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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9351442" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Most DM's, in my opinion, are pretty strict about illusions.  Their NPC's will use illusion magic rather liberally, and the DM will be irritated that you don't believe in the illusion, but meanwhile, anything you try to do with an illusion gets a lot of pushback.I don't attribute this to any specific malice, really, I think it has more to do with human nature.  Humans are very gullible creatures, yet we hate to admit that we can be easily tricked or conned.  We like to pretend that we'd be much more discerning than most of us really can be- and so, DM's hate to be tricked, and by extension, they hate to have their NPC's tricked.It's the same problem with debates about deceit-type skills in other editions.It doesn't help that many illusionist players, seeing how open-ended their illusion spells are, tend to go for grandiose effects.  Rather than create an illusion of a town guard or a zombie, they want to create illusions of Balrogs or Dragons- the kind of thing that might be somewhat eyebrow raising.I would think the best illusionist would try to be subtle, and not stretch the boundaries of belief too much.Of course, D&D being a world where the fantastic exists, a dragon or demon could appear in a town and spells that conjure monsters or beasts totally exist make this more problematic.It doesn't help that a well-used illusion can punch well above it's weight compared to other spells of the same level, the kind of thing any DM would be suspicious of allowing (even when they shouldn't be).Simply put, I've often wanted to play an illusionist, but I usually balk at it, because spells with real effects also exist, and are put under less of a microscope.  Even if my DM was one I knew would be amenable to my use of illusions to deal with problems, the monsters aren't necessarily complicit- they might have special senses or abilities that allow them to realize "hey, that thing isn't real/is hella sus" as a matter of course!I have an Enchanter in a 2e game that has very similar problems- her spells don't say "creature x, y, or z are immune"; that information is in the monster writeup, something you might not realize until it's too late.All magic has risks, of course.  Any monster could have Magic Resistance or special immunities, but it's usually a lot easier to realize something is immune to fireball than to know if I should use hold person, slow, or fumble against an enemy.</blockquote>

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