So Just out of interest I posted this thread about how much better Illusionists are in 2024.
D&D General - Illusionists better in 2024
I’m going to be playing one in our new campaign.
So there are a few fundamentals about illusions which people don’t understand - including players - and as a result there is a lot of wariness around them when there doesn’t need to be.
The first is that illusions (almost all of them) create
an object,
a creature, or some other visible phenomenon.
So straight away the idea of conjuring an image of three flanking wolves is out of the picture. You also can’t redecorate a room with the spell because you can only change one object in the room.
Now folks often try and get around this by saying their ‘one object’ is a photo-realistic painting with forced perspective and everything that makes it look like the room has been redecorated. For me that’s jank I would expect the DM to deny it because A it tried to do far more than the spell allows by a straight reading, B you can only create what you can cenceive and in a typical medieval campaign photo-realistic paintings don’t exist.
In the basis that illusions have been dramatically simplified and thus less powerful the DM should be more confident letting them do what the illusionist wants them to do. With the caveat… major illusion isn’t some catch all gotcha. It’s a tool just like every other spell. I sometimes think people expect an illusion to act as a compulsion and force a creature to act in a certain way. If you do, I think you’re asking to be disappointed.
Plausibility should be a thing. If you’re summoning a wolf in the street of a large city folks are going to be more sceptical than if you’re summoning a snarling guard dog.
The best way to think of illusions is as a con or hustle. The trick itself is only deployed when circumstance exist to support the illusion. So use your free bonus action minor illusion to make a loud sound of howling come from the corridor behind the BBEG as a distraction and then cast your illusion of the wolf.
One thing that’s worth noting is that it is much harder to disbelieve illusions now that you haven’t interacted with. Simply staring at an illusion to work out if it’s real now requires a study check vs your spell DC. Int is rarely a high stat and investigation is a rare skill in my experience.
I’ve got a fair DM in
@GuyBoy who will generally let a sensible plan have a chance of success but who like me has little patience for cheap gotchas and grandstanding and encounter with a single low level spell.
My approach to illusion will be to have some simple uses for minor illusion which can help in day to day situations and then some more elaborate cons ready to go where the set up required is possible.
