Note: I apologize for the lateness of this article and for the topic change. I also apologize for not having a Proofreadaloud to go along with this one. It has been a very difficult time for me personally. I’ll have a further update next week.
Today, I’m rambling about magic and rules and magic rules. Why? Because it’s a miserable, gray day and it’s the last day of a miserable kind of month. And because, a few days ago, someone asked a really interesting question in the Angry supporter Discord about rules and magic. These are topics that have been on my mind lately: magic, the rules of magic, detect magic, and identify. And because the discussion that ensued in the Discord server — most of which I missed because I’ve been away for the better part of a week now — led me to read the dumbest-ass official answer to a rules question I’ve ever read. So far.
Not that I read a lot of them. Seriously. I don’t waste my time reading shit like Crawford’s Twitter feed or the Sage Advice column because I literally don’t give a crap about official rulings on the rules as written and the rules as intended. In fact, I consider those to be the worst answers to any GM’s question about how to run the game. But that’s only because the official answers have a really crappy track record of being the best answers.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The point is, I’m rambling about magic and rules and magic rules and detect magic and identify because that’s what I want to do today. And because I think there’s a very useful lesson for Game Masters to learn here.
Besides, it was either jumping in on the topic of detect magic and identify or discussing — for the fiftieth freaking time — why d20 swinginess is not a problem and why the problem that people keep mistaking for swinginess can’t be fixed with numbers or math. And I’ve got to hold something back for next month.
Anyway…
What Does Detect Magic Detect; What Does Identify Identify?
Angry Discordian mAc Chaos recently posed a question in the Angry supporter Discord server.
In mAc Chaos’ Dungeons & Dragons 5E game, there are substances — like ectoplasm and magical flower sap and whatnot — that have properties that make them useful in crafting magical items. And they also have magical effects on creatures when consumed or rubbed on the skin or whatnot. mAc Chaos wanted to know how those items interact with the detect magic and identify spells. What would those spells reveal about the items in question?
Go ahead and think about how you’d answer that question. Take a minute. Then read on.
There followed a very long discussion — like it went on for more than a day — that basically amounted to a bunch of rules analysis. I’m going to call them rules lawyer answers. Because they’re based on reading the rules and interpreting them. And nothing else.
I’m not going to go through all the answers. I will, below, give the correct and official, “by the book” answer which is pants-on-head retarded and shows everything that’s wrong with the rules lawyer approach. But it also shows some pretty piss poor underlying game design.
But first, I want to talk through all the ways there are to answer that question. The methods by which any Game Master might arrive at an answer.
Describe the World or Design a Game
Given a question like that above, one that arises from the players taking an actual action in the game world that isn’t wholly described in the rules — or one whose rules answer isn’t easy to remember to find — there are basically three ways to answer the question. First, you can pick apart the rules and try to an answer by interpreting the exact wording of every rule. That’s the rules lawyer answer I mentioned above. Second, you can think about how the fictional game world works and then give the answer that best describes that world. And, third, you think about which answer would lead to the best gameplay experience.
I don’t think anyone here doubts that the second and third approaches are the best because, in the end, as a Game Master, you’re trying to provide the best narrative and gameplay experience you can. So, whenever you have to make a call, you should always aim for one of those.
But we also tend to assume that the rules lawyer’s answer will lead us to an answer that maximizes the narrative or gameplay experience or both. After all, isn’t that precisely what game designers should do?
More to the point, in a well-designed game, all three answers should be in the same ballpark, right?
But, check this out: if the answer isn’t immediately obvious from the rules as written — if it requires any interpretation or discussion — then the rules aren’t going to give you the best narrative or gameplay answer. And I can prove it.
First, the best narrative answer — the answer that best describes the game’s world — should be reasonably intuitive. That is, if you understand the world of the game the way a Game Master should, then the descriptive answer should just reveal itself with a little thought.
Second, the best gameplay answer is the one that is logical and consistent. It’s the one that players can predict so that they can make good choices. This means, again, it should logically follow from the question with very little thought. If you have to think about it for too long, you probably don’t have a logical, predictable, consistent answer.
In other words, if the rules aren’t obvious and intuitive, they’re not leading you to the right place.
And you shouldn’t trust them.
Intuition is the Opposite of Looking Things Up
There is, as it turns out, an official answer about what detect magic actually detects. And it is batshit insane. It’s a terrible answer. It’s found in the Sage Advice Compendium under the question “Is the breath weapon of a dragon magical?” Because it gives you the conditions under which something counts as “magical.”
I’ll let you read the answer for yourself. But, in summary, there are two types of magic in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. There’s the magic that exists as part of the world. Part of the fiction. And there’s the magic described in the rules of magic. The game’s rules, not the world’s rules.
If you doubt that’s what’s being said — if you want to get finicky and nitpicky about my summary — note that the conditions for something to count as “magical according to the rules” can only be assessed by reading the names and descriptions of the things in the rulebooks. Either it’s a named magical item or a named spell or it uses spell slots or the description explicitly uses the word “magical.” And if you troll through the Monster Manual, you’ll discover how few obviously magical things are actually magical. And the few magical things are bizarre because they’re the sorts of things most Game Masters — incorrectly I might add — would say detect magic and dispel magic shouldn’t touch. Things like the visual illusion that displaces displacer beasts and the altered shapes of lycanthropes can, conceivably, be detected and dispelled.
The problem here is similar to the biggest problem with the saving throw mechanic. And that is that it suggests that the Game Master can only determine what can and can’t be detected or dispelled by referencing the rules. That there is literally no way to intuit the answer. Apart from spells and magical items, a Game Master cannot judge whether any given game effect is or is not “magical enough to interact with effects that interact with magic.”
Not only is it nonintuitive, but it’s also really confusing. Because it gives the word “magical” two different meanings. There is a sense in which dragons are magical creatures, right? They’re impossible beings. They couldn’t exist without magic. They are raw elemental fury wrapped in a mortal shell. And many, many creatures in the Dungeons & Dragons universe are inherently magical.
But they’re not “magical” in a rules sense. Because the word “magical” — as it’s used in detect magic and antimagic shell and dispel magic and in the description of certain abilities — has a very narrow, specific meaning. And that meaning actually isn’t really clear. The Sage Advice answer doesn’t really define “rules magical” except as “whatever the rules say it is.”
And this demonstrates an essential problem with Dungeons and Dragons. Especially its modern incarnation. It isn’t really concerned with describing a world. This is a problem because the world has to function as a world. Otherwise, you don’t have a roleplaying game. You have a game. Maybe. If the Game Master and the players don’t have some intuitive understanding of the world, they can’t make consistent judgment calls and decisions. They can’t guess how anything works that isn’t described in the rules. And roleplaying games are supposed to let you do anything you can imagine. Not just what’s programmed in the rules.
The Problem with Magic
Magic in tabletop roleplaying games is a thorny issue. While magic does have real-world analogs in the sense that there are magical systems defined in myths, legends, and stories and there are even some pretty complex real-world magical systems you can study — like astral theory or alchemy or vodun — most people aren’t well-versed enough in any of these subjects to say they’re intuitive.
So every tabletop roleplaying game in which magic features must first define and describe magic well enough that Game Masters and players have at least some sense of what it is, where it comes from, and how it works. In-universe. Let me give you an example of what that might look like.
Detecting Magic in the Angryverse
My players know exactly what it’s like to use detect magic in the Angryverse. Hell, they can almost sing along. Whenever anyone uses detect magic, their perceptions of the mundane become distant, gray, hazy, and washed out. Sounds become muted. And instead, they become attuned to the ebb and flow of magic. At first, they can only sort of vaguely feel that there’s magic about. The longer they concentrate, though, the more the magical auras around them come into focus. The strongest auras become perceptible first. Then other auras. And gradually, they go from being an invisible sense to a visible aura. Provided the object radiating the aura is visible. Magical auras are complex things and their colors, textures, shapes, and such are more an approximation than any real description. Because spellcasters can’t see them with their eyes. So auras aren’t red and crackling. They have a sense of redness and cracklingness. It’s kind of like remembering the color red or the feeling of something energetic. Stuff you can almost see in your mind’s eye.
In the Angryverse, all living things and all magical things have auras. But it takes a lot of practice to perceive auras. Even more to comprehend them. Because of all that vagueness. The different detect spells are attuned to different aspects of different kinds of auras. Detect magic shows the ebb and flow of magical forces and energies. Detect alignment shows spirits and souls. Shit like that.
And detect spells have worked that way in the Angryverse since before there was an Angryverse. In fact, it’s about the oldest world detail that has pervaded all of my D&D games ever. And it’s due to a combination of young Angry’s interest in the paranormal and supernatural and a bit of flavoring from Shadowrun’s second edition. And it’s all based on how the earliest editions of D&D I played — Mentzer BECMI Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition — described these spells in the rulebook.
See, this is all really grounded in the “real life” idea of astral projection and aura reading. Which is what Shadowrun’s magic system is also based on. In the Angryverse, magic flows through a coexistent unseen world — the ethereal plane — and thus wizards can peek through the veil with the detect spells. Or at least, they can become aware of the strongest presences in the ethereal plane while still mainly aware of the mundane plane. Obviously, more powerful wizards can eventually master spells that let them see into the ethereal more fully or even enter the ethereal plane.
And all this shit was at least strongly implied by D&D’s rules and world lore. Even as late as D&D 3rd Edition in which that whole “concentrate to perceive more” was given a lot of mechanical rigor and in which literally every game effect and special ability was classified based on its magicness.
And what of identify? Well, identify reveals the magical aura of an object so fully and completely that a wizard can figure out exactly what the magic does and how to unleash it. Which takes time and focus.
Because the low-level detect spells only let spellcasters get a vague sense of auras “through the veil” — they can’t see under the sheets, they can only see where something under the sheets is bulging up and they have to guess what’s under there — it can only really show active magic or strong spiritual forces. And to have anything more than a sense that there’s magic present — or whatever — the thing radiating the aura must be visible.
The Power of Intuitive Understanding
Given my understanding of magic — as a collection of complex energies that flow through an unseen world, can be shaped into spells, and coalesce around and flow through anything with magical properties — I can tell you that ectoplasm and flower sap that are useful magical ingredients do radiate magical auras detectible by a detect magic spell. And further, because identify is an analysis of those auras, their properties would be revealed by the identify spell.
And I’d be able to make that call at the table when a player cast detect magic and identify. I wouldn’t have to analyze any rules or get into any sort of protracted internet debate about what the rules mean. I certainly wouldn’t have to trust Crawford’s dumbass answers. Moreover, I’m pretty sure that my answer is the answer most players would expect. Hell, if players didn’t expect detect magic to reveal the properties of magical plant sap, they wouldn’t cast the spell so the question would never come up anyway.
Ultimately, that’s a good rule to keep in your head: if a player tries something, they’re expecting it to work. So, it should work as expected. Or, at least, if it doesn’t, it should reveal something useful about the world of the game when it doesn’t work.
The Good of the Game
Getting back to the question at hand: you have these magical ingredients. They provide magical effects when consumed, but they’re also useful for crafting magical items. How do the players know what they can do? How do the players know how to make use of them? How can they find out? And how do they know how they can find out?
Are players likely to just drink ectoplasm on the off chance it might do something? Probably not. That’s just not a thing the average person thinks to do. We don’t drink ghost fluids hoping they’ll give us magical powers. So if you’re not going to let players discover that information by using spells that specifically analyze the properties of magical shit, how are the players to discover that information? Moreover, if the spell that reveals that things are magical doesn’t reveal ectoplasm is magical, are they likely to keep analyzing it after that?
Detect magic and identify specifically exist to allow players to identify and use the magical stuff they find. That’s the game purpose behind those spells. That’s why they existed in their very earliest incarnations. And that’s what they should do. And exceptions built on technicalities are dumbass Sage Advice rules lawyer bullshit. It’s against the spirit of roleplaying games.
Intuition and Judgment Always Beat Analysis
Internet forums, Discord, and most Game Mastering advice blogs and content creators always end up bogged down in rules lawyer bullshit. And that happens for a reason. It happens because, in those situations, the Game Master isn’t pressured to make a call and keep the game moving.
When the players find the ectoplasm and then cast detect magic, you — the Game Master — have just seconds to figure out what happens. And your brain is going to blurt out an answer. And it’ll tend to blurt out intuitive answers. Which, as I noted above, are usually the best answers. Because they either follow from an intuitive understanding of the world or they follow logically from in-game events.
On the contrary, when you’re analyzing a situation away from the game table — when you’re trying to design a set of rules or when you’re thinking about how you’d handle some hypothetical situation — you can reference the rules and dig for an answer. You can even ask the designers. Or call on other gamers to help you. And that seems like it’ll lead you to the most correct answer. The one that follows the rules of the game.
And that belief leads to the general approach of “ruling at the table and then reviewing the rules later.” We’ve all said that, right? “I’ll make a call now to keep the game moving, and then I’ll check the rules and issue a formal correction later.”
But I posit the best answers — the ones that describe the world and design a good game — are the quick-and-dirty intuitive ones. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve made it known that I don’t like to rule on hypothetical situations away from the table. And if someone does ask me how I’d rule something, I give the first answer that pops into my head. I rarely go to the rulebooks first.
Building Understanding by Making Rulings
But there’s another reason to rely on intuitive rulings and to treat them as the best answer. It’s that making rulings is how you build an intuitive understanding of things. All that crap I explained above about detecting magic in the Angryverse? That’s not something I just wrote one day because I needed to have an answer in my head. That’s the result of years of ruling on detect magic. I’ve built an understanding of magic in the Angryverse by making judgment calls.
The thing is, if the system’s rules are well written and they’re written to both describe a world and provide a good gameplay experience, that stuff will underlie the game’s rules. So even if you don’t memorize every rule, if you get most of the rules mostly right as best you can with minimal referencing, your rulings will allow the game’s underlying design and world to emerge. And that’s what happened with me and detect magic in D&D 3E. There was a lot of subtextual crap in D&D 3E that was included to describe the universe of D&D. Magic was very consistent. Maybe a little too much. A little too rigorous. But what can you do?
Meanwhile, if the system’s rules are just a pile of rules that neither describe a world nor provide a particularly logical play experience, then your own rulings will provide a better experience than going “by the book.” And if you trust your intuition, rule consistently, and you’re skeptical of whether the rules have better answers than you do, you’ll also gradually build a consistent world and gameplay experience.
In other words, whether you’re running a good system or a bad system, trust your intuitive judgment, ignore the designers, and stop picking over the rulebooks like they’re the freaking legal code and you’re trying to get off on a technicality.
Thank you for the great article!
How do we develop better conversations so that we can discuss rulings and get suggestions from other GMs without getting too bogged-down in the analysis of rulebooks?
Internet discussions tend toward rules as written, because we’re not at your table, so I can’t know your best ruling. I can know the rules. I have told people, “You need to ignore the rules here” or “read the 3.5 DMG on cursed items, sometimes stuff just happens, and that’s fine and in accordance with the rules,” but 9 out of 10 times, if I know the system you are playing, I’m going to try for the rulebook answer, because without being at your table, that’s what I can do.
There’s also a difference in understanding how the rules and mechanics work from a purely academic point of view, and playing the game according to how it feels.
I’ll admit, coming from a wargaming background, I have leaned a lot more on rules as written than I probably should. Which is also why I now lean more towards game systems which rely a little more on GM intuition than D&D does. It’s generally less stressful to run a game where the players don’t sit around online every week and come up with “the killer builds” and analyze how to beat every encounter in the game.
If the players have to rely more on intuition too, they might still break the game, but I’ve often found that they and I find more interesting things to do than when all you do is heat up a “Magic-in-a-Can” and get the same results every time.
I think that the point being made is that you, as a GM, shouldn’t feel the need to discuss rulings you make at your table. As douglampert also implied, rulings are specific to your game that you are GMing. You may be in the same system as others, but you make different decisions based on what you have internalized about your world, and that’s a good thing.
The better conversation would be more about how you incorporated a concept in your world and to discuss how others did that in theirs. Like Angry did in this article where he described how he treats magic in the Angryverse.
That is where I ended up landing. I also went back to 3.5 to see how it handled Identify, since a lot of 5e rules and spells are just 3.5 rules with details omitted. Interestingly, Identify in 3.5 does have detail: it specifies it only is for magic items. So in that case it probably wouldn’t work on the sap… unless it defines that as a magic item.
Or unless *you* define it as a magic item. Or if you decide it’s better for the game that way.
So instead of reviewing the rules afterwards to invalidate or not the ruling, it’d be better to take some time to reflect on what the ruling taught us about the game world, right? If I ruled that Detect magic detected ectoplasm but then later that Identify couldn’t tell its properties, that could tell me that in this world, Identify can only work on man-made items, because it works by deciphering the intent imbued in the item by its creator.
I’m adding it to my checklist of “things to reflect on at the end of a game session”.
I don’t like how Identify is implemented in D&D. I like adding lots of small, random, magical items for my players to loot in dungeons, like a ring that would give you True Seeing for a short time but only once per day while in moonlight, or a transparent mask that would take on the face of last person who wore it for a few minutes. I wanted my players to have fun trying things out to see what they did.
This didn’t happen for two reasons. 1) They were scared of things that might be cursed. I will handle cursed items differently in my next game so this won’t be an issue. 2) Identify. All they wanted to do was cast Identify because it could give them the answer instantly. So my next game is going to be a completely different system that isn’t D&D and has much slower Identify mechanics, so it will still be possible to Identify stuff, but actually working it out by trying the item will be the quickest way.
Agreed. That is why I used alternate rules for magic items. Identify spans casting levels with scaling insights; characters can attempt to figure them out using Arcana at disadvantage (straight if proficient); or they can save and pay hoping the hired caster is honest.
And as plagiarism is flattery, totally using Angry’s Detect Magic now.
I allow my players to identify magic items with an Arcana check during downtime, which they can repeat until they figure it out. Better items have higher DCs, higher margins of success get you more information.
The identify spell just allows them to make an instant check in the field. This ended up encouraging them to use unidentified items (especially since I roll the checks for them behind the screen) because they know that its harder to identify more powerful items, so when they fail they assume its something really good and want to try it.
Yeah, I’ve used arcana checks instead of Identify for items occasionally, but this rarely works as my players succeed these checks more often than not, particularly if they have guidance or flash of genius or something like that. The moment it becomes character-driven skill or roll instead of a player-driven puzzle all they want do is scheme how to bump up the roll using various dice mechanics – it becomes a different sort of game and loses what I think could an opportunity for fun and discovery.
Thinking about this, especially if my characters attempt this route… Guidance is a cantrip lasting for a minute. Easy to rule that a character couldn’t self guide over multiple hours (short/long rest) while attempting the arcana check or that if they want to benefit from it, another character can do nothing but cast guidance during that time and thus lose the short/long rest benefit. Still doable but costs resources. Turns it into a cost/benefit decision that has consequences.
You could just rule that identify only gives them one aspect of the magical item, so they need to cast it multiple times to decipher every aspect of the object. 3-4 casts per object, each time cast at a cost (see below) suddenly makes Identify less attractive than DIY experimenting.
Also, stick to the magical component requirements. Early on in the game, components are a great limiter (100 gp on every use isn’t something to shake a stick at when they’re 2nd – 3rd level – not to mention that a 100 gp pearl is something they’ll only find in hordes starting at 5+, and you can always tightly control that resource (it’s probably something you’d only find for sale in the largest of inland cities)).
Yeah, but it doesn’t really solve the issue as that mechanic would still encourage them to use character skills for something which I don’t want to be achieved via a roll. It’s just one more reason (out of many) why D&D is completely the wrong ruleset for me as a GM.
Having magical components as loot in low level dungeons is a good idea 🙂 but I don’t see any reason not to have funny little magical items too.
To me it sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Players want to know how something works before using it. I mean would you try to light up a stick of dynamite thinking it might be a road flair, but you aren’t sure?
If you want small fun items, you have to make them easy to identify. But, the D&D rules actually gives you rules for this. They might be “boring” but they get around the whole “what is it? I won’t bother using it”
A player can during a short rest, or an hour of their long rest, meditate on a magic item and figure out how it works. No checks, no nonsense.
At the same time, as a GM it takes some of the mystery out of things. I personally would prefer to have more mystery and make it require the players to seek out aid, or at least have some proficiency to figure a thing out. Alchemists and brewers might find out how an elixir works. Arcanists or knowledged people might consult their knowledge to figure something out.
If they fail, they will have to seek out aid somehow.
I think their point about spell components is that, if every use of Identify requires a trip to a major city and spending a large sum of money to buy out the local stock of special Identify pearls, or using one of a very limited supply you found in a dungeon, players will hopefully only use it when they’re really stumped.
I think detect magic is very similar in function to find traps, but also a form of searching. I think it is perfectly ok, to not tell the players everything about a magic object, but if you want them to play with it, you have to let them know that it is safe to do so.
This was my reaction to this article as well. Using a 0 cost cantrip or low level spell grants perfect information and removes a lot of nuance to the whole system. Maybe say that ‘Ingredients have magical potential, but no active magical fields’, like iron outside of a magnetic field. Requires a more experimental approach to determine the properties and uses than a one and done spell.
You undersold this at the start so I was expecting a pre 2023 type article. The description of detect magic in the Angryverse is beautiful and the overall point about intuitiveness is very useful.
I feel I should be learning a lesson here, about rules of engagements, and playing ‘their game’, because I always felt those arguments were silly, but never that its problem was a fixation on The Rules over The World.
Thinking about this, I realize what’s irked me about so many rules discussions. The fixation on the “Truth” found within the rules, over how the world itself is supposed to click together.
And why that never sat right with me.
Great post. I would love to see a default “unified theory of life, magic, the planes, and cosmology”, I realise sometimes these kind of things are left blank so that the DM can just decide whatever they want, but it’s good to have SOMETHING that’s consistent that you can extrapolate from. Your post on death/the soul/graveyards was fascinating as well, and with all of these it’s like seeing small but highly detailed parts of the whole.
Hope to see more like these.
I concur. Lore details about the Angryverse are very interesting.
If it’s not on my DM screen, I’m probably trusting my gut.
The tough ones, for me, are the cases that don’t come up very often, but they do need to be consistent.
Town mode (more specifically big city mode) is a good example. My guys love to have their weapons enchanted, and I think it’s cool. After last week, I realized there are some pretty big swings on how I go about doing that. Same goes for training. I’m trying to codify it a bit more before next game.
What’s interesting, if you like it, is the extreme swings in real life history on how things were done and what they cost because standardization has not been a constant of most of history.
I love your description of how detect magic functions. Do you have a pre-defined color chart that correlates types/schools of magics to colors?
This runs into the problem of “why is Detect Magic useful then, rather than just scream EVERYTHING IS MAGICAL, YOU’RE DEEP IN THE OCEAN OF MAGIC”. I would find it intuitive for such spells to have some baseline level, level of sensitivity, which is not triggered by the spell. (Cf. infrared goggles not really detecting cold-blooded creatures: they’re not at absolute zero of heat emission, just not really hotter than the soil around them.) What might be meant by Sage Advice is that things that are marked magical are above such baseline while magic that supports a dragon being basically at the same level as magic that permeates the world itself (in a magical world, perhaps you’re not on a planet but on some flat rock that would collapse unto itself by astronomical forces long ago were it not for magic!).
For flower saps and stuff like that, the question then is: in potion-making, is the process doing most of the work or the ingredients? (This is, of course, a question about the world rather than about the rules.) But I think there’s something of a Riemann-geometry situation here: rules otherwise consistent may be perfectly compatible with either solution if implemented rigorously and thus not specify it, just like the same set of axioms (Euclidean without fifth postulate) is compatible with both Riemannian and Euclidean geometry and delivers good answers in either case.
Sage Advice said what it said. If that’s what it meant, it would have said that. And this is a whole lot of mental gymnastics to argue that point. And I’m not sure why that’s good for the game from either a mechanical or narrative standpoint.
After all, our world is full of light and yet there’s nothing useless about us being able to see light. Because we can also discern patterns by differences in the light.
And if you have to cite Riemann-geometry to make your case, you’re well, WELL outside the intuitive.
True, apparently so outside the intuitive that the message got completely outshadowed by the reference 😀 What I was trying to say is that there can be reasonably intuitive systems _and_ in-world explanations for all of the following:
1. Not everything – and not even everything that feels “non-real”, such as dragons – registering as some level of magical via things like Detect and Identify;
2. Ingredients of potions in particular not registering as such (cf. the logic of potion-making in Methods of Rationality);
3. Existence of something that explicitly tracks “man-made” (in a wide but not the widest possible sense) magic but not “natural” magic, regardless of magnitude.
What I’m absolutely _not_ claiming (and I agree my wording might have been misleading on that part) is that D&D creators originally intended it or even given it as much of a thought. I’m thinking of it because, well, I’m a GURPS fan, I’m accustomed to taking GURPS Thaumatology and/or GURPS Powers and designing one’s magic – well, not _from scratch_, but from quite a loose template, so decisions like this are something I need to actually make. (Random reader, don’t tell me “but Dima, there’s a perfectly workable magic system in Basic Set, extended in GURPS Magic”. It’s basically unconnected to the rest of the system in terms of CP costs, and it’s ridiculously overspecific for most settings and overconnected (prereqs, colleges and stuff) for most of the remaining ones, _and_ in Fourth Edition, GURPS Magic shares with GURPS Ultra-Tech the problem of being rushed out the door right after Basic Set, and it shows.)
GURPS relies even more on the intuitive understanding of what an advantage/spell/skill can do. It’s generic by definition, you need to put the context in world terms for your players.
If you say your world is built by gods, who are magic themselves, so everything is somewhat magic, then detect/identify has to be able to describe the variations in a meaningful way.
If magic is a complex set of energies working behind the scenes, and detect/identify allow a peek behind those scenes, you have to have an understanding of where/how those energies manifest to the observer so that you could describe it to them.
The rules aren’t going to do it for you, it’s your world. but in either case it has to be useful and consistent, or what benefit/cost would your players gain/lose from using it?
I think something we can think on here is the effect on GMs of marketing the value of your game rules as generic/reskinnable. If the designer says “the point of these rules is that they’re totally agnostic to how your world works, and also they result in consistent rulings because they always work the same way no matter how the world works.” then anyone who takes the designer’s word at face value is going to assume the rules have the answers.
I fully agree with you on the meta-level (does the post suggest otherwise?). However…
> If you say your world is built by gods, who are magic themselves, so everything is somewhat magic, then detect/identify has to be able to describe the variations in a meaningful way.
I don’t agree with this on the object level, see infrared goggles example.
The sage advice answer you linked *did* outline the in-universe logic behind Detect Magic as they see it – that it only detects very concentrated forms of magic, like spells, not every single mildly magical trait of a magical creature/plant/whatever. So, pretty much this exact line of thinking.
In fact, your own extended flavorful description says much the same thing – only the strongest magic auras are apparent when using Detect Magic, everything is a little bit magic but you often need specialized spells to see it – so I expected you to give the opposite answer to the one you did (random potion ingredients are probably not strongly magical enough, although a more fine-grained spell like Identify might work to identify them.)
The thing that pissed you off, it seems like, was that their suggestion for how to tell if something is sufficiently strongly magic is to check if the rules “magical” instead of using vibes. Which agree seems unlikely to work all that well.
I think I sufficiently explained what pisses me off about it and I think you missed a few passes. But good on you if you’re okay with the Sage Advice answer. I’m not.
Interesting to see the displacer beast’s ability described as “a magical illusion” while apparently lycanthropes cast polymorph self on themselves. Ok displacer. But lycanthropes are using a spell (or suffering from it)? Shouldn’t these both be innate powers, again like that of the dragon breath? Or if it COULD be a spell, it MUST be? Is there a convenient list somewhere of these discrepancies?!?
The real problem with “the rules” is that they’re an attempt to codify an inherently contradictory, unstable system with powerful emergent properties. As a very early Magic player (as in, coulda traded the cards I had then for a house now), I saw Wizards going through the same contortions trying to stabilize card interactions and a lot of early bad design choices. The “solution” there eventually was to basically ban most of the problem cards and interactions and rewrite a few others.
It’s always fun to see early stages of games, and how the designers didn’t really have a focus yet. Those games had soul, but were a lot more hit and miss too.
Chaos Orb was a brilliant and fun card, if all you did was play for fun… in tournaments it was completely broken, and lead to many rulings.
This is a wonderful article. I’ve read the piece of Sage Advice before about dragons and magic and while on one hand I understand that Crawford needs some mechanical reason to say “you can’t use dispel magic to kill a dragon”, on the other hand “two ways of being magical” has always felt incredibly dumb. What does NOT feel dumb is listening to the intuition that dispel magic is just not powerful enough to dispel a dragon. Even the spell’s text makes it clear that higher level magic is harder to dispel! I think what’s very interesting and rewarding to me is that the answer (in this specific case) isn’t any different, but the rationale is very different and leads to a feeling of “this is right” instead of “okay, I guess that’s technically right” in the same way that any human understands they can pick up a small rock, but not a really big rock. The big rock isn’t a “different kind of heavy” it’s simply “heavier.”
Considering this article is titularly about a very specific ruling, it did an awful lot for helping me understand the general philosophy you are trying to teach us.
I think what keeps him from using that solution is the idea that you can use Wish to wish a dragon out of existence, and you can Counterspell Wish, so transitively speaking you should be able to Counterspell a dragon.
But also, in true 5e style, this is just a more vague rehash of the extraordinary/supernatural/spell-like/spell system from 3rd edition, where abilities were rated on a scale of their interaction with spells and abilities with the word “magic” in their names.
I have no idea how dispel magic effects items but my gm gut ruling would be that it suppresses them for some amount of time. It might follow that dispel magic could be logically used to suppress an ability of a dragon, like it’s breath weapon. No you’re not going to kill a dragon, the same way casting dispel on a sword doesn’t obliterate the steel, but it probably do something.
Glad to see that my gut feeling ended up in the same ballpark. I remember how I used to pause the game to look up those kind of rules interactions a couple years ago… Dark times
Reading the post I am not sure the writers has even read the rules. Let’s look at 3rd. Magical effects are actually divided into 3 categories magic/divine , supernatural, extraordinary . So his complaint about how everything is lumped under magical (dragon breath weapons ect) is incorrect detect magic /identity looks at the arcane/divine aspect of magic ( spells and the spells used to create magic items and how to use them). To figure out the properties of natural items you just assign a school and use knowledge checks.
“Are players likely to just drink ectoplasm on the off chance it might do something? Probably not. That’s just not a thing the average person thinks to do. We don’t drink ghost fluids hoping they’ll give us magical powers.”
According to the 5E rules that’s exactly how players are supposed to figure out how potions work. It’s really dumb, I know. I would much rather have them use their alchemy tools and analyze the damn thing, to determine what an Elixir does. Or consult their knowledge on what a potion looks like to make a guesstimate on how it works.