With that line though, you've nailed it down so that you can never find anything but the highest level magic. :)
Without that line, you can't find anything at all ever, as with restricted mobility options (a room that's only 15 feet by 15 feet and a single corridor leading to it; an arrangement of chasms/immovable 'furniture'; etc) and items placed in certain ways means you can never pin any of them down.
But sure, if you want to quibble over the wording, go ahead. All I was doing was giving the heightened 4th benefits as an activity instead of never. You want it more permissive, fine. The point is that one additional sentence lets the GM go "you CAN search the room this way." Without that line you can't search the room with detect magic at all (that functionality is in Read Aura).
Forcing things into encounter mode for this kind of nonsense is pointless. Either you have the time or you don't. It shouldn't rely on a player's metagaming shenanigans that waste everyone else's time.
There is also nothing in the wording of Detect Magic that exempts it from line of effect rules, which apply to all spells unless otherwise stated. It is listed as simply an emanation with a 30' radius.oh then you can cast it inside a cup and get a cone shaped detect magic. if the source is your hand or something just pull up your sleeve.
hell you can easily use any obstruction then, like casting it from behind an open doorway to easily determine location...
Except the source isn't your hand, the spell is an emanation, which emanates from your square in all directions. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=357 Find a single rule that exempts detection spells or emanations from line of effect. Maybe there can be some disagreement on what constitutes a barrier to line of effect, but if it's a barrier, Detect Magic isn't going through it. So yes, you could stand in the hallway past an open door and restrict the area of effect into the room, assuming the wall is a barrier, which it would be in the vast majority of cases.
So would being in a chest be a barrier to line of effect? How about in a drawer of a desk or a secret compartment in the wall? The rules say that an opening of an square foot stops something from being a barrier to line of effect, none of which would apply to any of the examples above. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=359
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There is also nothing in the wording of Detect Magic that exempts it from line of effect rules, which apply to all spells unless otherwise stated. It is listed as simply an emanation with a 30' radius.oh then you can cast it inside a cup and get a cone shaped detect magic. if the source is your hand or something just pull up your sleeve.
hell you can easily use any obstruction then, like casting it from behind an open doorway to easily determine location...
Except the source isn't your hand, the spell is an emanation, which emanates from your square in all directions. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=357 Find a single rule that exempts detection spells or emanations from line of effect. Maybe there can be some disagreement on what constitutes a barrier to line of effect, but if it's a barrier, Detect Magic isn't going through it. So yes, you could stand in the hallway past an open door and restrict the area of effect into the room, assuming the wall is a barrier, which it would be in the vast majority of cases.
So would being in a chest be a barrier to line of effect? How about in a drawer of a desk or a secret compartment in the wall? The rules say that an opening of an square foot stops something from being a barrier to line of effect, none of which would apply to any of the examples above. https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=359
you could crawl inside your bedroll then. :P
if the ementation is outside your bedroll you can do some weird things by burying yourself.
more or less the point being putting a moveable controlled mundane barrier around yourself you can change an ementation to a cone of rather fine granularity. perhaps a tent with a 1x1 foot opening.
anyway the best option is still just to manually search a room and use read aura.
example
say you set up a 5x5x5 tent with one side open and use detect magic, if the sides of the tent block the emenation, then you reduce the detect magic effect into a cone more or less from your square. so in a 5 by 5 square room you can get:
YYYYY
XYYYX
XXTXX
XXXXX
XXXXX
where Y is squares hit by detect magic, X is squares uneffected, and T is the tent. :P
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With that line though, you've nailed it down so that you can never find anything but the highest level magic. :)Without that line, you can't find anything at all ever, as with restricted mobility options (a room that's only 15 feet by 15 feet and a single corridor leading to it; an arrangement of chasms/immovable 'furniture'; etc) and items placed in certain ways means you can never pin any of them down.
Emphasis mine; hyperbole much?
You seem to be either not getting or ignoring the idea that this is an intentional design decision to make players rely more on mundane ways of finding treasure, rather than solving the problem with a single spell.
Without that line, you can't find anything at all ever, as with restricted mobility options (a room that's only 15 feet by 15 feet and a single corridor leading to it; an arrangement of chasms/immovable 'furniture'; etc) and items placed in certain ways means you can never pin any of them down.You seem to be either not getting or ignoring the idea that this is an intentional design decision to make players rely more on mundane ways of finding treasure, rather than solving the problem with a single spell.
That supports the "can't find it, never" with Detect Magic that I was getting at. The bolded part of my post was specifically in reference to what you can or cannot find with the spell. I did not say anything about mundane searching.
The point was "You cannot use this spell to search, no matter how you move about the room and add/remove squares from your effect." The "ping, there's magic" doesn't blink out the moment you remove the item from the area (or the area from the item). Its just a "oh, there's magic somewhere here-ish" sense not "there's magic within exactly 30 feet / there's no magic within exactly 30 feet."
Except the spell does have 30 ft radius, so it would not react to any magic outside that area, and it would definitely mean you can at the very least narrow down the area where the magic is located.
You understand how quantum states and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle work, yes?
Magic, when deteced with Detect Magic, only tells you "it is somewhere in this 30 foot radius area." A second pulse cannot tell you more information if you overlap the areas because you're resolution on the spell is "30 feet." The spell explicitly says that you cannot pinpoint unless it is cast at a heightened level by the very fact that pinpointing is a 4th level feature.
Ergo all you can determine is a vague "somewhere in this 30 foot radius zone."
Maybe it didn't pick up the moment it entered the field, maybe you still pick it up for a moment after it leaves the field.
The mechanical effect is that you can locate a source of magic with a precision of 30 feet. You can't zoom in, you can't enhance, you can't triangulate.
That's a 4th level effect.
QED
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You understand how quantum states and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle work, yes?
You understand geometry and Venn's principles of laying one circle partially over another, yes?
maybe you still pick it up for a moment after it leaves the field.
This is not how Detect Magic works. It doesn't have a duration, it just tells you whether there's magic within 30 feet of you right when you cast it.
You understand how quantum states and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle work, yes?You understand geometry and Venn's principles of laying one circle partially over another, yes?
Yes, I do.
And I'm saying that because the pinpoint is a feature of the 4th level spell effect MAGIC happens and it doesn't work.
Just like I can't go outside and shout FOS ROH DAH and actually knock over any cars, our physics doesn't apply to a gamified world.
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You understand how quantum states and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle work, yes?You understand geometry and Venn's principles of laying one circle partially over another, yes?Yes, I do.
And I'm saying that because the pinpoint is a feature of the 4th level spell effect MAGIC happens and it doesn't work.
Just like I can't go outside and shout FOS ROH DAH and actually knock over any cars, our physics doesn't apply to a gamified world.
You're just adding restrictions that aren't there. If they wanted the 1st level effect to only work once per item, and then to intentionally mislead you after that, I think that's something they would have spelled out.
The 4th level version effectively let's you skip all the math, and moving around for the highest level item.
Then why does the spell not say that you can "spend 10 minutes" (or however long) and get the same effect?
You're just adding restrictions that aren't there.
You're adding abilities that aren't there.
Not at all?
Like, even if there's one magic sword in an empty room, you can't be sure? It detects with it there, take it out, it might still detect magic, just to fool you?
You are also adding things that weren't said.
Obviously if its a blank, empty room with only a sword in it, the sword is probably magical. Cast Read Aura on it.
(But don't be surprised if the sword is mundane and there's an illusion in the corner hiding something once in a while)
The point is about what happens when you find a room full of swords, most of which aren't magical. Backing off 15 feet isn't going to give you any more information than "there's something magical in that pile of swords (thanks, we already knew that)." Its not the spell lying to you, its the world and the GM saying, "this is not how you perform the Search Activity."
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The 4th level version effectively let's you skip all the math, and moving around for the highest level item.Then why does the spell not say that you can "spend 10 minutes" (or however long) and get the same effect?
Because the spell is describing what you get with a single casting of an instantaneous effect. It would be a waste of book space to have to elaborate on every impact of repeatedly casting the same spell multiple times. Not to mention that the spell couldn't specify a length of time when it would be highly variable based on situation. Narrowing down a magic item in a room filled with hundreds of scrolls will take longer than narrowing down a magic item in a room with only 12 weapons on a rack.
For comparison, Create Water says it creates 2 gallons of water that evaporate after 1 day. Would you say that repeated castings of Create Water fail to do anything because 2 gallons of water were already created and the spell only says you get 2 gallons? Of course not, each casting of the spell is its own effect.
For contrast, the Light Cantrip has to include specific wording to prevent overlapping effects, or else nothing would prevent a character from creating multiple light sources to get a greater radius of bright light than what the spell specifies.
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So, from what I gather so far, Draco think that there's absolutely no point of using Detect Magic for finding loot because the first level entry makes it super imprecise, and somehow quantum mechanics make it impossible to shuffle stuff around a room to move it outside the radius to make your radar pings suddenly come up false? Is that right, or did I miss something along the way that will make the logic flow better?