The Gaming Den

Arcana Unearthed has a perfectly workable True Name system, where some guys don't get True Names at birth and are immune to both good and bad True Name magic, and other guys have them and get the upswing and downswing.

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As for Scry, your pages of houserules for Scry are proof for my example. The spell itself is requires every DM to write elaborate houserules for it to work at all.

The spell itself doesn't impose any of the limitations you want to place on it. I'm sorry, but pulling crap out of your ass does not constitute proof for your opinion. The actual text only says "Secondhand (you have heard of the subject) +5." What that means is open to debate. If we did a poll right now, I bet half the people would say that second-hand knowledge means: "that guy that killed the princess."

Even by your houserules, huge areas of grief are possible. What constitutes "knowing someone." If you met them in a Polymorphed form, do you know them? How about a Magic Jarred form, or an undead or outsider form when they are now living? What if someone is a well-known celebrity like the King, but you don't know anyone who has met the King who can tell you about him, even though you know from tales around the tavern how tall he is, his hair color, and any other thing that you could get from talking to someone intimately connected to him?

Do you have to talk to them to "meet them." Do they have to talk back for it to constitute a meeting? Is seeing them the same as "meeting them." If seeing is "meeting", can you fly hundreds of feet in the air watch the daily crowd and "meet" anyone so that you can Scry them later. Or do you have to see their face? What if they are wearing a magical disguise, and they look just like someone else? Do you Scry the person you met or the owner of the likeness? If you have met a person, and then they later kill the princess, can you Scry on the "princess's killer" since you have met them, even if you don't know that they are the killer?

Unlike line of sight or line of effect spells, which are easy to relatively easy to adjudicate, spells based off of the DM's poorly understood ideas about the dozens of conflicting systems of sympathetic magic are almost impossible to use in a game without writing a thesis called "Targetting: First- and Second-hand Knowledge, and Sympthetic Targetting as related to Scry spells in DnD 3.5."

Guest (Unregistered) at [unixtime wrote:1096560998[/unixtime]]
Do you have to talk to them to "meet them." Do they have to talk back for it to constitute a meeting? Is seeing them the same as "meeting them." If seeing is "meeting", can you fly hundreds of feet in the air watch the daily crowd and "meet" anyone so that you can Scry them later. Or do you have to see their face? What if they are wearing a magical disguise, and they look just like someone else? Do you Scry the person you met or the owner of the likeness? If you have met a person, and then they later kill the princess, can you Scry on the "princess's killer" since you have met them, even if you don't know that they are the killer?

No, scrying targets a person not a concept. You can target "that guy I saw last night at the tavern" but you can't target "the princess' killer" because you dont' know who that is, and it is thus an ambiguous term. You don't know the princess' killer, therefore you scry no one.

Now theoretically, you could scry someone who you saw polymorphed, but again you would be targetting "that dragon I saw last night" or what not.

When you are targetting "the princess' killer" you aren't targetting a specific person, you're targetting a concept. For all you know the princess could have tripped and broke her neck, or some loose stone could have fell on her. Or maybe a swarm of insects did it. So it's not a valid scrying target.

As for true name systems, I really don't see the point. It's basically a way for the DM to hose PCs and prevent them from using any of thier magic. And maybe as a plot device the DM has someone figure out the PCs true name and fuck them over with it, but either way it blows. It's no fun to want to scry on the evil lord's butler but then be told you can't do it. Scrying is just about no good then.

So then the PCs want some kind of spell that they can use to find out someone's true name remotely. And that spell ends up running into the same problems we have with scrying.

The only place true names can be cool is for summoning because you can hand them out as effective treasure. Maybe you find the true name to a succubus in an ancient tome and can now planar bind her. That's cool and helps control the binding spells.

Using it to control scrying is dumb, because it basically means that the PCs will never get to scry anyone.

RC wrote:but you can't target "the princess' killer" because you dont' know who that is,

Why not? Where in the rules does it say that you have to know who the killer is? "The Princess's killer" describes one unique person in all the world far more accurately than "Steve the Mighty Retard," since the world might be filled with six guys named "Steve the Mightly Retard." Since "having met" is undefined, and "knowing" is undefined, and "likeness" is undefined, and "possession" is undefined, every casting of the spell is a unique event houseruled by the DM.

Just because the houserules in your head make sense out of the Scry spell description doesn't stop the spell from being a point of argument in everyone's game.

I mean, even the houserules in you head couldn't answer the 20 different common DnD situations I came up with, and you had time to think about it.

And, to be fair, the storyl that Scry is based on does give you divination-type answers: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?"

Look, if you want to get ridiculous and reach the rules to obscene levels, then you can. But whenever someone makes a ridiculous claim that says "but the rules don't say I can't do it, so I can if my DM is a moron."

I just shrug and say "ok... so you're banking on your DM being a moron. Why are you playing with him again?"

If you're pointing at a real rules ambiguity, then ok, but I can't think of many uses of scry where allowing or disallowing it isn't obvious or largely irrelevant.

Most of the questions you posed could be ruled either way and it really doesn't matter which way you rule them for the purposes of the game so long as your consistent.

So you're right in that you rpobably couldn't program a computer to handle scrying, but I just really don't care much about that fact.

No, he's totally right. When you say that:

RC wrote:Now theoretically, you could scry someone who you saw polymorphed, but again you would be targetting "that dragon I saw last night" or what not.

That's you making shit up. A DM would be just as within his rights to point out that at this time, there is no Dragon you met last night - because the polymorph has ended and noone fulfills that criteria.

That's ambiguity. Serious ambiguity. Does the fact that you don't know that he wasn't a Dragon mean that your Scry fails? In some games it will, in some games it won't.

But if it doesn't, then the fact that as court sorcerer you almost assuredly have met the princess' killer at some point, and the killer of the princess is a unique individual, and you are thus uniquely describing a singular person who you have at one point met - means that you are fulfilling the letter of the rules much more closely than the scrying on the guy who isn't really a dragon whom you've already allowed a scry to go off against.

The ambiguity is real. Scry is based on principles of sympathetic magic, which vary from culture to culture and are not independently verifiable because sympathetic magic is not real. It runs on Magic Logic, which isn't the same between two different people.

True Names don't make any sense to you. Apparently because you've never in your entire life known any Catholics or had to deal with Social Security Administration. Fine. But because something which obviously does make sense to billions of people in the realm of magic logic makes no sense to you, it should be patently obvious therefore that putting up some vague pointers to magic logic and telling DMs to figure it out is a losing proposition.

Levels of association and attachment aren't real, so asking a spell to rely upon them for its game effects is asking for an argument.

-Username17

Look, I mean whenever you've got something open ended, you're always going to get arguments about what it can or can't do. So you either eliminate scry, add some super restrictive tag on it like true names, or you learn to live with it.

As I said before the true name thing just sucks for the purpose of the PCs, because it basically says "you can't scry on anyone, ever." and it makes the spell useless. The only one who ever scries is going to be a BBEG who has some spy infiltrate the PCs to learn their true name.

Also, once your true name is out, you're screwed... because if you want to be sadistic you can just have people go around telling everyone what it is. And then you're as good as dead.