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Illusions, lighting, and reflectance
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<blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 7547651" data-attributes="member: 158"><p>A lot of the reasoning for extremely limited illusion school spells I first saw back in the AD&D days, when due to lack of clearly defined boundaries, illusions ran roughshod over DMs' games because players would argue all sorts of insane abilities for illusions. The backlash seems to be a reaction out of concern that illusions can duplicate other more powerful spells, but to me, unreasonably so. All of these things (duplicating darkness or blindness, etc.) don't stand up to scrutiny, (HA!) when just physically interacting with the illusion pretty much breaks it. For Minor Image, putting an "illusion cardboard box on someone" means they step five feet right and break it immediately. Putting an "illusory cardboard box on yourself" gives you 'heavily obscured" -- ONCE. It then clues them in that you are using illusion magic, and the jig is up anyway. It's a poor man's 5 foot obscuring mist that uses your action, and which one person can dispel immediately without so much as a spell.</p><p></p><p>Then, if we get into more powerful illusions, such as Major Image, people use these arguments to completely defang these spells, which leads to the same situations as back in AD&D -- no one wanting to focus on illusion magic, because it is a pale facsimile (irony intended) of other schools of magic. </p><p></p><p>What's next, because "things can pass through" a Major Image, then putting a red dragon Major Image in front of a bonfire reveals it to be an illusion, because "the light passes through it?" It's a third level spell, yet a Web spell would outshine it because it's more effective at stopping a few orcs? To me, people need to focus on the specifics given in the spell description's mechanics -- namely, in the case of Major Image, it looks, smells, and sounds REAL, until you either TOUCH it, or decide to try and pierce it with an Investigation check.</p><p></p><p>Those are what would make illusion magics usable, and to start nitpicking until the whole school is useless eliminates the point the spell is in there for in the first place. When I hear talk of <em>"proper clever use of the spells"</em> to me it seems to frequently mean <em>"use of the spells in extremely limited circumstances that only I think will work, that I see fit to allow"</em> rather than making inferences that actually flow from what the spell says are its capabilities.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Henry, post: 7547651, member: 158"] A lot of the reasoning for extremely limited illusion school spells I first saw back in the AD&D days, when due to lack of clearly defined boundaries, illusions ran roughshod over DMs' games because players would argue all sorts of insane abilities for illusions. The backlash seems to be a reaction out of concern that illusions can duplicate other more powerful spells, but to me, unreasonably so. All of these things (duplicating darkness or blindness, etc.) don't stand up to scrutiny, (HA!) when just physically interacting with the illusion pretty much breaks it. For Minor Image, putting an "illusion cardboard box on someone" means they step five feet right and break it immediately. Putting an "illusory cardboard box on yourself" gives you 'heavily obscured" -- ONCE. It then clues them in that you are using illusion magic, and the jig is up anyway. It's a poor man's 5 foot obscuring mist that uses your action, and which one person can dispel immediately without so much as a spell. Then, if we get into more powerful illusions, such as Major Image, people use these arguments to completely defang these spells, which leads to the same situations as back in AD&D -- no one wanting to focus on illusion magic, because it is a pale facsimile (irony intended) of other schools of magic. What's next, because "things can pass through" a Major Image, then putting a red dragon Major Image in front of a bonfire reveals it to be an illusion, because "the light passes through it?" It's a third level spell, yet a Web spell would outshine it because it's more effective at stopping a few orcs? To me, people need to focus on the specifics given in the spell description's mechanics -- namely, in the case of Major Image, it looks, smells, and sounds REAL, until you either TOUCH it, or decide to try and pierce it with an Investigation check. Those are what would make illusion magics usable, and to start nitpicking until the whole school is useless eliminates the point the spell is in there for in the first place. When I hear talk of [I]"proper clever use of the spells"[/I] to me it seems to frequently mean [I]"use of the spells in extremely limited circumstances that only I think will work, that I see fit to allow"[/I] rather than making inferences that actually flow from what the spell says are its capabilities. [/QUOTE]
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