.
I mean, if your wizard isn’t triangulating, is he even a wizard?
Jokes aside, yeah, it’s hella gamey. Giving the square would let people sense invisibles, sure, but one could also make a caveat where illusion magic covers itself - or make it concentration and let it give the square after one minute.