Re: Pub Crawling 2 (OOC Discussions)
Good point. Presumably, if one wizard is sending the Message to another wizard, the receiving wizard would know he can reply. I suppose, though, anyone with Knowledge (arcana) or Spellcraft would likely know that. Otherwise, it would be something included in the message.
Since Ezguar doesn't know Victor yet, he would have included something like 'I can hear a 3-second reply.'
The spell description doesn't put a limit on words, probably because it depends on how fast you speak and what language you are using. However, the duration is 1 round. So whatever you can say in 6 seconds... or 3 seconds if you want a reply.
That seems rather absurd. Admittedly, it's meant to be a short message, rather than an entire speech, but, still. Nor does it offer any guidelines for how long it can take the receiver to reply. I don't think it breaks the rules all that much if I expand the duration to two minutes for the original message and add in two minutes for the reply. Nor does it seem unreasonable if the receiver can feel the time ticking away while he tries to think of what he wants to reply.
So, to answer Victor's question, yes, he knows he can whisper a reply that the sender will receive, but he only has 12 seconds to respond.