Bug in Analyze Magic

[phiwum]

I agree that taking away the player's explicit knowledge of their stats would be a problem. This is better solved by allowing certain spells to require full fatigue on failure.

But I am a little puzzled by Henry's response. I had it on good authority that all players of reasonable intelligence are already playing ST 6 goblin witches. I can't imagine that any of the stubborn fools not playing ST 6 wizards would make the switch just so they know when Analyze Magic fails.

[larsdangly]

I think it's easier to simply ignore those somewhat incompletely considered instructions and just tell the player 'you're not sure' when their detection/information gathering spell fails. They know they failed. You know they failed. Anything you tell them will be made up on the spot and they will know it is a lie. Rather than make up a complicated house rule to deal with this unusual circumstance, I'd rather blow past that relatively uninteresting moment and move on to whatever comes next.

[Shostak]

The only real problem is lying to the player on a standard miss. With critical misses, full ST is lost and false readings are appropriate.

[Skarg]

Wow. I had no idea so many TFT GMs wouldn't get how to play such things.

It seemed pretty clear to me, after a little consideration and/or experience, that any information-giving spell or talent which is supposed to give not-entirely-reliable information, needs to be rolled by the GM, not allowed giveaways such as only charging 1 fatigue for incorrect information on a higher-cost spell, and also that the false information needs to not actually be obviously false and so about as good as success (i.e. you can't use your dumbest person with Detect Lies to be reliably backwards about whether a much smarter person is lying or not).

Even with the chance of a false reading, Analyze Magic is very good, and especially for a player determined to find out what an interesting item's enchantments are. "Of course we cast Reveal five times and Analyze Magic three times!" Not to mention that for most enchantments, you can usually test the accuracy by trying to use the item.

So I don't think Analyze Magic has any need for more reliability from only giving false information on a 17. I suppose it would at least make players less suspicious if/when they ever did get false information. But it would make successfully casting it twice more or less absolutely certain you had the right information.

And I would hope it would be obvious that Long-Distance Teleport isn't going to only cost 1 to teleport a dwarf to Timbucktu by "accident", especially not by using the Thrown range penalty at whatever distance to ensure a missed roll.

[larsdangly]

I think the point of the OP is that the ST cost actually paid to cast the spell will tell the caster whether or not it worked, so there is no amount of GM creativity or taking over of die rolls (which I suspect most people do in these circumstances) that will trick a player unless you actually change the ST cost as specified in RAW.

[hcobb]

Another fix I have for this is "On a critical failure the GM may lie about the results. Once a wizard is convinced that a mundane object is magical he will fool himself into always detecting magic of course."

[phiwum]

Skarg is obviously right that getting false information from Analyze Magic doesn't matter too much if the player can just cast it again and get correct information. These spells are often cast between adventures where ST cost is largely unimportant.

I've decided that if I lie to the player about an Analyze result, he'll get the same result on repeated castings. Repeated castings could tell him about other spells on the item (if present), but he won't amend previous results. Sorta like Henry's suggestion regarding detecting magic.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by larsdangly

I think the point of the OP is that the ST cost actually paid to cast the spell will tell the caster whether or not it worked, so there is no amount of GM creativity or taking over of die rolls (which I suspect most people do in these circumstances) that will trick a player unless you actually change the ST cost as specified in RAW.

Right, that's what he wrote.

So, it seems clear to me that implied in "If the roll is missed, the GM should lie" would be that you DO change the cost of failure to be the same as success. Otherwise, I'd hope it would be obvious, or quickly learned by experienced GM's, that the ST cost of failure has to be the full cost, or it wouldn't be much of a lie, unless your players are even less clever. There are other spells for which this is an issue, such as Pathfinder, Duplicate Writing, and Trance. And like Long-Distance Teleport, I'd say it's pretty clear that casting these spells is doing something that logically needs to involve paying the full cost, even if you fail.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by phiwum

Skarg is obviously right that getting false information from Analyze Magic doesn't matter too much if the player can just cast it again and get correct information. These spells are often cast between adventures where ST cost is largely unimportant.

I've decided that if I lie to the player about an Analyze result, he'll get the same result on repeated castings. Repeated castings could tell him about other spells on the item (if present), but he won't amend previous results. Sorta like Henry's suggestion regarding detecting magic.

Yes. Players will also just go to the Wizard's Guild and pay for a through analysis.

And yes, only if you extend the lie to repeat castings, or invent some other interesting house rules about it, is there likely to be much mystery about what enchantments are on an item that attracts suspicion.

Not to mention if there's someone with Spellsniffer available.

[hcobb]

If Albert gets the wrong answer from Detect or Analyze Magic then does Betty get the same wrong answer?