IT’S CHOWDAH YOU IDIOT!

Also, good foreshadowing always creates the possibility that your audience (the players, in this case) will work out what’s really going on before you expected them to. This is not a flaw, it doesn’t “spoil” the experience. It is, in fact, incredibly satisfying to put a bunch of clues together and then see that prediction vindicated when the twist is revealed.

Like forcing the players into an encounter where all their toolkits are nerfed. Close quarters for casters, magical monsters that can’t be harmed by melee, or NPCs that are way OP for the group and they stick to the Monster Manual to the letter.

When I GM, it depends on just how narrow and just how powerful your particular toolkit is. I’m not going to ensure that you can do whatever your thing is at absolutely every opportunity, and if your schtick becomes well known, enemies capable of planning will plan around it when feasible. The more narrow your schtick is, the more scenarios you might encounter where it does not apply simply by chance (for example, if you’re a flying archer every room in a dungeon won’t gain a minimum 30’ high ceiling to maximize your use of that). The more disproportionately powerful your schtick is compared to other party members, the more likely I am to specifically come up with occasional scenarios meant to make it not apply so someone else gets to shine.

Sometimes I will signpost something is a very bad idea, and if you do it anyways (or do something else absurdly dangerously foolish) I’m not going to pop up a guard rail to save you at the last moment - retrieving your body from somewhere adrift on the astral and your soul from the gemstone the archdevil you pissed off is keeping in his treasury to try to save you is the next adventure hook.

You encounter a huge, elaborate tome, on a concealed lectern, in a library connected by a hidden door directly off the bedroom of a powerful wizard, you detect magic and get extremely powerful auras of conjuration, transmutation and evocation maybe “I flip it open to a random page and start reading aloud, I’ll sound out any words I don’t recognize” is not, in fact, a wise decision. The copy of “Words You Mispronounce And Die: A Primer For Apprentice Wizards” you saw on one of the shelves on the way there, the references to a cursed grimoire of terrible power, the book being bound in the skin of an angel covered in burns and scars, etc, etc should have maybe hinted at that.

Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.

Did not roll perception check ; the chowder was bad and will hit the intestines in a few hours during the dungeon delving.

Detect Magic telling someone “it’s chowder” is a cop-out, same as a DM saying “you failed the skill check because you looked suspicious.” If a spell exists to reveal a magical aura, use it to reveal an aura, not to sass the player.

My answer in that case is “You detect no aura” from the non-magical chowder (or maybe they do detect one if it was flavored with prestidigitation), unless it’s an edition where the effect is a cone, and they are sitting across the table from their friend blinged out in magical gear, in which case they are definitely detecting an aura. Several of them. And they’re going to have to take time, focus, and make checks to recognize that none are coming from the chowder.

What school of cuisine is the chowder?

Showwdair!

Ah yes, like The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo. A classic.

Not one crime, at least two: belonging to a secret society, and having an unregistered mutant power. Except some secret societies might actually be sponsored by the state— not that the players know that. And you can register your mutant power, except that this will make you a targeted minority subject to massive discrimination, not to mention being forced to use your power in service— and your own power might kill you, and you don’t really know how to use it fully, and being forced to use it also means being put on the front lines of deadly combat…

But that’s not what makes the adversarial play in paranoia so great. It’s that everyone has a different true objective that they are following in secret, while ostensively all being on the same team. That’s what I mean by “there are winners and losers in this game”. You can objectively determine who succeeded and who failed, and a good mission will make those secret missions mutually exclusive. It’s great fun!

It’s like in d&d when you get the asshole player who really just wants to steal from the rest of the party and not get caught, except everyone is in on it and everyone is trying to do something different to everyone else, to very different degrees, and everyone expects to be betrayed at all times, and often is— except you get extra lives so you can keep playing anyway… and then you get to laugh about it together at the end! It’s great!

That happened to my buddy Eric

If Detect Evil and Good detects creature type then sure, maybe Detect Magic detects chowder.

No magic. No curse. Just your average every day poison.

The only idea I even have for such a campaign is one where all the BBGs are dopplegangers of the party and the players are trying to defeat me, playing as their dopplegangers.

I would only be able to do what the players themselves can do. So it becomes a test of who understands the build better. The player or the DM.