The presence of strong evil registers on your senses like a noxious odor, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears. As an action, you can open your awareness to detect such forces.
Is this just flavor text? Divine Sense isn't supposed to be an evil intent detector, is it, but just because someone is a celestial doesn't mean they're "powerful good" at all. Something happened last session (which I can't remember the specifics) and I used Divine Sense, asking if whatever I was sensing felt evil. My DM said I should've cast Detect Evil and Good instead, but looking at the spell, the only thing Detect Evil and Good has on Divine Sense is it can penetrate some small magical/physical barriers.
Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any celestial, fiend, or undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover.
Okay, it's not just flavor text. It may be a ribbon ability, but it's not flavor text.
Celestials are good by nature, so the exceptional celestial who strays from a good alignment is a horrifying rarity.
If an evil celestial is a rarity, a good fiend is almost inconceivable.
Those little gems are straight from the Monster Manual section on creature types.
Alignment is an essential part of the nature of celestials and fiends. A devil does not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn’t tend toward lawful evil, but rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil.
And that is straight from the Basic Rules section on alignment, which just so happens to be the same as the matching section of the Player's Handbook. But that doesn't have anything to do with your question, does it?
The question was "is that flavor text" (specifically, the very first sentence, I'm not sure how that was misunderstood tbh) and also, if it isn't just flavor text, then Divine Sense would be a good and evil detector of more than just races, wouldn't it?
We had the same problem. A fairly new player used the ability to detect evil. I had to reread the ability to find out that it doesn't do that but I really couldn't blame him. The wording is indeed very bad.
Fiends, undead, and necrotic consecrations are literally made of evil energy. Likewise, celestials are made of "good" energy. These are beings and areas literally formed of the essence of Good and Evil. That's why it says "strong" evils - mortal races are a mix of different things, so they can't be separated like that.
If it helps, replace Good and Evil with Radiant and Necrotic Energies.
Fiends, undead, and necrotic consecrations are literally made of evil energy. Likewise, celestials are made of "good" energy. These are beings and areas literally formed of the essence of Good and Evil. That's why it says "strong" evils - mortal races are a mix of different things, so they can't be separated like that.
If it helps, replace Good and Evil with Radiant and Necrotic Energies.
By that analogy, wouldn't Divine Sense be able to detect spells that deal radiant or necrotic damage?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Use an action to detect fiends, undead etc within 60ft that do not have total cover. That's all it does. It's mostly useful to see through the human disguises of devils, vampires etc. Yeah it's pretty unimpressive. But if you think that is bad, the Grave Cleric gets a version that is only for detecting undead. Otherwise same mechanics.
By that analogy, wouldn't Divine Sense be able to detect spells that deal radiant or necrotic damage?
Its an imperfect analogy, admittedly. I was trying to figure out a way of explaining what "strong good/evil" would translate to without thinking that applied to just the Alignment chart. Probably not the best one to go with.
Flavour text by it's nature is an example of how a spell is supposed to be interpreted.
For example our first campaign I rolled Paladin/Minutaur and we were in a Vampire based tourist location. Some trinkets allowed "tourists" to dress up as monsters Ghosts, Giant Spiders, Vampires etc (Additionally the town does have real vampires but everyone says they don't exist...)
While perception, investigation and insight did help other characters roughly guess peoples attire my paladin could essentially 4 times a day hard identify real vampires.
Here how the skill worked in 2 scenarios.
Note: When interpreting a skill I take the breakdown approach of all the info and fit it into these brackets of practicality and importantly of only what it says.
Range : 60ft
Duration: This whole round until the end of my characters next round.
Creature Affector: Line of sight - Basic detect - Alignment & Race / Creature type.
Area Affector: Basic detect of Consecration or Desecration of items / areas within range.
With this in mind here is some of the plot of the day, to give context of usage:
The party had been to a church to pay respects to My characters god (Bahamut, Lawful Good Paladin) I toss a few silver coins in the plate and recieve a couple of blessings to my armour, the priest eludes that I should investigate the nearby hospital.
Usage 1 - Character detection) Talking to a vampire: In the hospital I visited the infirmary happened to utilise Divine Sense and to my horror the DM straight up said the Doctor I was talking to is a vampire.
I stupidly react (per my character) confront him to talk to him in private ( the party follow and I, in my haste, tell no one he is a real vampire ) so I take him to one side,his office, in my enquiries, flub a charisma role and take the hard intimidation stance for information on a missing girl, His office is filled with evil artifacts, which is relevant later and the spell caster of the group decides to take an artifact a skull. ( An evil artifact is any past or current property of an evil aligned character )
Unfortunately the vampire charmed my character... this technically avoided my lvl 1 Paladin dying to an area boss immediately, (so that a plus.)
Charmed I go back to the Church of Bahamut ( The party Clerics and My God) and I disheatenedly tell the Priest that nothing was wrong and the priest lifts the charm off me. I (Still in character) now realise what has happened and I Bee-line for the hospital, once I get outside the church, the spellcaster is holding a stolen skull, out in the open and in character I sternly chide him
Hush tones "Are you mad you stole from a real Vampire, you can't wave about a stolen property in the open"
I stupidly usher him inside the nearest shelter... The Church... Only to have priest panic and tell us to get out because the Skull has by proxy invited evil on the premesis and I quote "If you desecrate this place there will be no where safe left to go!"
Upon hearing this I immediately realise what has happened use a second stock of Divine Sense
Usage 2: I sense the Church is indeed desecrated and the skull is an artifact of evil (Property of evil) and I kick the spellcaster out hurridly the priest attempts to re-bless the entrance with little success. I turn to the cleric quickly and request he utilises his holy water to assist and as the Spell Caster leaves the Doctor is approaching, I line of sight him through the closing door and prepare myself readying myself to physically block him.
Looking at my character sheet I have very little in my arsenal to tackle a vampire at night only a blessing to my armour and shield +2 so I have to think fast.
As I have all the knowledge of what he is, spellcaster fortunately was told previously that he is a real vampire and tries to stall him, getting immediately charmed,
The vampire requests his Skull back and steps onto the grounds the spellcaster does delay him enough for the cleric to bless a good portion of the entrance but not the doors and the vampire flings the doors open and instinctively I in full 8ft "6 minutaur holy lawful good blessed plate armoured fashion turn and shout begone foul beist and I announce 'I utilise my blessed shield which has a cross on it to body check him physically out the door before he can react.
He gets knocked back off the premeses, the priest sees this uses a lantern which is available at the gift shop which emits daylight and this wards off the Vampire.
As I turn back with my bonus action I notice he left a burned footprint on the floor and as it was before the end of my next turn the DM tells me you feel the good from church fading we spend the entire night clensing the church back to hallowed ground.
Divine sense 3 Area check) In the morning divine sense does detect it is back to hallowed ground. After apologising to the Priest we discern that while the Doctor is an old vampire and we should investigate other sources to determine the depth of the infestation before tackling the doctor who is clearly massivley out gunning the party.
There was one other time with is a mysterious house with illusions all over it open windows appearing closed with curtains drawn, front door opening straight through to the back door exit etc, but Divine Sense allowed my paladin to penetrate the illusion to see a man standing in the window revealed as another vampire.
Hope these breif encounters help with your Divine Sense usage.
In the sense of the flavour text it is a Short Duration perfect perception role of a specific kind Alignment / Race.
You don't know names or items held or weaknesses only the race / type of creature and alignment...
Think of The Witcher series, within the Queens hall when Geralt senses the hedgehog guy is cursed.
This is a potential usage of Divine Sense seeing through a curse to the true nature of a being.
Must admit I was very surprised by the answer to this question.
I'm not a D&D DM, so when I agreed to join my sons D&D game as a human paladin I had to start from scratch with my understanding of the rules for paladins and naturally read everything in the handbook literally. When it came to Divine Sense I simply read and accepted what it said and came out with a completely different impression of what this feature does and what its purpose is as far as roleplaying a paladin is concerned.
I actually read Divine Sense as having two quite separate and distinct characteristics separated quite clearly by a full stop in the text.
The first reads: "The presence of strong evil registers on your Senses like a noxious odour, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears." This as far as I was concerned was an AOE style sense which registers a general warning on the divine senses of a paladin that there is or has been a strong evil or powerful good influence in the area where he is standing. It refers to the paladin's senses which are separately defined as all aspects of his being including special senses and therefore I assumed that this was registered as a smell or ringing in the ears as specifically described and thus would even be felt even if the paladin had his eyes closed or the source was beyond a wall, floor, ceiling or door. The paladin would have no idea of the source or cause of the feeling and may not even be able to tell which location it came from but he would sense it.
The second feature which I read as quite separate and distinct because of the fullstop was 'Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any Celestial, fiend, or Undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover." I read this as a completely separate and distinct feature which states quite clearly that if a creature is visible to the paladin then it will immediately be tagged and revealed if it is a Celestial, Fiend or Undead. So I saw this as a completely different feature of Divine Sense which only really applies if creatures are within LOS of your character.
To me, this made perfect sense as if one has to be able to see the creature to sense it then the very name of the ability is misleading as it's not actually using the paladin's senses at all but rather his eyesight. So, the ability ought to have been called 'Divine Sight' or 'Divine Vision' rather than 'Divine Sense' It's disappointing as it takes an awful lot of interest away from the ability which I thought sounded quite atmospheric. The idea that my character would actually be able to walk into a room or location and smell the presence of evil sounded quite cool, whereas as defined above it's just a spot the vamp trick, which is much less fun.
I had expectations that my paladin would be able to walk into a building and instantly sense that something evil lurked within and would then be able to follow its sense to hunt down the source and eventually locate it. But actually, as things stand if my Paladin walks into a room full of Vampires hidden under tables he would sense absolutely nothing until they sprang out at him. So, where was my Divine guardian....asleep?
I'm really intrigued by your interpretation of it. My opinion on Divine Sense was always that it was an ability to Detect Good and Evil forces without casting a Detect Good and Evil spell. In this scenario, if my party were to meet someone that was generally hard to get a read on, I could use my Divine Sense to get a clearer picture on what we were dealing with and the general intentions of such a creature. Which has honestly proved to be a really interesting tool throughout the course of roleplay. Then, when I reread it, it seemed to only detect the presence of certain types of creatures. And it was an almost immediate buzzkill. And truthfully, I haven't used Divine Sense since.
Seeing it as a two different features of the same ability would at least add some excitement back to the class ability. I guess it would be something I'd have to run by my DM, see how he interpreted it.
Part of the clue of how it works is the name Divine Sense. It's used to sense extraplanar (ie. Divine/infernal) beings. And undead because they are a corruption of divine will. So it doesn't detect anything outside of that.
Use an action to detect fiends, undead etc within 60ft that do not have total cover. That's all it does. It's mostly useful to see through the human disguises of devils, vampires etc. Yeah it's pretty unimpressive. But if you think that is bad, the Grave Cleric gets a version that is only for detecting undead. Otherwise same mechanics.
Dunno, me and a team mate where involved into a tavern Brawl where a Gnome used a Mass illusion to make a good portion (20) of the patrons look like Hezrou's...
So when the Dm's tells us this, we are like "Holy jeebus...20 Hezrou's?, are you kidding?, thats like 2500hp...", we though we where allready dead.
But since they wheren't really aggresive and fighting defensively, i found it suspicious and used my Divine sense, and the Dm confirmed that i din't detect any Fiendish presences around us, so we could ignore the "Hezrous" and concentrate on the 6 Imps the Gnome summoned after that.
Divine sense is not bad, i uses it a lot actually, the only bummer is that it requires an action to use.
Also used it to detect and kill Invisible Imps that where spying on us or following us, and it can be used to see through the disguise of some creatures.
so does this mean divine sense used within 60ft of a doppleganger disguised as a trader would be detected?
RAW, no, they aren't celestials, fiends or undead so they aren't strongly enough good or evil to be detected. By a more expanded version, possibly, but it would only let you know that they were good or evil, which isn't uncommon for traders.
It is entirely possible for someone to be evil but completely law abiding. In fact, it's not uncommon for evil characters to be fine upstanding members of the community because doing good deeds gets them the influence they need to be able to achieve their own aims. By a similar token, it's possible for someone to be good and commit genocide if they feel that's what's necessary to help others.
I tried as others have to use this to detect good and evil, only to have the dm suggest I should have used the spell.
Divine sense, could mean a sense to detect divine beings as you suggest
but it could also mean, a sense divinely given, to detect ...
It doesn't help that on the dndbeyond character sheet the description: "As an action, you can detect good and evil. Until the end of your next turn, you can sense anything affected by the hallow spell or know the location of any celestial, fiend, undead within 60 ft. that is not behind total cover. You can use this feature 5 times per long rest" - is different to that given in the PHB p84
It doesn't help that on the dndbeyond character sheet the description: "As an action, you can detect good and evil. Until the end of your next turn, you can sense anything affected by the hallow spell or know the location of any celestial, fiend, undead within 60 ft. that is not behind total cover. You can use this feature 5 times per long rest" - is different to that given in the PHB p84
I don't see any significant difference between the character sheet description and the PHB version other than the character sheet version getting compacted a bit and the number of uses being calculated for you.
The presence of strong evil registers on your senses like a noxious odor, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears. As an action, you can open your awareness to detect such forces. Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any celestial, fiend, or undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover. You know the type (celestial, fiend, or undead) of any being whose presence you sense, but not its identity (the vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich, for instance). Within the same radius, you also detect the presence of any place or object that has been consecrated or desecrated, as with the hallow spell.
You can use this feature a number of times equal to 1 + your Charisma modifier. When you finish a long rest, you regain all expended uses.
When you look at DDB character sheets, almost none of the class features, racial traits, etc. actually repeat the actual descriptions in the books published by WotC verbatim. They instead display something called “snippets.” A snippet is an abridged/shorthand versions of a full description designed to be more succinct (which makes navigating the online character sheet faster), and to occupy less page-space (for the convenience of those who prefer to print out their characters on paper). Snippets also frequently include macros, or “little ‘snippets’ of code” that can automatically do certain calculations for our convenience.
Using the case of Divine Sense as an example, I will now display it with the sentences color coded to indicate how those sentences correlate to the text in the snippet which will follow. I also took the liberty of underlining where both use the words “detect,” “good,” and “evil” in their introductions. *Note- Where the snippet code that automatically calculates and displays each PC’s exact number of uses as a whole number in bold text, I represented using the traditional algebraic convention of representing such an unknown variable with an “X.”
Color-Coded Feature Full Description:
Divine Sense
The presence of strong evil registers on your senses like a noxious odor, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears. As an action, you can open your awareness to detect such forces.Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any celestial, fiend, or undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover. You know the type (celestial, fiend, or undead) of any being whose presence you sense, but not its identity (the vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich, for instance). Within the same radius, you also detect the presence of any place or object that has been consecrated or desecrated, as with the hallow spell.
You can use this feature a number of times equal to 1 + your Charisma modifier. When you finish a long rest, you regain all expended uses.
Snippet Text Featuring Coordinated Color-Coding:
Divine Sense - PHB, pg. 84
As an action, you can detect good and evil.Until the end of your next turn, you can sense anything affected by the hallow spell or know the location of any celestial, fiend, undead within 60 ft. that is not behind total cover.You can use this feature X times per long rest.
If you are using the website to view a character sheet, and ever look at one of the snippet descriptions provided by DDB and wish to double check the exact meaning/wording of the full Description in the book you can easily. Simply tap/click that displayed snippet and a sidebar will slide out with the actual full description of the feature, trait, or action as it appears verbatim and updated to include any erratas for said feature that may exist. (I cannot tell you if that feature is available in the Player App as I have never used it.)
If you print your character sheets on paper, you can check the actual descriptions by referring to either the DDB Compendium App if you purchased that source here, which also gets automatically updated to reflect any potential current errata, or by checking a physical book like we did before DDB made everything easier for us.
The presence of strong evil registers on your senses like a noxious odor, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears. As an action, you can open your awareness to detect such forces.
Is this just flavor text? Divine Sense isn't supposed to be an evil intent detector, is it, but just because someone is a celestial doesn't mean they're "powerful good" at all. Something happened last session (which I can't remember the specifics) and I used Divine Sense, asking if whatever I was sensing felt evil. My DM said I should've cast Detect Evil and Good instead, but looking at the spell, the only thing Detect Evil and Good has on Divine Sense is it can penetrate some small magical/physical barriers.
Okay, it's not just flavor text. It may be a ribbon ability, but it's not flavor text.
Those little gems are straight from the Monster Manual section on creature types.
And that is straight from the Basic Rules section on alignment, which just so happens to be the same as the matching section of the Player's Handbook. But that doesn't have anything to do with your question, does it?
What is your question?
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
The question was "is that flavor text" (specifically, the very first sentence, I'm not sure how that was misunderstood tbh) and also, if it isn't just flavor text, then Divine Sense would be a good and evil detector of more than just races, wouldn't it?
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
We had the same problem. A fairly new player used the ability to detect evil. I had to reread the ability to find out that it doesn't do that but I really couldn't blame him. The wording is indeed very bad.
Fiends, undead, and necrotic consecrations are literally made of evil energy. Likewise, celestials are made of "good" energy. These are beings and areas literally formed of the essence of Good and Evil. That's why it says "strong" evils - mortal races are a mix of different things, so they can't be separated like that.
If it helps, replace Good and Evil with Radiant and Necrotic Energies.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
Tooltips (Help/aid)
Use an action to detect fiends, undead etc within 60ft that do not have total cover. That's all it does. It's mostly useful to see through the human disguises of devils, vampires etc. Yeah it's pretty unimpressive. But if you think that is bad, the Grave Cleric gets a version that is only for detecting undead. Otherwise same mechanics.
DnDBeyond Tooltip Syntax
Flavour text by it's nature is an example of how a spell is supposed to be interpreted.
For example our first campaign I rolled Paladin/Minutaur and we were in a Vampire based tourist location. Some trinkets allowed "tourists" to dress up as monsters Ghosts, Giant Spiders, Vampires etc (Additionally the town does have real vampires but everyone says they don't exist...)
While perception, investigation and insight did help other characters roughly guess peoples attire my paladin could essentially 4 times a day hard identify real vampires.
Here how the skill worked in 2 scenarios.
Note: When interpreting a skill I take the breakdown approach of all the info and fit it into these brackets of practicality and importantly of only what it says.
Range : 60ft
Duration: This whole round until the end of my characters next round.
Creature Affector: Line of sight - Basic detect - Alignment & Race / Creature type.
Area Affector: Basic detect of Consecration or Desecration of items / areas within range.
With this in mind here is some of the plot of the day, to give context of usage:
The party had been to a church to pay respects to My characters god (Bahamut, Lawful Good Paladin) I toss a few silver coins in the plate and recieve a couple of blessings to my armour, the priest eludes that I should investigate the nearby hospital.
Usage 1 - Character detection) Talking to a vampire: In the hospital I visited the infirmary happened to utilise Divine Sense and to my horror the DM straight up said the Doctor I was talking to is a vampire.
I stupidly react (per my character) confront him to talk to him in private ( the party follow and I, in my haste, tell no one he is a real vampire ) so I take him to one side,his office, in my enquiries, flub a charisma role and take the hard intimidation stance for information on a missing girl, His office is filled with evil artifacts, which is relevant later and the spell caster of the group decides to take an artifact a skull. ( An evil artifact is any past or current property of an evil aligned character )
Unfortunately the vampire charmed my character... this technically avoided my lvl 1 Paladin dying to an area boss immediately, (so that a plus.)
Charmed I go back to the Church of Bahamut ( The party Clerics and My God) and I disheatenedly tell the Priest that nothing was wrong and the priest lifts the charm off me. I (Still in character) now realise what has happened and I Bee-line for the hospital, once I get outside the church, the spellcaster is holding a stolen skull, out in the open and in character I sternly chide him
Hush tones "Are you mad you stole from a real Vampire, you can't wave about a stolen property in the open"
I stupidly usher him inside the nearest shelter... The Church... Only to have priest panic and tell us to get out because the Skull has by proxy invited evil on the premesis and I quote "If you desecrate this place there will be no where safe left to go!"
Upon hearing this I immediately realise what has happened use a second stock of Divine Sense
Usage 2: I sense the Church is indeed desecrated and the skull is an artifact of evil (Property of evil) and I kick the spellcaster out hurridly the priest attempts to re-bless the entrance with little success. I turn to the cleric quickly and request he utilises his holy water to assist and as the Spell Caster leaves the Doctor is approaching, I line of sight him through the closing door and prepare myself readying myself to physically block him.
Looking at my character sheet I have very little in my arsenal to tackle a vampire at night only a blessing to my armour and shield +2 so I have to think fast.
As I have all the knowledge of what he is, spellcaster fortunately was told previously that he is a real vampire and tries to stall him, getting immediately charmed,
The vampire requests his Skull back and steps onto the grounds the spellcaster does delay him enough for the cleric to bless a good portion of the entrance but not the doors and the vampire flings the doors open and instinctively I in full 8ft "6 minutaur holy lawful good blessed plate armoured fashion turn and shout begone foul beist and I announce 'I utilise my blessed shield which has a cross on it to body check him physically out the door before he can react.
He gets knocked back off the premeses, the priest sees this uses a lantern which is available at the gift shop which emits daylight and this wards off the Vampire.
As I turn back with my bonus action I notice he left a burned footprint on the floor and as it was before the end of my next turn the DM tells me you feel the good from church fading we spend the entire night clensing the church back to hallowed ground.
Divine sense 3 Area check) In the morning divine sense does detect it is back to hallowed ground. After apologising to the Priest we discern that while the Doctor is an old vampire and we should investigate other sources to determine the depth of the infestation before tackling the doctor who is clearly massivley out gunning the party.
There was one other time with is a mysterious house with illusions all over it open windows appearing closed with curtains drawn, front door opening straight through to the back door exit etc, but Divine Sense allowed my paladin to penetrate the illusion to see a man standing in the window revealed as another vampire.
Hope these breif encounters help with your Divine Sense usage.
In the sense of the flavour text it is a Short Duration perfect perception role of a specific kind Alignment / Race.
You don't know names or items held or weaknesses only the race / type of creature and alignment...
Think of The Witcher series, within the Queens hall when Geralt senses the hedgehog guy is cursed.
This is a potential usage of Divine Sense seeing through a curse to the true nature of a being.
Must admit I was very surprised by the answer to this question.
I'm not a D&D DM, so when I agreed to join my sons D&D game as a human paladin I had to start from scratch with my understanding of the rules for paladins and naturally read everything in the handbook literally. When it came to Divine Sense I simply read and accepted what it said and came out with a completely different impression of what this feature does and what its purpose is as far as roleplaying a paladin is concerned.
I actually read Divine Sense as having two quite separate and distinct characteristics separated quite clearly by a full stop in the text.
The first reads: "The presence of strong evil registers on your Senses like a noxious odour, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears." This as far as I was concerned was an AOE style sense which registers a general warning on the divine senses of a paladin that there is or has been a strong evil or powerful good influence in the area where he is standing. It refers to the paladin's senses which are separately defined as all aspects of his being including special senses and therefore I assumed that this was registered as a smell or ringing in the ears as specifically described and thus would even be felt even if the paladin had his eyes closed or the source was beyond a wall, floor, ceiling or door. The paladin would have no idea of the source or cause of the feeling and may not even be able to tell which location it came from but he would sense it.
The second feature which I read as quite separate and distinct because of the fullstop was 'Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any Celestial, fiend, or Undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover." I read this as a completely separate and distinct feature which states quite clearly that if a creature is visible to the paladin then it will immediately be tagged and revealed if it is a Celestial, Fiend or Undead. So I saw this as a completely different feature of Divine Sense which only really applies if creatures are within LOS of your character.
To me, this made perfect sense as if one has to be able to see the creature to sense it then the very name of the ability is misleading as it's not actually using the paladin's senses at all but rather his eyesight. So, the ability ought to have been called 'Divine Sight' or 'Divine Vision' rather than 'Divine Sense' It's disappointing as it takes an awful lot of interest away from the ability which I thought sounded quite atmospheric. The idea that my character would actually be able to walk into a room or location and smell the presence of evil sounded quite cool, whereas as defined above it's just a spot the vamp trick, which is much less fun.
I had expectations that my paladin would be able to walk into a building and instantly sense that something evil lurked within and would then be able to follow its sense to hunt down the source and eventually locate it. But actually, as things stand if my Paladin walks into a room full of Vampires hidden under tables he would sense absolutely nothing until they sprang out at him. So, where was my Divine guardian....asleep?
I'm really intrigued by your interpretation of it. My opinion on Divine Sense was always that it was an ability to Detect Good and Evil forces without casting a Detect Good and Evil spell. In this scenario, if my party were to meet someone that was generally hard to get a read on, I could use my Divine Sense to get a clearer picture on what we were dealing with and the general intentions of such a creature. Which has honestly proved to be a really interesting tool throughout the course of roleplay. Then, when I reread it, it seemed to only detect the presence of certain types of creatures. And it was an almost immediate buzzkill. And truthfully, I haven't used Divine Sense since.
Seeing it as a two different features of the same ability would at least add some excitement back to the class ability. I guess it would be something I'd have to run by my DM, see how he interpreted it.
Part of the clue of how it works is the name Divine Sense. It's used to sense extraplanar (ie. Divine/infernal) beings. And undead because they are a corruption of divine will. So it doesn't detect anything outside of that.
Dunno, me and a team mate where involved into a tavern Brawl where a Gnome used a Mass illusion to make a good portion (20) of the patrons look like Hezrou's...
So when the Dm's tells us this, we are like "Holy jeebus...20 Hezrou's?, are you kidding?, thats like 2500hp...", we though we where allready dead.
But since they wheren't really aggresive and fighting defensively, i found it suspicious and used my Divine sense, and the Dm confirmed that i din't detect any Fiendish presences around us, so we could ignore the "Hezrous" and concentrate on the 6 Imps the Gnome summoned after that.
Divine sense is not bad, i uses it a lot actually, the only bummer is that it requires an action to use.
Also used it to detect and kill Invisible Imps that where spying on us or following us, and it can be used to see through the disguise of some creatures.
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Kain de Frostberg- Dark Knight - (Vengeance Pal3/ Hexblade 9), Port Mourn
Kain de Draakberg-Dark Knight lvl8-Avergreen(DitA)
so does this mean divine sense used within 60ft of a doppleganger disguised as a trader would be detected?
RAW, no, they aren't celestials, fiends or undead so they aren't strongly enough good or evil to be detected. By a more expanded version, possibly, but it would only let you know that they were good or evil, which isn't uncommon for traders.
It is entirely possible for someone to be evil but completely law abiding. In fact, it's not uncommon for evil characters to be fine upstanding members of the community because doing good deeds gets them the influence they need to be able to achieve their own aims. By a similar token, it's possible for someone to be good and commit genocide if they feel that's what's necessary to help others.
I tried as others have to use this to detect good and evil, only to have the dm suggest I should have used the spell.
Divine sense, could mean a sense to detect divine beings as you suggest
but it could also mean, a sense divinely given, to detect ...
It doesn't help that on the dndbeyond character sheet the description: "As an action, you can detect good and evil. Until the end of your next turn, you can sense anything affected by the hallow spell or know the location of any celestial, fiend, undead within 60 ft. that is not behind total cover. You can use this feature 5 times per long rest" - is different to that given in the PHB p84
I don't see any significant difference between the character sheet description and the PHB version other than the character sheet version getting compacted a bit and the number of uses being calculated for you.
it simplifies the action as detecting good and evil.
which the phb describes differently
When you look at DDB character sheets, almost none of the class features, racial traits, etc. actually repeat the actual descriptions in the books published by WotC verbatim. They instead display something called “snippets.” A snippet is an abridged/shorthand versions of a full description designed to be more succinct (which makes navigating the online character sheet faster), and to occupy less page-space (for the convenience of those who prefer to print out their characters on paper). Snippets also frequently include macros, or “little ‘snippets’ of code” that can automatically do certain calculations for our convenience.
Using the case of Divine Sense as an example, I will now display it with the sentences color coded to indicate how those sentences correlate to the text in the snippet which will follow. I also took the liberty of underlining where both use the words “detect,” “good,” and “evil” in their introductions.
*Note- Where the snippet code that automatically calculates and displays each PC’s exact number of uses as a whole number in bold text, I represented using the traditional algebraic convention of representing such an unknown variable with an “X.”
Color-Coded Feature Full Description:
Divine Sense
The presence of strong evil registers on your senses like a noxious odor, and powerful good rings like heavenly music in your ears. As an action, you can open your awareness to detect such forces. Until the end of your next turn, you know the location of any celestial, fiend, or undead within 60 feet of you that is not behind total cover. You know the type (celestial, fiend, or undead) of any being whose presence you sense, but not its identity (the vampire Count Strahd von Zarovich, for instance). Within the same radius, you also detect the presence of any place or object that has been consecrated or desecrated, as with the hallow spell.
You can use this feature a number of times equal to 1 + your Charisma modifier. When you finish a long rest, you regain all expended uses.
Snippet Text Featuring Coordinated Color-Coding:
Divine Sense - PHB, pg. 84
As an action, you can detect good and evil. Until the end of your next turn, you can sense anything affected by the hallow spell or know the location of any celestial, fiend, undead within 60 ft. that is not behind total cover. You can use this feature X times per long rest.
If you are using the website to view a character sheet, and ever look at one of the snippet descriptions provided by DDB and wish to double check the exact meaning/wording of the full Description in the book you can easily. Simply tap/click that displayed snippet and a sidebar will slide out with the actual full description of the feature, trait, or action as it appears verbatim and updated to include any erratas for said feature that may exist. (I cannot tell you if that feature is available in the Player App as I have never used it.)
If you print your character sheets on paper, you can check the actual descriptions by referring to either the DDB Compendium App if you purchased that source here, which also gets automatically updated to reflect any potential current errata, or by checking a physical book like we did before DDB made everything easier for us.
I hope that helps somewhat.
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