That's a variation on my favorite Grimtooth's trap! The party finds a pit trap hidden under an illusion. Casting dispel magic clears the illusion... revealing the medusa chained to the bottom of the pit.
I did something similar, when I suspected that a player was reading the (purchased) module, before each session. Some will remember the somewhat famous 1e pic of the female Thief chained to a wall. In my version it was an illusion of a Succubus, pretending to be a Thief. Said player had his character kissed by the Thief, who then revealed herself to be a Succubus, who then eventually disappeared as an illusion. "But it was an illusion! How did I lose levels?!" "Because you believed it was a Succubus at the time." Clearly, he couldn't reveal how he knew it wasn't supposed to go that way
Also, "influenced by" should not mean "a copy of."
I actually have very low blood pressure. Maybe that's whybI never learn...
The conclusion I finally reached (and Vaalingrade helped me get there) is that the online format persistently thwarts the only justifiable role I see for debate: finding the truth and changing our minds to fit it once found. It shouldn't be this fraught, but it is.
A pretty fraught exercise is in any format. In person dialogs can get you juridically murdered with poison for annoying the wrong people.
True that, but at least in person I can read their faces and body postures to get a sense for where their minds are at. Online it instantly becomes the worst Derridean hellscape I've ever seen: all we have is the text before us and nothing of our actual interlocutors to guide our interpretations. In a scenario like this, I'd say a kind of collective road rage is inevitable.
