Dealing with Illusory Reality shenanigans?

[charlesk]

DMing a module for my family. This Illusionist ability always seemed to me like it had potential, but now that I have a character who has it, I am seeing that it is powerful almost to the point of being abusable. The example in the book mentions a handy utility example (making a bridge). But last night what I was actually treated to as a DM was a character tossing up foot-thick walls of adamantine, essentially providing impenetrable CC at will.

How do other DMs deal with this, short of redesigning whole encounters around it? There's nothing realistically that even most high-level monsters can do to deal with obstacles of this nature.

[Daehron]

a character tossing up foot-thick walls of adamantine, essentially providing impenetrable CC at will.

Yeah saw this coming. I have serious issues with the wording of this ability, and the nature of illusions. Abuse abounds.

Every encounter is trivial now, unless opponents have high level 'dispel magic's available.

[Shaofoo]

You could easily rule that the foot thick adamantine wall isn't really made of adamantine but rather "illusion stuff" that is much more weaker than adamantine. So an enemy trapped in an adamantine wall can still smash through given that he isn't too weak.

Also considering that the Wizard has to be 14th level to get Illusory Reality, I would hope the enemies will have some tricks up their sleeves to deal with sudden springing walls.

[SharkForce]

what's your point? by level 14, all wizards can cast wall of force. no save, literally unbreakable rather than just too difficult to be worth the bother, doesn't take an extra bonus action, shoves enemies on the border into the square you wanted rather than needing to be in an open space with no enemies, available 5 levels earlier, can be easily placed floating the air without difficulty. and possibly even allows some spells if the DM rules that LoS and not LoE is required for them.

if they want, they can even do it with forcecage and potentially block extradimensional travel and not need concentration.

you can do some awesome stuff with illusory reality, don't get me wrong. but it doesn't feel like it's so much more of a problem than what they could already do at that level.

[charlesk]

what's your point?


Is it necessary to be rude to someone just for asking for help with something?

Wall of Force is a 5th level spell. A level 15 wizard can cast it a maximum of 6 times per long rest, and only by using up all his high-level slots. It also has very specific dimensional limits.

Illusory Reality can be used on ANY illusion. Silent Image is a 1st level spell. It can be used, RAW, to create a solid 15' block of adamantine. Major Image, a 3rd level spell, allows you to create a 20' cube. This could be used to take an adult red dragon out of a fight for 10 rounds. No save.

Look at the Creation spell. Illusory Reality allows the equivalent of this spell to be cast 8 times per day using 1st level spell slots, or 20+ times using higher slots.

That is my point.

14th level wizard abilities should be powerful, but this one is game-breaking.

Edit: I was mistaken in thinking it could be used on Minor Illusion, at least they didn't allow that.

[MaxWilson]

DMing a module for my family. This Illusionist ability always seemed to me like it had potential, but now that I have a character who has it, I am seeing that it is powerful almost to the point of being abusable. The example in the book mentions a handy utility example (making a bridge). But last night what I was actually treated to as a DM was a character tossing up foot-thick walls of adamantine, essentially providing impenetrable CC at will.

How do other DMs deal with this, short of redesigning whole encounters around it? There's nothing realistically that even most high-level monsters can do to deal with obstacles of this nature.

Switch to Combat As War mentality. In this case, you're not designing whole encounters around Illusory Reality, but you're also not building encounters from a standpoint of assuming there will be a "fair fight". You assume the players are going to try to stack the deck somehow, whether it is Wall of Force or hiring hobgoblin mercenaries or Polymorphing enemies into earthworms and bringing them along to use as weapons or Planar Binding elementals or just a simple Pass Without Trace to make everybody in the party insanely stealthy. And then you try to build an encounter that will be fun anyway, no matter how the players approach it. Hostage rescue from the middle of a company of 100 hobgoblins, for instance--they could sneak in and poison the food, or try to assassinate the hobgoblin captain, or use your Illusory Adamantine Walls to produce a fortification with crenellations for 3/4 partial cover from which to fight the hobgoblins in a pitched battle while someone else sneaks in and tries to teleport the hostages to safety via Arcane Gate.

The reality of D&D is that past a certain level, attempts by the DM to control the terms of engagement always fail, because the whole point of high-level abilities like Illusory Reality is to give the players more control over the world they live in.

Other CAW scenarios which can be fun even at high level include:

1.) Somebody (in my game it was a Rakshasa) is impersonating you and doing horrible things (eating people's hearts right there in the street). Now your reputation is ruined and everybody is afraid of you. (Bonus points if your name is Jason Cosmo (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/JasonCosmo).) Bounty hunters may come after you, if there are any good guys in the game. Deal with them, and eliminate the impostor.

2.) You stumble across an ancient treasure horde with a magical sword in it... which has a gem embedded in the hilt which turns out to be a Magic Jar for a powerful wizard who's been stuck in that treasure horde for ten thousand years. You have no clue about this until someone in your party goes rogue (possessed by wizard). Your mission is to get your partymate back without killing them, and learn whatever magical secrets you can from the ancient wizard at the same time.

3.) Prince Deren is in love with the fair Angmaril Khamul, but their union is socially unacceptable because Angmaril is an Oni. Find a way to make Angmaril an acceptable in-law in the eyes of the court and Deren's parents.

[charlesk]

Max, those are all excellent ideas and the sort of campaign I'd like to make some day. But we are just doing a short premade dungeon crawl over the weekend so I need something more mechanical to deal with this. :) I hate nerfing players for being clever so I want some other solution.

Making this worse is the fact that they are going to be conducting most of this fight in an underground dungeon largely made from.. you guessed it, adamantine. :) So it's not like monsters will be able to easily tunnel around things or whatnot.

I may just make the areas they are in so large that this will have limited effect on creatures that can fly or have other means of moving past walls (teleport, etc.)

[JumboWheat01]

Also if you're worried about the power of certain Wizard specializations, re-introduced the tried and tested "Prohibited Schools" during the next character restart. When they choose a specialization, they have to give up spells of another. You can either give them a list per specialization or let them choose how they'll limit themselves.

Like I've been planning a Gnome Illusionist, and am also willingly giving up Necromancy for some slight balance and for story reasons. Also limiting the amount of Evocation I'd use as well, since we know how powerful Illusions can be.

[Tanarii]

Nothing says that the 'real' object has the same hardness or toughness as the object it is imitating. Nor that the 'real' object can be a specified material. An illusion of a wall is one thing, but allowing a player to say it's an illusion of an adamantine wall, then giving the 'real' wall the same stats as one, is your choice as a DM.

[Shaofoo]

Also if you're worried about the power of certain Wizard specializations, re-introduced the tried and tested "Prohibited Schools" during the next character restart. When they choose a specialization, they have to give up spells of another. You can either give them a list per specialization or let them choose how they'll limit themselves.

Like I've been planning a Gnome Illusionist, and am also willingly giving up Necromancy for some slight balance and for story reasons. Also limiting the amount of Evocation I'd use as well, since we know how powerful Illusions can be.

I am not sure how this will balance anything in relation to the topic. I doubt giving up Necromancy spells will make Illusory Reality less powerful.

Also considering that Illusory Reality doesn't kick in till late game I doubt limiting spells from the get go will balance things out.

Personally the schools are only focused on their own spells and rarely do other schools can take advantage.

[charlesk]

Illusionists have traditionally been neglected in D&D. I really hate the idea of punishing this speciality in any way. I am going to have to think hard about this, thanks for the ideas.

[TrollCapAmerica]

If the enemy can be shut down by illusionary walls made real it could also be shut down by a regular Wall of Force. How does the opponent handle that and you have the answer without going into metagaming to ignore the main reason you play a backloaded illusionist for late game shenanigans

[Tanarii]

Illusionists have traditionally been neglected in D&D. I really hate the idea of punishing this speciality in any way. I am going to have to think hard about this, thanks for the ideas.

Lol illusionists have traditionally been insanely overpowered. Especially when they were first created. Part of that overpowering is because DMs let players get away with using illusions to create mechanical advantages far more powerful than their spell level. If adjudicated properly, they're plenty powerful when the player uses them with subtly, as opposed to just trying to brute force a mechanical advantage out of them.

[SharkForce]

Is it necessary to be rude to someone just for asking for help with something?

Wall of Force is a 5th level spell. A level 15 wizard can cast it a maximum of 6 times per long rest, and only by using up all his high-level slots. It also has very specific dimensional limits.

Illusory Reality can be used on ANY illusion. Silent Image is a 1st level spell. It can be used, RAW, to create a solid 15' block of adamantine. Major Image, a 3rd level spell, allows you to create a 20' cube. This could be used to take an adult red dragon out of a fight for 10 rounds. No save.

Look at the Creation spell. Illusory Reality allows the equivalent of this spell to be cast 8 times per day using 1st level spell slots, or 20+ times using higher slots.

That is my point.

14th level wizard abilities should be powerful, but this one is game-breaking.

Edit: I was mistaken in thinking it could be used on Minor Illusion, at least they didn't allow that.

silent image is smaller than wall of force, doesn't displace anything where you want it to be, and cannot be used if the enemy has a single limb anywhere inside it (as materializing a wall inside their arm would undoubtedly constitute harming the person).

major image can't be used to take an adult dragon out of a fight, because it lacks the language of wall of force that shoves the target where you want it to be, and a dragon almost undoubtedly fills up more than their space (the fact that they have a 10 foot reach bite attack on one end and a 15 foot reach tail attack would certainly indicate as much), even if you *could* create a floating cage of adamantine (which is probably magical in 5e come to think of it and therefore not eligible, flying or otherwise, and as noted it would immediately fall which would require that it cause damage which would make the illusory reality not work). forming a cage that intersects the dragon's limbs would be harmful, therefore you cannot do it.

illusory reality is a really good ability. but by the time it comes into play, the things you could do with illusory reality could have been done in a fight already using other spells, generally speaking. a level-appropriate encounter should be able to deal with wall spells anyways, as wall spells have been a thing for several levels by that point. it doesn't matter how many (less effective) wall spells per day the illusionist can get, because ultimately any of those encounters need to be able to handle them in some way regardless.

[MaxWilson]

Max, those are all excellent ideas and the sort of campaign I'd like to make some day. But we are just doing a short premade dungeon crawl over the weekend so I need something more mechanical to deal with this. :) I hate nerfing players for being clever so I want some other solution.

Making this worse is the fact that they are going to be conducting most of this fight in an underground dungeon largely made from.. you guessed it, adamantine. :) So it's not like monsters will be able to easily tunnel around things or whatnot.

I may just make the areas they are in so large that this will have limited effect on creatures that can fly or have other means of moving past walls (teleport, etc.)

The simple solution in this case is to add a couple of extra monsters to each fight (yay, more XP!) and make the dungeon layout less linear and more labyrinthine, with the monsters knowing the labyrinth layout. Blocking off an entrance with an adamantine wall will then split the encounter in two, but there's a time limit because the other monsters are going to come charging around the other corner in a round or two. (Could roll 1d3 to see how many rounds it delays them, or could actually game it out on a grid--whatever you prefer.)

And don't forget to celebrate when your players do something game-breakingly awesome. They're family and when they do something right it is good! My observation is that if a game-breaking combo works, and the DM doesn't escalate difficulty to match, the player will often want to switch strategies or PCs to find something which is more challenging, now that he's mastered one approach. It's fun stomping all over monsters with hordes of Necromantic skeleton archers, but once it's been established that skeletons work and the DM isn't ramping up the difficulty, either (a) the player wants to spend more time on non-combat, CAW aspects and mostly handwave the combats, or (b) the player switches to his Paladin and leaves the Necromancer home.

P.S. Make sure you also use traps in the labyrinth as well as monsters. Ambush predators are good too, as an occasional change of pace. E.g. a creepy banquet hall with lots of trestle tables, and food laid out on the tables, candles still burning, and shadows flickering... but no one is eating. (It's a bunch of goblins and they're all Hiding in the darkness/under the tables until they see what the intruders are going to do. If the players engage it will be a running ambush with goblins shooting arrows and then ducking under the furniture to use Nimble Escape before moving to new positions. Adamantine walls will help once the fight begins but only if the illusionist can keep concentration.)

[JackPhoenix]

By 14th level, you have learned the secret of weaving shadow magic into your illusions to give them a semireality.

While it later says you can make one object real, you aren't actually conjuring a wall of adamantine... you're infusing an image of adamantine wall with enough magic to make it solid...just because it LOOKS like adamantine doesn't means its just as indestructible. It can't directly cause damage or harm anyone...would it stop being real if you punched it hard enough to break your hand? I'd say it's still just an illusion, and if you direct enough force at it, it will fail... "enough force" being a lot less then what you would need to destroy real adamantine. I think I'd rule that just damaging it once is enough...less powerful, still usable for non-combat applications (bridges, stairs, etc...), causes an enemy that knows what it is to waste at least one attack, and not everyone know enough about magic to attack what looks like solid stone (or adamantine) wall

[MaxWilson]

While it later says you can make one object real, you aren't actually conjuring a wall of adamantine... you're infusing an image of adamantine wall with enough magic to make it solid...just because it LOOKS like adamantine doesn't means its just as indestructible. It can't directly cause damage or harm anyone...would it stop being real if you punched it hard enough to break your hand? I'd say it's still just an illusion, and if you direct enough force at it, it will fail... "enough force" being a lot less then what you would need to destroy real adamantine. I think I'd rule that just damaging it once is enough...less powerful, still usable for non-combat applications (bridges, stairs, etc...), causes an enemy that knows what it is to waste at least one attack, and not everyone know enough about magic to attack what looks like solid stone (or adamantine) wall

That is a very reasonable interpretation.

[charlesk]

That actually does make a lot of sense. Thanks.

[E’Tallitnics]

http://www.sageadvice.eu/?s=Illusory&submit=Search

Even JC says to treat such a wall as real, but doesn't confirm the type of material. (He tends to do that with his answers so as to not 'pin down' an example too much, and therefore allow a DM latitude in their adjudication within their own games.)

Also consider that the class feature works with the illusion 'at hand'. Even though a part of that illusion can be made 'real', for 1 minute, there's nothing in the class feature that says that it can exist if the illusion is no longer in affect.

"You can do this on your turn as a bonus action while the spell is ongoing."

To me that means that if the Illusionist tries to cast an illusion around a creature that will immediately "physically interact with" said illusion (your example of confining a dragon), the illusion would immediately fail (for that creature) simply because of it's interaction.

It's up to you to adjudicate what that means when the Bonus Action 'Make Real' comes into effect, and also what that means for others that see this 'situation' unfold.

Considering all of the above—and with the most generous of DM adjudication—the 'effect' only lasts 1 minute. Surely enough time for the party to move away from danger, which is its point.

But, perhaps, not enough time to completely remove the party from the given danger. The delay will only give the party's enemies time to plan….

[AeonsShadow]

While it later says you can make one object real, you aren't actually conjuring a wall of adamantine... you're infusing an image of adamantine wall with enough magic to make it solid...just because it LOOKS like adamantine doesn't means its just as indestructible. It can't directly cause damage or harm anyone...would it stop being real if you punched it hard enough to break your hand? I'd say it's still just an illusion, and if you direct enough force at it, it will fail... "enough force" being a lot less then what you would need to destroy real adamantine. I think I'd rule that just damaging it once is enough...less powerful, still usable for non-combat applications (bridges, stairs, etc...), causes an enemy that knows what it is to waste at least one attack, and not everyone know enough about magic to attack what looks like solid stone (or adamantine) wall

While I agree with this, I would argue only that it should be given a certain amount of HP... maybe 2 hp per wizards level(so min. 28) and Hardness equal to Half (rounded up?) the wizards intelligence bonus? and when that is done to it THEN it disappears.