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Old 04-26-2022, 07:26 PM   #1
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default detecting when you ought to cast Identify Spell on your debuffed Ally

Identify Spell will tell a mage which spell their is enchanted with (so they can know how much to spend on Counterspell or Suspend Spell) but how would they know they ought to cast Identify Spell on their ally to begin with?

You need to react within 5 seconds of them being debuffed, otherwise Identify Spell won't work (you need the much more troublesome Analyze Magic) but I'm not sure how you get that sort of reaction time.

This makes me wonder if there's someway to program "detect my ally had an unknown spell cast on them" long-term sensory abilities?

Magesight (M102) seems to fill this role as
"Enchanted (or magical) beings also glow, though mages themselves do not unless they actually have spells on them at the moment.
So all I can think is that some mages must just try and keep magesight active for long periods of time so that they can be alerted (by the visual glow) when an ally gets enchanted and they have to quickly cast Identify Spell during the 5 second window.

- - -

Identify Spell can actually react prior to the spell being completed (instead of "just been cast" the "or are being cast at" condition) but I don't know if there's any way for Magesight to tip you off about those situations.

Should Magesight start showing your ally glowing as soon as the enemy begins casting the spell at that ally? Or would the glow only appear at the spell's completion?

Without an answer I was wondering about a compromise where they start to glow and it gradually glows until the spell completes? So you could maybe do a vision-based check with penalties if it's only a small % of the casting time completed?

This of course assumes you can't see other cues, like if you noticed the mage mumbling words and waving his hands you could posit the need for an Identify Magic without Magesight (unless he feints you to bait you into wasting money on Identify Magic?)

- -

Aside from constantly maintaining Magesight (even if you are skill 25 so it's 0 to maintain that's a -1 penalty which could be annoying) or parking it for long periods using Maintain Spell, I was wondering if there might be ways to have Magesight activate when needed.

Delay (M130) could be cast on Magesight, but the question is how you would actually trigger this delay, so that it could tell you a situation where "maybe a spell got cast, you should turn on your sight to see if someone zapped your allies".

Something like "activate Magesight on me as soon as a spell is cast" seems like it falls outside the normal boundaries of Delay though, which is "something that could reasonably be determined by a normal person at the Delay site"

This sounds like the "triggered by a more esoteric event" clause where you tack on a 3rd spell (Information) to define the trigger?

I'm not sure I understand how the esoteric expansion on Delay are meant to work though, M131 for example says:
The linked spell does not need to be maintained, though the Delay or its Information spell may need to be
Does this mean only that maintainable information spells can be used?

Something like "I cast Magesight on my Delay so it knows when to cast Magesight on me" doesn't seem to have any kind of economic advantage, as you don't save time, energy or spells on... am I missing some benefit here?

- - -

Is the solution here something like "I cast Magesight on my Delay so it knows when to cast Identify Spell" ?

It seems like the difference here would be that if you did this combo on an ally, the MSdelayIS combo would "keep an eye" on that ally and react to the visual glow and tell you what spell just got cast on him, which means you would not need to keep an eye on that ally yourself?

That'd be important if your ally was walking around some corner (or engaged in battle behind you) since that falls outside the "field of vision" which Magesight requires (ie it won't let you see magic objects through walls, right?)

The downside here is of course that this means you need separate castings of magesight on each of the delays you set to watch your allies, whereas actually casting Magesight yourself could let you monitor multiple allies simultaneously.
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delay, identify spell, knowledge spells, magesight

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