How do you handle identification?

[graelth]

How do you handle magic item idenification? My own preferred method is to have the players experiment to figure out what something does (sip potions etc.), but I also allow a detect magic spell to reveal magical writing (like trigger words) and a read magic spell to make that writing intelligible. Of course, detect magic only lasts 2 turns (according to Swords & Spells) and read magic only for a few moments (according to Men & Magic), so after read magic wears off the writing is unintelligible magical script again and after detect magic wears off, it disappears altogether! In that case, the players have to write down the trigger word to experiment with later.

The rules do seem to allow scrolls to be positively identified with just the read magic spell without actually needing to "test" the item (indeed, that is how cursed scrolls trigger), but for everything else it is experimentation. The passive abilities of a magic item, like weapon or armour bonuses, can't really be identified exactly short of doing a backwards calculation on your to-hit number or going on a sidequest to slay a monster that can only be hit by +X weapons. However, I rather like bonuses to stay mysterious. A player can grow very attached to his mighty magical sword, only to be disappointed when he eventually learns that it was a humble +1 sword all along! If bonuses are very easy to discern, players will always seek after that fabled +3 and feel ambivalent about every other weapon along the way.

[graelth]

Jan 27, 2018 9:52:50 GMT -6 Piper said:

My general guideline is easy to access, but costly. In original and still used starting town of Riverton, there is a magic user turned Sage (to the players best knowledge) who will identify magic items for a fee. Ahmechs (ahh-MEKS) is helpful, accurate, and an absolutely shrewd businessman who knows his magic items and treasure.

This allows the players to positively ID items, but the cost factor encourages them to try to figure it out on their own. I’m also a good referee for making sure that the magic words to trigger are typically discoverable with a little bit of work.

Please understand, I know this isn’t “by the book.” I’m always a little hesitant to reply to threads like this because there are so many people who want to helpfully point out to me that I’m “doing it wrong.” My campaign began when this game was first published, I had to make up a lot of stuff on my own. I rarely changed to later published ways of doing it because my way worked just fine. So, I freely present to you my opinion and advice. I’m quite certain somebody will come along before too long and give you a much better way of doing it!

I like this approach! It is very Tolkien-esque in a way, where a powerful NPC with a great deal of experience and knowledge may have heard of the magic item and can relate what lost writings have said about it. Presumably, if you have other NPCs that can also identify certain magic items (a king, a high patriarch, the guildmaster of the thieves), you could make identification a quest in itself... seek the audience of the world emperor, for he may know the legend of this magic item. Of course, if the players rely on too many freebie identifications, perhaps the superhero will start giving the players quests and kick them out of his or her court if they are not accomplished in a timely manner. Or perhaps his or her knowledge will simply run dry and the players will be referred to yet another NPC that they will have to go on an adventure to find... "I know it not, but perhaps you will seek out the legendary hero Luka, for he may know better than I. He is said to live these days as a nameless hermit in the dread Swamps of Mynock."

Of course, Ahmechs sounds more like a businessman, as you say, which is a good angle in itself. Identification is convenient, but it will take some of that hard-earned treasure!

I think it is probably really important to learn trigger words, as you mention, as experimentation cannot really take place without them in many cases.

[tetramorph]

My approach is similar to Piper’s.

Scrolls: if the MU already knows the spell, instant ID. If not, must use read magic to ID.

Potions: quaff or research. But the potion is lost in the process of research. But then the MU knows the spell and can cast it/ make it. Also, I’ve built up some consistent (often hoaky / humorous) descriptions that players can get used to and that characters can come to learn. Like “invulnerability” is red, swirls and consistently forms a Superman symbol.

Items: must discern word of power to activate. Always written on the item in either an unknown tongue (read language), or in magic. Then they must experiment, research, but the word of power usually relates to what it does in some obvious way. It’s a game, but not every riddle needs to be an IQ test.

Swords: all have word of power on blade or hilt. The word of power is
2-4 common
5-6 unknown
7+ magic
I roll a D6 + sword bonus.
After the alignment match or shock, then the ego check then (if the PC wins) a regular reaction check. If the sword has a very positive reaction and speaks or telepathically communicates it will give the PC it’s name. No spell like abilities until the user pronounces the word of power.
If an MU has helped the FM before touching the sword to discern its name, pronouncing the name upon touch grants save for ½ alignment damage, advantage to ego struggle and bonus to swords initial reaction.

Anyway, that is the general thrust of things!

Fight on!

[hamurai]

Jan 27, 2018 9:52:50 GMT -6 Piper said:

Please understand, I know this isn’t “by the book.” I’m always a little hesitant to reply to threads like this because there are so many people who want to helpfully point out to me that I’m “doing it wrong.”

There's no wrong way to play a game, just "by the book" and with house rules. Nothing wrong with house rules, in fact. When you look at how many people actually make money off of their house rules in the OSR movement, there seems to be a real craving for house-ruled versions of all D&D editions.
When I started playing, all the rules I knew were the ones my neighbour translated for me because back then, I had not learned English (apart from some words and expressions I picked up in old Amiga/Atari games). So we played by his (sometimes wrong, often house-ruled) translations and what sense I could make from the tables in the books he showed me. Many of these early, mostly unintentional house-rules stuck in my head and I used them or adapted them for later editions as well.

That said, I'm not sure I've ever played a role-playing game strictly by the book. Well, maybe the ultra-light rulebooks where you can't really change anything without dissolving the game entirely. And that happened, too.

[graelth]

A tangentially related question, is read magic cast on a person or on an object? My reading of the wording of the spell is that it is cast on a person, but I've played with a lot of DM's that handled it as a spell cast on an object.

Read Magic: The means by which the incantations on an item or scroll are read. Without such a spell or similar device magic is unintelligible to even a Magic-User. The spell is of short duration (one or two readings being the usual limit).

[Vile Traveller]

Jan 27, 2018 9:52:50 GMT -6 Piper said:

My general guideline is [good stuff cropped for brevity]

I thought everybody did it like that.

[tetramorph]

Jan 27, 2018 18:21:28 GMT -6 Piper said:

I treat it like it is cast on a person, giving them the ability to see a magical aura surrounding things with an enchantment upon them.

That sounds like detect magic to me.

I understand it to be about deciphering a particular instance of magical inscription. Like revealing the invisible ink.

Strictly, I think it should be burned per inscription, but I’m a softy and give it a time frame, like 1d6 turns or something. I haven’t pinned down a consistent house rule yet.

[scottenkainen]

When I'm not running AD&D, I allow anyone with a Detect Magic spell prepared and four hours to kill to be able to figure out what one magic item does and how to work it.

[Finarvyn]

For me, I always allow for the characters to experiment on their own or to consult an NPC for a small fee.

* Read Magic -- determine the contents of a scroll or book without the effects going off.

* Detect Magic -- see an aura of magical persons, items, or creatures in the area.

* Identify -- determine the effects of a potion, ring, weapon, armor, or whatever without experimentation.

The tricky thing about experimentations is potions. Characters want to try a sip, but that shouldn't be enough to actually make the thing work so it should always fail. One thing I like with potions is an old trick I stole from the classic "Rogue" DOS computer game; I assign each potion type a different color or smell so that if they keep a list they can eventually identify them all. Of course, along the way, they end up wasting a lot of potions and are usually better off to get it Identified for real.

[howandwhy99]

Just like exploring a dungeon, but hand held

Spells can help with this, in all sorts of ways.

[talysman]

I allow experimentation or research. Spell research rules are used to determine time and cost to identify a magic item. A sage can perhaps do it cheaper, but there's less certainty (sage might be wrong, or lying.)

Magical inscriptions, the way I run them, are highly individualized for each magic-user. They can be researched as well, but Read Magic can act as a shortcut. Basically, it's Decode Cypher.

[graelth]

Feb 1, 2018 16:19:54 GMT -6 talysman said:

I allow experimentation or research. Spell research rules are used to determine time and cost to identify a magic item. A sage can perhaps do it cheaper, but there's less certainty (sage might be wrong, or lying.)

Magical inscriptions, the way I run them, are highly individualized for each magic-user. They can be researched as well, but Read Magic can act as a shortcut. Basically, it's Decode Cypher.

That's interesting. I've always interpreted "read languages" as the "decode cypher" of the game, since its main use (making treasure maps intelligible) implied that all treasure maps were written in languages that couldn't normally be learned or known (i.e., one person's code, much like the Voynich manuscript). It makes a great deal of sense, in my mind, that a treasure map would be written in one man's private code language.

Read magic is a little different in my campaign because most spells are more than just a trigger word (protection scrolls being the exception). Read magic makes the magic itself intelligible, shows how the spell was designed to work and makes it clear how the spell is cast (if that type of magic would normally be intelligible to the character's class, whether magic-user or cleric). You could say that read language translates coded words into common language, while read magic transforms raw sorcery into logical patterns.

Incidentally, I do not like players to have to choose between using a scroll or saving it to learn the spell later. If I saw players having this quandry, I would simply apply a stronger version of the advice in Monsters & Treasure and have all spells disappear after a short while if they are not cast. Scrolls are there to be used, not hoarded up! If the players do not wish to use a scroll, maybe it will find a better master that isn't so reluctant to unleash its wonderous powers.

[countingwizard]

I think it heavily depends on how your group plays D&D. If you have multiple DMs you absolutely must tell the player the item attributes before the end of the session, because another DM won't know what was intended when it is eventually identified. If you are playing in a group that only has one DM, the best way is to approach a Sage or Oracle.

[talysman]

Feb 1, 2018 17:36:38 GMT -6 graelth said:

Feb 1, 2018 16:19:54 GMT -6 talysman said:

I allow experimentation or research. Spell research rules are used to determine time and cost to identify a magic item. A sage can perhaps do it cheaper, but there's less certainty (sage might be wrong, or lying.)

Magical inscriptions, the way I run them, are highly individualized for each magic-user. They can be researched as well, but Read Magic can act as a shortcut. Basically, it's Decode Cypher.

That's interesting. I've always interpreted "read languages" as the "decode cypher" of the game, since its main use (making treasure maps intelligible) implied that all treasure maps were written in languages that couldn't normally be learned or known (i.e., one person's code, much like the Voynich manuscript). It makes a great deal of sense, in my mind, that a treasure map would be written in one man's private code language.

Read magic is a little different in my campaign because most spells are more than just a trigger word (protection scrolls being the exception). Read magic makes the magic itself intelligible, shows how the spell was designed to work and makes it clear how the spell is cast (if that type of magic would normally be intelligible to the character's class, whether magic-user or cleric). You could say that read language translates coded words into common language, while read magic transforms raw sorcery into logical patterns.

Part of this is a matter of perspective. Sure, Read Languages can be seen as Decode Cypher. But magical inscriptions are an even harder cypher to decode.

The other part has to do with the way I interpret magic. I have a facsimile print of Francis Barrett's The Magus, which is an 18th century grimoire, basically, by someone who really believed in magic, as opposed to someone like us who's just building fantasy magical systems for a game. Part of the process of creating a magical talisman in that book is:

1. Find the planet and astrological sign that governs the desired magical effect under the System of Correspondences, and determine the best hour and day of the week for invoking those correspondences.
2. Translate that into the names of spirits and "intelligences" of that planet, day, and hour.
3. Use one of several methods to transform those names into magical inscriptions or symbols.

So, assuming magic in my D&D world uses a process similar to this, identifying a magical scroll or item has to go through these reversed steps:

1. Translate the symbols or inscriptions into readable text.
2. Look up the names in various tables to see what planets or signs they govern.
3. Figure out what the goal of invoking those magical forces would be.

As you can probably see, it's a lot more guesswork involved when reverse engineering a magical inscription than when making it in the first place. You could compare it to one-way hashes in computer programming: a given source text produces exactly one hash every time, but a given hash can be created from more than one source text.

Feb 1, 2018 17:36:38 GMT -6 graelth said:

Incidentally, I do not like players to have to choose between using a scroll or saving it to learn the spell later. If I saw players having this quandry, I would simply apply a stronger version of the advice in Monsters & Treasure and have all spells disappear after a short while if they are not cast. Scrolls are there to be used, not hoarded up! If the players do not wish to use a scroll, maybe it will find a better master that isn't so reluctant to unleash its wonderous powers.

This issue doesn't come up for me, because Read Magic identifies a spell and effectively teaches it to you at the same time. Since I use the above steps as a guide to how magic "works", books of magic aren't specific incantations, but charts and tables for creating such incantations, each of which is tailored for the time and place of the incantation's creation. There might be notes in a spellbook discovered in a dungeon on which combos to use for specific effects, but once learned, that information is retained even if the M-U loses their spellbooks.

[foster1941]

Trial and error experimentation, like in the example of play in the ruleexwhere the players try on random pairs of boots to see if any of them allow silent movement. Intelligent swords will generally tell their owner about their capabilities (unless they don’t want to). Sipping potions tells what they do without triggering the effect (except Poison, of course). Read Magic identifies scrolls and may reveal command words engraved on other items. If the item was taken from an NOC or monster who was using it they might have seen it in action to know what it does ( and what the command words are). Magic-users usually have the command words for their items written in their spell books (likely in magical script). High level characters might use Commune or Contact Higher Plane spells to identify items without using trial and error (and risking cursed items). A wish will certainly identify the functions of a magic item.