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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8439259" data-attributes="member: 58197">That's the difference between a novel and an RPG: These questions come up in RPGs and can't be waved off as shark-jumping. Because one of the PCs just cast minor illusion on a torch, and now the DM needs to say what happens. And it is generally preferable for the DM's answers to be consistent so the players don't find their abilities changing randomly from one session to the next.That's where I find real-world physics helpful, not because the D&D world necessarily operates that way, but because it helps me frame the question in my head. Thinking about the movement of actual photons gives me a way to think through the consequences of any given interpretation. For example, if I rule that the light is visible even though the torch is not, that raises the question of whether illusions cast shadows, and if so, at what point "object casting a shadow in torchlight" becomes "barrier that the torchlight can go through."(The quantum stuff was just an aside. I was in the middle of explaining why "it's all in your head" is the only consistent way to run it, and that's when it occurred to me that you could do a weird dual-realities thing instead where the illusion is both there and not-there. As I said, the "it's all in your head" explanation is much easier to reason about. But, again, I would never have thought of "there/not there"--which actually feels very mysterious and magical, and might be worth exploring--without my sketchy layman's knowledge of quantum physics.)</blockquote>

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