No, it doesn't.
A fighter critting on every single attack they make is an anomally of math. We know exactly how likely it is, and it is purely a an artifact of the dice. But do you know what the fighter is balanced around?
Assuming they hit.
No fighter is balanced assuming that they will miss most of their attacks. The game is balanced so that if the fighter hits on every single attack, the game is not broken.
An outgrowth of everything having huge whacks of hit points relative to some editions, perhaps: the fighter can hit on every attack and it'll still take ages to bring the foe down.
And so it is with spells. The game is built with the assumption that you have the correct spells for the situation. However, there is consideration given after the fact that that situation is unlikely.Hence things like Elemental Adept being added in an acknowledgement that, yes, you might have the wrong elemental type to deal with this monster.
Having the perfect spell selection is not broken. It can't be, because the design can't assume what your spell selection is.
Happening to have the perfect spell selection for a situation vs happening to have a selection of spells that are of no use in that situation makes a much bigger difference than whether or not the fighter hits every time.
Which makes the question very simple: should the game make it easy to swap out spells (or to have all spells castable at all times), or should swapping require a certain amount of in-game time (a long-rest, a day, a week, the next downtime, whatever), or should swapping spells be impossible in any form.
Yes with a whole host of limitations.
1) It can't be subtled, because you need to speak to the target to give the suggestion
2) It has to be a reasonable suggestion, and cannot be a suggestion to self harm
3) If you or your allies harm the creature, the spell ends
Phantasmal Force would have none of these restrictions. You could have the God you are impersonating show up and demand the King flagellate himself in front of the court to atone for his sins. It could demand that the Paladin in your party do it.
So, Phantasmal Force and Suggestion are clearly not supposed to do the same things.
Suggestion, if done right, can hose someone over far worse than PF can. Sure it doesn't do any damage, but the 'Suggested' task could be something that keeps the target busy for a long time, and thus out of your hair.
As for PF and other illusions: I take the stance that if someone believes an illusion then that illusion can hurt or even kill the believer, if done right. If someone casts a five-sense illusion of the cave collapsing on your head and you fall for it, you're in a world o' trouble.
I think we have a fundamental difference of opinion on one aspect of this spell in particular.
Who writes the script the illusion follows? Is the target of the spell deciding what the illusion says and does? Or is it the sorcerer who decides?
The caster, always.
And if it is the sorcerer deciding what is said, how is it any different to speak through an illusory image of a god than it is to speak while wearing the mask of a nobleman? If a thief uses his disguise kit to appear like a nobleman, and he goes to do something under that guise, does he automatically succeed in deceiving or persuading the people he is targeting, no roll, because he is using the knowledge on his target against them and hoping they bite?
No. And Phantasmal Force being used in the manner you are presenting is just an elaborate puppet show the sorcerer is putting on. And that does not mean they get to skip straight to success.
Situationally dependent. If the illusion is subtle enough that there's no reason not to disbelieve it (e.g. very slowly moving the gang-plank of a ship three feet to the left such that the next person who tries walking on it goes splash) then it's auto-success.
That said, one thing I don't allow illusions to do is coherently speak. The best they can do is make mumbly sounds as if speaking a very foreign language, but
Comprehend Language or
Tongues will not translate this speech (which might be a clue that something fishy's going on...)
The one that has someone's deity showing up is interesting: yes the viewer can try to disbelieve...but from the viewer's side there's going to be that doubt: what if it really
is my deity and I'm caught looking askance at it?
Provide a quote from the designers stating that they felt this was a bad rule that would hurt the game. Then you get to claim you know what they thought.
Given that this idea seems to have been in the pre-marketing and was then pulled, what other reasoning could there be?
I suppose there's a non-zero chance it was intentionally pulled from this release in order to include it in some future release where it fits better, or as a setting-specific rule, or because of practical issues e.g. page count/space; but all of these seem rather unlikely.
