Identify Magic (identifying items)

[The Gleeful Grognard]

So, up until now I have been allowing my players to simply roll the relevant skill to identify items they find. But on further reading I may have been running this incorrectly

--- The Action---

Identify Magic CRB.238 wrote:

Once you discover that an item, location, or ongoing effect is magical, you can spend 10 minutes to try to identify the particulars of its magic.

The key words of this being "once you discover", which for elements that have a visual effect or evidence that makes sense. Then, sure maybe that works with Runes right, as they are visible.

How about things that are described to you, that you didn't witness or cannot see then? The pedantic part (majority?) of me suggests a strict reading of the personal "you" element from "once you discover" but the reasonable part also believes this could be unintended.

--- The Spells---

Then we get to the spells detect magic and read aura.

Detect Magic CRB.328 wrote:

You send out a pulse that registers the presence of magic. You receive no information beyond the presence or absence of magic.

Detect magic seems intentionally vague in its readings, heightened versions of the cantrip help make it more precise but not overly so.

Read Aura CRB.362 wrote:

You focus on the target object, opening your mind to perceive magical auras. When the casting is complete, you know whether that item is magical, and if it is, you learn the school of magic

This seems fairly straightforward and designed specifically for finding magical items. It has a long cast time and its heightened effects are all about more efficient magical object/item dousing.

--- Initial Conclusions / Further Complications ---

After reading this I was fairly sure of two things:
- Magic spells are probably required to identify even if runes are visible.
- Detect magic is likely not intended to be an outright better version of Read Aura when it comes to identifying magical items. Especially since the precision should only be limited to the highest school effect.

However those hunches aren't enough to get me to rule against player convenience so I decided to do more digging and PDF searching and I found something else in the GMG that had me decide to post it here for other opinions.

Merchant GMG.244 wrote:

Appraising Eye The merchant can use Mercantile Lore to Recall Knowledge about items, including determining their value. They can also attempt to Identify Magic using Mercantile Lore and can do so without first knowing whether the item is magical.

This ability suggests that knowing that an item is magical is required for a check, that the "Once you discover" element might be more hinged on the "you" and "discover" elements than I had thought.

As if you could just take the word of anyone without evidence, the ability wouldn't need to be there in the first place.

--- In/Conclusion ---

I am asking on the forum to see if anyone else has any evidence of RAW or RAI through other abilities / readings / items as I am stumped. I will probably just keep ruling it in favour of players identifying freely for now, but it is worth figuring out imo.

I wonder if we will get a skill feat in the APG allowing for identification of Magic Items like the Merchant can, that would certainly put the debate to rest for me.

[Aratorin]

Unless you really want to RP the party putting everything into a pile, walking 35 Feet away with a single Item, Casting Detect Magic, rinse and repeat ad nauseam to determine which items in their loot are Magical, just let them Identify Magical stuff...

[thenobledrake]

Detect magic starts out as only telling the caster "yes, there is magic that you aren't fully aware of within 30 feet of you." Even the heightened versions aren't entirely specific, except if you're talking the 4th level version and happen to only have one magical thing within range at a time.

Read aura is used after detect magic has given you a "yes" to check item by item at first, and more rapidly when heightened, to narrow the "yes, magic is nearby" to a "yes, this item is magical" - and while detect magic sufficiently heightened can pin-point one magic item, read aura at the same level confirms every magic item in range that is magical, which is helpful when there are numerous items in the room but not all are magical (i.e. in the wizard's study with a magic scroll on one shelf, a crystal ball on another, and a magic dagger used as a letter opener on the desk).

And then you use the Identify Magic action and actually figure out what something does.

In practice, as a GM, I typically just make a note of how long it took to use read aura to narrow down what item was magical and add that to the time it takes to Identify Magic so long as a player has that spell, rather than actually playing it out item by item and leaving it on the player to repeatedly tell me "I cast read aura on..."

Usually with my group, who like to spread responsibilities for "mandatory" stuff like this around, I'll have one player using Detect Magic as an exploration activity and tell them "You detect some magic nearby" and their character tells the character that can read auras, and that player says "I'll figure out where the magic is" and then someone takes first crack at Identify Magic (often one of those two, but sometimes a third character gets involved)

[TomParker]

The Gleeful Grognard wrote:

How about things that are described to you, that you didn't witness or cannot see then? The pedantic part (majority?) of me suggests a strict reading of the personal "you" element from "once you discover" but the reasonable part also believes this could be unintended.

I had the same question. If a PC with Read Aura tells another PC, "Hey, this thing has a magical aura," can the PC without Read Aura now use the Identify Magic action by just studying it for 10 minutes?

I haven't found an answer that seems definitive. For now, I just allow anyone to make the check once the group knows that a given item is magical. It's more convenient but I have no idea whether it's supposed to work that way.

[Blave]

The merchant's Apraising Eye ability is just that: A special ability of a non-player characte.

Don't try to apply NPC-rules to player character and vice versa. Unlike PF1, they no longer follow the same rules (and even PF1 was more than generous with its interpretation of "same rules").

For the general RAW process of identifying items, see thenobledrake's post.

[whew]

For the general RAW process of identifying items, see Aratorin's post.

You can speed it up by testing multiple items at once and repeatedly splitting the group of items in half when magic is detected.

[masda_gib]

I think the information whether an item is magical can be transferred between people. So person A detects magic on an item, tells person B and person B can identify it. Otherwise it's really cumbersome.

Since both Detect Magic and Read Aura are cantrips, as long as you have a caster with one of those cantrips, just narrate that their are using that and let your players identify. With some walking away if only Detect Magic is available and with handling each item if only Read Aura is available.