Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Fairly new DM, running my first campaign.
So, my players have access to the identify spell, and I was wondering if there was a way to make it so items that don't properly function or are cursed in some way wouldn't be noticed. Take the Bag Man for instance, super interesting item with a cool twist, but wouldn't identify just straight up tell them what it is and what it does? Is there a way around this within reason, or do I just need to accept that they will always know what they have?
Identify generally doesn't reveal the cursedness of cursed items unless the item description explicitly says it does.
pronouns: he/she/they
Greetings CrazyApparition,
Wagnarokkr is correct.
Per the Players Handbook in the Identifying a Magic Item section, it specifically states that Attuning and the Identify spell do not let the player know if an item is cursed.
So if your players pick up a Cursed item, they will not be able to tell with those options.
Cheers!
Breathe, dragons; sing of the First World, forged out of chaos and painted with beauty.
Sing of Bahamut, the Platinum, molding the shape of the mountains and rivers;
Sing too of Chromatic Tiamat, painting all over the infinite canvas.
Partnered, they woke in the darkness; partnered, they labored in acts of creation.
Strictly speaking, the Identifying a Magic Item section says that the Identify spell is the fastest way to learn a magic item's properties. It then says "Alternatively..." during a short rest you can focus on an item, and "At the end of the rest, you learn its properties and how to use them (but not any curse the item might bear)," indicating that the part saying you don't learn about any curse applies to the short rest method of Identification. It doesn't say the Identify spell can't tell you about curses (and the spell itself also doesn't specify you don't learn about any curses). Is a curse a property of an item? I can see how that would make sense.
However, the Identify spell doesn't specify that you DO learn about any curses either. So while Short Rests don't reveal curses, it's up to the DM interpretation to determine whether the Identify spell does. I don't have a problem with Identify not revealing any curses, other than perhaps that means there is no actual way to learn about a curse without the DM explicitly telling you.
So decide what would be the best method for your table. Just try and be somewhat consistent.
The rules are actually much less ambiguous than that, but it's sort of annoyingly tucked away in the Dungeon Master's Guide section on Cursed Items (in chapter 7) which says:
So the default behavior of cursed items is that Identify doesn't tell you about the curse. There are a few magic items, like the Loadstone that explicitly override this in their item description and say that Identify actually does smoke them out, but the vast majority do not have this sort of override.
pronouns: he/she/they
The Identify spell itself may not mention that it can't detect curses, but DMG Magic Item section does specifically say that Identify does not detect curses (which is confusing for Players who don't have access to the DMG).
More annoyingly for me, as a DM, is that Items in DnD Beyond don't have any concept of a "DM only" section. So if a player does add a cursed item to their character sheet here, they can just see exactly what the curse is immediately. Forces me to keep that info separate somewhere if I homebrew a cursed item.
I have bypassed this issue by saying to my players they cannot add items into their inventory before they decide to attune to it. If they cast Identify, I reveal all the information it normally does. However, I have ruled that items that require attunement cannot be added to inventory before they decide to attune to it. They just keep track of the item as a temporary custom item until then.
Doesn't stop players just doing it though, or just looking up the item in "Manage Inventory" unless I remember to remove the homebrew from my collection (which I generally forget to do)
That's true. But I also encourage my players that "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". And I trust my players enough that they won't go searching for all my homebrew content in the campaign. I've told them what they can freely look (feats, spells) and what they can't (items).