Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elethiomel" data-source="post: 4839638" data-attributes="member: 49897">This thread has given me a lot to think about regarding illusions. As the consensus in this thread stands, the outcome is binary: - Will save is successful. You see straight through the illusion. - Will save is failed. You are utterly convinced that the illusion is real.I don't see this being all the possible outcomes any more. The rules say "A failed saving throw indicates that the character fails to notice something is amiss". This is an ambiguous statement with several possible interpretations. I now lean toward the following interpretation: This "something amiss" means something about the makeup of the illusion that reveals it clearly and unambiguously as illusory. After all, it causes the character to see right through the illusion directly after succeeding on the will save.Consider the following scenario:A high level party have just fought a lich. During the fight they expended all their True Seeing effects and so on. They have a cleric with a high enough Knowledge (religion) to know that they need to immediately find the lich's phylactery and destroy it or the lich will rise again and come after them.During their search of the lich's lair they enter a room with an Illusory Substansive Wall (a spell created by the lich - it's like an Illusory Wall with a tactile component added, but it acts like other figments in that it becomes transparent to someone who succeeds their Will save). Searching this wall for traps, the rogue gets a Will save, and miraculously succeeds. The rogue says: "Hey, look, I can poke my hand right through this wall. It's an illusion!"Behind this wall they find another wall. Now being suspicious of trickery they all study this wall carefully. Almost all of them fail their Will saves but the cleric makes it and exclaims "This is an illusion too! Look!" and again provides the party with proof that the illusion is not real.Behind this wall they find another wall. They all fail their Will saves. It is unreasonable that they will not be suspicious that this wall is also an illusion even before a Will save is rolled. None of them see right through it, but I still think it is reasonable for them to suspect that it is an illusion  - even if they all fail their saves.No, this is not adequately covered by a bonus to Will saves. No, they are not using out-of-character knowledge - after all, they have just seen the result of a failed will save against an illusion that was later proved to be just that. The party's loremaster has plenty of ranks in both spellcraft and knowledge (arcana) and thus knows enough about the laws of magic to know that some times you cannot see through an illusion after examining it closely even though there is one there, plus there is ample proof in the loremaster's recent memory.Thus I will rule in my games from now on that a failed will save against a non-mind-affecting illusion means that you do not pierce the illusion instantly... but it does not mean that you can't think it is an illusion. Furthermore I believe it is a valid interpretation of RAW and not a house rule.</blockquote>

Verification