Nondetection: Don’t Scry for Me, Argentina
Usable By: Bard, Ranger, Wizard
Spell Level: 3
School: Abjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Duration: 8 hours
Components: V, S, M (a pinch of diamond dust worth 25 gp sprinkled over the target, which the spell consumes)
For the duration, you hide a target that you touch from divination magic. The target can be a willing creature or a place or an object no larger than 10 feet in any dimension. The target can’t be targeted by any divination magic or perceived through magical scrying sensors.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Cackling maniacally, the scarred skeletal lich wraps her striped bone hands around the dark crystal orb. The orb slowly rises as she commands “Come, spirits, show me the hero who carries the blade of light!” The orb hovers for a brief moment, slowly beginning to show a picture from within, before abruptly stopping and falling back into her hands. “Ugh, freaking Nondetection” she mutters. “Okay, spirits, show me their idiot barbarian companion instead.” The orb floats up again, revealing a napping bugbear barbarian next to blurred-out paladin, clearly showing their current location right outside her dungeon of evil.
Nondetection is a non-spell. It's a 3rd level spell tax DMs can ask players to make, or a DM tool to simply say no when the players attempt to spy on the villain. It’s a tool that has so many flaws and workarounds it feels horrific to have to use, and even worse to stumble into with your own divination magic.
At its best, Nondetection is a tool to protect a lone individual tasked with an important mission from divining eyes. Dungeons & Dragons is a cooperative roleplaying game. A game typically played with three or more adventurers together, going on an epic journey. If a player goes off on their own adventure, by themself, everyone else just gets to sit around texting or browsing social media for an hour of solo play, which isn’t a particularly great experience. Otherwise, Nondetection needs to eat multiple spell slots to protect the entire party or be foiled by a villain who just keeps guessing at party members until one is revealed. Have a familiar? You’ll need to Nondetection that, too. How about some zombies or skeletons made from Animate Dead? Better have spare gold and slots for them as well!
I don’t want to DM games where Nondetection matters, nor do I want to be a player in those games. It’ll feel like either a speculative waste of gold and a spell slot that slows down larger-scale exploration, or an annoying barricade that the DM throws up whenever the players use a Scrying effect well that feels cheap. The number of instances where Nondection feels fun is near zero, and for that reason, I will never recommend it to anyone. Most of the time it's useless, as most of the time, you’re not getting divinely scouted. If it's ever mandatory or powerful, it's an expensive tax that has no business being required.
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