The Curious Case of Detect Magic in D&D 5e

NOTE: This blog post was intended to go up several days ago. However, I had to go into surgery, and therefore had to delay the posting of this entry. It also prevented me from properly editing it...there aren't any images, clever captions, and it might come off choppy. That said, I hope you all enjoy.

I think my last post betrayed the fact that I have a deep and abiding love for cool magic items. I love peppering enemies' inventories and weapons-stores with neat little trinkets.

I think the designers of D&D 5e love them, as well, based on some of their design decisions. Traditionally, you see, discovering and identifying magic items boiled down to, mostly, a single spell. Detect Magic. This was the case all the way back in AD&D, and remains the case in modern games like Pathfinder. A group of adventurers comes across a chest full of treasure, and they immediately cast detect magic to see if any of it glows with the light of potentially-cool powers. D&D 5e changed this. In 5e, everyone knows that a magic item is magic as soon as they pick it up. It radiates an aura that can be felt by anyone, like a magical sixth sense.

So, then...what's the point of detect magic? Why does it still exist?

That question is a bit disingenuous, I realize. But it's a great teaser to place before the “Read More” button.

Replacing Necessity with Utility

The easy answer, of course, is that detect magic can—and has been for a long time—used for several things other than treasure detection. And it's even more utilitarian in 5e with its mechanical redesign. My first experience with the spell was in 3^rd edition, where it was essentially useless outside of the standard treasure detection. You could detect magic in a cone in front of you, and the spell required heavy concentration to determine anything other than that the magic existed somewhere in that general area. In 5^th edition, it requires much less intensity to maintain (concentration is its own interesting bag of goodies in 5e, but I won't get into that), and automatically detects anything within 5 feet of you. Beyond that, it can last for up to 10 minutes, meaning that it's actually a really good spell for when you're worried about magical traps. In 5e, detect magic becomes a great scouting tool, and can even be used tactically within combat to discover unseen opponents.

That said, it's a 1st-level spell, and you can only cast so many of those.

Except, it's also a ritual spell...and this is where things get interesting and...well, it's where my conflicting feelings on the spell really come into view.

Artifacts of Old Design

A quick recap: a ritual spell is a spell which can be cast by the magic user (if they possess the ritual casting feature) without consuming one of their spells for the day. This requires them to perform a ritual, however, which itself requires 10 extra minutes of casting time. This is a great mechanic, which was introduced (I believe) in 4^th edition. I'm glad it survivied. However, it brings into question the purpose of the detect magic spell. As I established above, the spell is essentially unnecessary for finding treasure, unless your DM is really a dick about where he places magic items in his games (Magical bookends on a shelf, a single magical key hanging amongst ten key rings in a jail, etc.). The spell's newfound utility in exploration and combat betrays this type of thinking—they wanted to keep an iconic spell in the game, but didn't need it to serve the same purpose as it previously had—but its ability to be cast as a ritual suggests that it was still intended to be used as a treasure detector.

Let me explain my logic on that front.

In a dungeon crawl, traditionally, time is a factor in determining success. It might not seem that way for many modern gamers, since most dungeons these days are explicitly designed, with all t's crossed and all i's dotted. The old-school method of doing things, though, focused a LOT on a little technique known as Wandering Monster Checks. The option for rolling for wandering monsters returned in the 5^th edition Dungeon Master's Guide, but it's not really a core piece of the game. Detect magic's ritual casting suggests that it may have been at an earlier time in development.

See, back in the day, wandering monster checks were rolled every 10 minutes in a dungeon (called a “turn”). The DM would roll a d20, or a d6, or whatever, to determine whether the players came across a wandering lurker in the dungeon. This means that, in a system where detecting magic items requires the detect magic spell, most mages would be using it quite often. And the only way to use the spell as often as necessary would be to cast it as a ritual, so that it doesn't consume a spell slot. This means that every time they wanted to check for magical treasure, they would risk a wandering monster, as rituals just so happen to take 10 minutes, the same length of time required between checks.

However, that's not the system we ended up with. Somewhere along the line, they decided to make it quicker and easier to detect magic items, as you just need to touch them to know—something that is inherently done when examining treasure. And I totally get this decision. As a DM, it's a lot easier to say “you find 375 gp, a polished silver ring with a garnet set into the side, and an old, musty, but magical Esperian flag” than it is to require the players to state that they detect magic every time. It only saves one step in the process, but that step is one of the most monotonous and bland in the entirety of D&D design. I get the decision, and I stand by it.

However, it does make the ritual casting of detect magic rather unnecessary. One could argue that it could be used to effectively always have a magical detection shield up when exploring dungeons, if you stopped every 10 minutes in order to ritually cast detect magic. But that's boring, and WAY too cautious, and honestly more trouble than it would be worth. The ritual casting seems to be just an artifact of a potentially-earlier stage in D&D 5e's design. A neat little easter egg for those of us with the historical context to pick up on it.

Identify still works perfectly, though. It's a great way to mess with players if you use Wandering Monsters. One minute, they think it'll be fine to just sit down and cast identify on a few items they found in a chest. Next minute?

Pride of owlbears. Like, 16 of them. At least. Is pride the right word? Bah, it sounds awesome.