[RPG] Can a spellcaster know why a spell failed

dnd-3.5epathfinder-1espells

I just read this answer to Can you Plane Shift to the plane that you're on? and it made me wonder: As a spellcaster, how do I know why spell failed? Is there any roll for it in either Pathfinder or D&D 3.5? Any rule?

It would seem natural to use Spellcraft for this, but neither Pathfinder nor any D&D edition have this use listed.

For a high-level spellcaster who knows his craft to be unable to identify the cause of failure seems weird, at least, so is this really so?

Spells that can fail without apparent reason:

  • Resurrection and Animate Dead cast on a body that is actually an immobilized undead

  • Plane Shift, as already mentioned

  • Any spell cast in an antimagic or dead magic zone when the character does not know of it

  • Necromancy cast on a disguised construct (not impossible with Warforged around)

  • Animal Trance when the target is actually an aberration

  • Control Water when the liquid is not actually water

  • Know Direction in chaos planes with no North

  • Scrying a creature that doesn't exist

  • Spells forbidden by a Mythal or similar powerful magic

  • Spells that got Counterspelled

  • All spells if Goddess of Magic dislikes you and decides to cut your access (as far as I remember Mystra had this option in Forgotten Realms)

And probably many more — I'm looking for general answer. Hints on specific cases would be nice, but I ask as a player, not DM, so I can't hope to always know which specific case it is in the first place.

For example, if Animate Dead fails, it might be due to the target not being a dead body, a Mythal effect, an NPC with silent means of necromancy counterspelling, or divine interference. (All those have happened to me or mine before.) And while there are means to get to know why and what a goddess thinks, a clue that the failure is her doing would save a lot of unneeded work (and gameplay time).

Best Answer

The rules are silent on this.

In practice, I've seen it both ways, depending on whether the group takes a more gamist/metagamey approach or a more simulationist approach. "Open rules" games just have the GM tell you "that fails" if it's invalid on its face (only concealing the reason if it plays into the challenge, like "Charm Person fails... I wonder what that guy is if not a humanoid?" But in general you roll for SR, roll the save, you know why it failed. In our current Pathfinder campaign the GM runs it like this, and whenever it's in doubt a flurry of Knowledge checks fills in the gap.

In a more sim game those things are kept more "under the table" because it's not about the rules challenge it's about the in-game-world reasoning challenge. I ran a 5-year 2e campaign that worked like this.

This falls into the lacuna of other things like "do I know if I made a save vs. a spell" that is undefined so that different games can do it differently based on their desired feel.