D&Deconstruction #3: Detect THIS

In the wild, frontier days of early Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, our teenage group played pretty fast and loose with the setting.   Instead of worrying about whether a concept made much sense, we just rolled with it, in search of fun.  And I'm certain we weren't the only ones.  There are certain amusing notions that seem to have become widespread practices back then, probably thanks to the regulars contributors to the legendary Dragon magazine. This is the third of a series of articles that will deconstruct those notions.

So, detection spells... kind of boring, right? I mean, they're pretty much useless for dude-killing, and lack the flashiness of certain non-violent spells like Fly or Polymorph Object.  Sure, Detect Magic was important when dealing with possible magic items, but nobody in our group ever bothered with the rest of the detection spells.

It was an eye-opening experience when one of my friends ran L2: The Assassin's Knot, and one of our regulars got wild with Detect Evil.  The adventurers were trying to solve a murder mystery, and had tracked the perp to a village with the unlikely name of Garrotten.  Unlike most other D&D adventures of the time, this one had no dungeon, just a village full of secrets, including a conspiracy.  Our DM was expecting a top-notch role-playing experience, with lots of verbal interaction between player characters and NPCs.

Instead, the party cleric and his acolyte henchman had loaded up on Detect Evil, and started casting it routinely on any halfway-interesting NPCs they met.  By coincidence, each one turned out to be an evil assassin, and the party made short work of each one. It was brutal. Imagine if Joseph McCarthy had access to Detect Communist, and the results would be easy to guess.

After that, detection spells became a real metagame issue in our games.  I started taking them into account during my prep work, inserting interesting decoy characters and objects, just to make the group waste detection spells. And the players got more sophisticated in their use of detection spells. For example, a spellcaster might cast the same spell twice, moving some distance between castings so he could triangulate on a target.

I was disappointed that the otherwise great D&D PC game, Temple of Elemental Evil, had a glitch involving the detection spells. You could memorize them and cast them, but they didn't reveal anything.  If you download the official patch and the excellent Circle of Eight patch, it fixes a lot of issues but not the detection spells. But if you download some of the later fan patches, you eventually get working detection spells again.  Hmm, I think I'm in the mood to play some Temple of Elemental Evil tonight.