Just a note in case anyone is worried I’m adding a mage to every encounter, I very rarely use counterspell against my players; it’s one of the spells I consider to have high “fun-ruining” potential.
I’m struggling a bit to decide on how to handle this interaction in a way that feels fair. From my understanding RAW, a character doesn’t know what spell is being cast. I think you can use your reaction to make an arcana check to discern it, but of course then you can’t counterspell it. For enemy spellcasters I generally describe what’s being cast, instead of naming the spell right away, but it can slow combat down, and is a bit one-sided since when a player casts a spell they lead with “I cast X”. This leads to an imbalance where I’m aware of what’s needed to counterspell something while the players are not, and can cause some awkwardness trying to decide how to play around that without metagaming.
I can think of a few different ways to handle this, each with its own drawbacks, but I’m curious to hear what y’all do at your tables!
From the sessions ive been in and ran, the player/npc can make a arcana check to see if they know the spell. If they fail the check they can still use their reaction cast counterspell but they wont be able to tell what spell (an consequently what level to cast counterspell) is it a firebolt or meteor storm, who knows, want to risk casting it?
Yeah waiving the reaction cost for that could be a good solution. Did it not affect the flow of combat too much in your experience?