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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 5886979" data-attributes="member: 1879">Ahh. I see what you mean, but I disagree with you about cause and effect. 4e did not solve the issue of vagueness that you dislike by providing specific, concrete instructions, it did it by excluding most of the effects in the first place. Now admittedly I am only working from the PHB here, as I own no other 4e books, but I'll note that neither of the spells you mentioned are in it, although they have been in the PHB of every previous edition as best I can recall. Now you do have a couple of Rituals that perform much the same function as Phantasmal Forces, but they also provide exactly zero explanation for how a person should react when seeing a bridge appear overnight. Furthermore I don't see the same perfect clarity you see, instead I note that the Insight skill gives you a chance to notice illusory effects, but doesn't tell you what that means. Individual illusion effects might tell you what happens if someone makes his Insight check but not all do. Mirror Image for example is an illusion, but provides no guidence for what happens if you spot the illusion. Worse (from my point of view) are powers which claim to be illusory in the fluff, but do not use the keyword, apparently because it would be too difficult to explain what the effect of an Insight check would be. (I'm looking at "Crown of Madness" on p[age 134.)So I don't think what you're seeing is a virtue of superior design, but the laziness of game designers who don't want to make GMs have to make judgement calls and so skirt the issue entirely. (Or tried to, but failed in my examples.)What you see as a weakness, I see as a strength in earlier editions. "Charm Person" is vague because it covers an impossibly broad range of options, people and situations. Cast "Charm Person" on a friendless street kid and he'll follow you to the ends of the Earth like 'Short-Round' tagging along with Indiana Jones, cast it on a Paladin guarding a sacred artifact and he might feel sad as he strikes you down, but mere friendship will not sway him from the demands of duty. It's roleplaying, and it's why I came to the table in the first place. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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