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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justin Bacon" data-source="post: 3158854" data-attributes="member: 3795">There are two questions here:(1) If you hit and destroy a mirror image, should you get a Cleave attack off it?(2) If you hit and drop another opponent and then choose to target a mirror image with your Cleave, what happens?In both cases you have a situation where the word "creature" is being used as a necessary condition: You must "drop a creature" in order to take a Cleave attack. And your Cleave attack must "target a creature".The former is definitely the way it should be. However, I would errata/house rule the Cleave feat to make ANY melee attack a legitimate follow-up to dropping an opponent. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to use the feat to (for example) cleave through an orc and bash down a door with a single powerful blow.But, by pure RAW, you would not be allowed to take a Cleave attack after causing a mirror image to disappear. Similarly, if we accept the general interpretation in this thread, if you dropped one opponent and then attempted to Cleave through a target which turns out to be a mirror image, your sword would... I dunno... Freeze in mid-air or something. Or maybe, since there's no rule for Cleave (as there is for magic missile) that says the attempt fails, you would simply be allowed to choose a legitimate target.In other words, your Cleave feat now allows you to have an ineffable sense of what targets around you are illusionary!But what's our alternative?Typically, for example, you can't cast a magic missile at an inanimate object. Should you allow a character to work around this limitation by allowing them to have a compatriot cast an illusion on the inanimate object to make it look like a orc, and then casting their spell? Probably not.Of course, maybe the real problem here -- with both Cleave and magic missile -- is that the targets of those abilties are goofed up. The reason why we're instinctively annoyed that the magic missile or Cleave shouldn't still strike the chair illusioned to look like an orc is because we don't really understand why bolts of force or an angry barbarian's sword shouldn't just smash up that chair.So if you cleared up some of those targeting issues, you could fix the rest of the problem by saying something like: "Illusions can be targeted normally be actions, spells, and other abilities, but will not be affected unless they would normally be so or if the spell specifically says so." Or something like that.Because, on the flip-side, you don't want a metal door illusioned to look like a wooden door affected by a warp wood spell (or something like that).</blockquote>

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