bekeleven
2022-03-25, 01:19 PM
I'm going to begin by reproducing a larger-than-normal amount of text. I apologize. You can skip this for now, and refer back to it if you like; I didn’t want to keep making points and then going “that would be true, EXCEPT…” and then inserting the next sentence, so I’m giving you everything I can in context.
This text is taken from the player's handbook, Page 173-174. I've bolded the sections that made it into the SRD. (This text was also published on the Wizards website in one of the articles I’m linking below.)
Creatures encountering an illusion usually do not receive saving throws to recognize it as illusory until they study it carefully or interact with it in some fashion. For example, if a party encounters a section of illusory floor, the character in the lead would receive a saving throw if she stopped and studied the floor or if she probed the floor.
A successful saving throw against an illusion reveals it to be false, but a figment or phantasm remains as a translucent outline. For examples, a character making a successful saving throw against a figment of an illusory section of floor knows the “floor” isn’t safe to walk on and can see what lies below (light permitting), but he or she can still note where the figment lies.
A failed saving throw indicates that a character fails to notice something is amiss. A character faced with proof that an illusion isn’t real needs no saving throw. A character who falls through a section of illusory floor into a pit knows something is amiss, as does one who spends a few rounds poking at the same illusion. If any viewer successfully disbelieves an illusion and communicates this fact to others, each such viewer gains a saving throw with a +4 bonus.
We can supplement this with excerpts from the 4-part "Rules of the Game: All About Illusions," written by PHB co-writer Skip Williams. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in these, but I’m considering it a secondary source. Still, feel free to read up. Part 1 is useless, but included for completeness: 1 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060207a) 2 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060214a) 3 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060221a) 4 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060228a).
Interaction
The first, and hopefully smaller, issue we face is that we have 3 tiers of potential interplay with illusions: Passive (during which the character is not allowed a save), interaction (which grants a save to see through the illusion), and proof (which disbelieves with no save, collapsing the illusion into transparency). We need to determine exactly what delineates these three tiers of interplay.
For instance, just viewing an illusionary wall or floor grants no save, if you’re just passing by it, but you can still get a save if you’re inching (”https://youtu.be/oSynJyq2RRo?t=2029”) down the hall, “studying” it carefully enough. What about direct contact? Well, you can interact with a floor if you probe it, but don’t even need a save if you poke it.* Probing a finger through a fake wall still needs a save, put poking one doesn’t.
Proof
Since Plato, many epistemologists defined knowledge as “justified true belief.” That is, if you believed something, and you had a reason to believe it, and it was true, you knew it. Then this absolute baller Edmund Gettier comes in swinging with this tiny little 3-page paper that says “What if you hold a belief of something, and you have a reason to believe it, and that thing is true, but not for the reason you think? What if you think 'Plato is old, and therefore Plato is wrong.' And then it turns out that Plato is wrong, but it’s just because Edmund Gettier is an OG. Your belief is justified and it’s true, but can you be said to know the idea in question?” And then everybody did the 1963 philosophy professor equivalent of playing clips of Phil Swift saying “that’s a lot of damage” and forgetting that Plato didn’t even really say that.
I know this sounds redundant, but D&D generally takes place in worlds with magic. In fact, worlds in which we have to determine whether characters believe in illusions? Those ones just about 100% have magic in them.
This vacuous statement needs to be said because we’re coming up on the worst part. Simultaneously pedantically insignificant and crucial, the question we have to answer now is: What is proof that an illusion is an illusion?
I’ll begin by running down 4 scenarios. After each scenario, consider whether the interplay of any potential illusions was passive, interactive, or proven.
Alice is greeted at the gate by a tall guard in burnished mail. She asks to be let in, and he tells her that the count is accepting no visitors. She tells him that it's urgent, and he says that the count is accepting no visitors. She asks for his name, and he tells her that the council is accepting no visitors. Frustrated, she pokes at him with her quarterstaff, but the staff somehow penetrates (and then exits) his midsection with no resistance. She repeats this trick twice more with the same result.
Bob receives a missive from his old sorceress friend that was training under a dragon. It looks a lot like the woman herself, actually. “Hey, Bob!” it yells as it runs into the room. “I figured out long-distance imaging! I’m still in the Magis Arcanis, but check out this figment projection!”
Clair tells her party wizard that she hears goblins moving in a passage ahead. "We'll lay an ambush," the wizard declares. "Everybody back into this nook. I'm going to make an illusion that it's solid rock." He casts a spell. She uses spellcraft to identify it as Silent Image.
Darryl approaches a possibly-locked door with trepidation. But his party’s not big on the lockpicking type, so he swings his axe into the door near the handle to try and break it. Somehow, the axe goes through with no resistance. The door smells of fine mahogany.
Let’s dig in. First, Alice and the guard.
The only think we have 100% determined as proof that something is an illusion is repeatedly poking it. It’s an example found in the player’s handbook and the Rules of the Game article. Poking through something that appears to be corporeal is proof that it’s an illusion, and lets you disbelieve it with no save, which reverts it to a translucent outline.
For the second scenario, with Bob, I’m going to quickly refer to the Rules of the Game articles. I didn’t want to quote long passages, and I do only plan to use them for divining designer intent and clearing up ambiguities, but this is something I consider ambiguous:
Characters hiding behind or under the illusions here need to make saving throws to successfully disbelieve them (assuming they want to do so). The caster, however, knows the illusions aren't real. If the caster points out the illusions, the characters get a +4 bonus on their saves; in this case, the DM might want to waive the saving throws and assume disbelief to save time.
In perhaps the second clearest example presented, the caster telling you that an illusion is illusory is also —sometimes, with DM approval— allowed disbelief with no save. This passage is a little weird, but for now let’s accept it. That means that our first two scenarios are both “Disbelief, no save, see translucent outlines.”
Do you see the flaw? You see it, don’t you.
What if I told you that in the first scenario, one of the following things happened:
A wizard made the tip of Alice’s quarterstaff ethereal.
Alice is ethereal, and forgot this fact.
A wizard cast Modify Memory on Alice to make her believe she had poked the guard several times when she had not.
The guard’s appearance is due to a nonmagical optical illusion or hologram.
Any other explanation (left as an exercise for the reader).
And in the second situation, Bob’s friend just teleported home for a visit and wanted to screw with him. In neither case are there Illusion (Figment) spells in play, and thus, in neither case is there a translucent background to see.
But the weirdest thing just happened in these two examples. Both of these apparent illusions got studied or interacted with, and yet regardless of whether they were illusions, no will saves were rolled. One situation in both cases was an evidence-based disbelief, and in the second case, there was no will to save because the guard and the sorceress were both real. It’s possible for the burden of proof to be met to allow for evidence-based disbelief in situations where there might not even be anything to disbelieve.
Let’s look at further examples.
In Clair’s case, the main thing I wanted to point out is that the above passage from Skip Williams, it suggests that the caster pointing out the spell he casts doesn’t necessarily void the will save, but could be considered as a time-saving measure (you know, because all saves rolled at +4 automatically succeed). This means that it’s possible for Clair’s wizard party member to say “I’m casting Silent Image,” then she Senses his Motive and believes he’s telling the truth, then spellcrafts his casting and identifies it as silent image, then rock appears around her, and if she rolls a bad will save, she thinks she’s encased in stone.
A suggestion I’ve seen to remedy this specific case is that characters can be “of two minds” about an illusion: What they believe can be separate from what they perceive. In other words, just like somebody on a roller coaster might have to shut their eyes and repeat “it’s safe it’s safe it’s safe,” maybe Clair has to shut he eyes and repeat “I can breathe, I’m not encased in rock” when she fails her save. I would consider this a partial fix, but be wary: It comes with a whole new axis of fuzziness grafted onto the existing fuzziness, since we’re tracking two different forms of consideration. And while it might make intellectual sense, it still means that Clair is the only member of the party that won’t see the goblins arrive.
As far Darryl, this is just a piece of trivia about figments. The key is in the final sentence. Swinging an axe straight through a door meets our standards for proof of disbelief, but there’s a twist. You see, smelling the door means that it can’t be made using Silent Image. Instead, it was most likely made with Major image, or one of the P images (Permanent, Persistent, or Programmed). Now, all of the P images act like major image, but they all inherit from Silent image, meaning they duplicate functionality, and do so imperfectly. Major Image has the following text: “The image disappears when struck by an opponent unless you cause the illusion to react appropriately.” This text is absent in silent image and all of its other children. So due to poor OO practices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_(object-oriented_programming)), we know a bit more about the spell in question.
Conclusion
Illusion spells are hard to adjudicate, and anybody pitching an easy solution is selling something. The more these spells come up in a game, the more the DM is just going to have to go with their gut and try not to let any players feel either omnipotent or cheated.
I hope that, at best, readers come away from this more skeptical of the idea of “proof.” 2022 is a post-truth society and we don’t have access to literal actual memory- and sense-altering magic cast by literal wizards.
The logic of “saving against an illusion lets you see through it” is commonly cited by optimizers (See: the ol’ “Shadow Evocation Deeper Darkness” trick), but frankly, I think it causes as many problems as it solves in typical play. Give it a thought and judge for your own table.
*Ok, technically if you “spend a few rounds poking” it. I stand by my conclusion that this text does not adequately give DMs or players tools to run or play games.
This text is taken from the player's handbook, Page 173-174. I've bolded the sections that made it into the SRD. (This text was also published on the Wizards website in one of the articles I’m linking below.)
Creatures encountering an illusion usually do not receive saving throws to recognize it as illusory until they study it carefully or interact with it in some fashion. For example, if a party encounters a section of illusory floor, the character in the lead would receive a saving throw if she stopped and studied the floor or if she probed the floor.
A successful saving throw against an illusion reveals it to be false, but a figment or phantasm remains as a translucent outline. For examples, a character making a successful saving throw against a figment of an illusory section of floor knows the “floor” isn’t safe to walk on and can see what lies below (light permitting), but he or she can still note where the figment lies.
A failed saving throw indicates that a character fails to notice something is amiss. A character faced with proof that an illusion isn’t real needs no saving throw. A character who falls through a section of illusory floor into a pit knows something is amiss, as does one who spends a few rounds poking at the same illusion. If any viewer successfully disbelieves an illusion and communicates this fact to others, each such viewer gains a saving throw with a +4 bonus.
We can supplement this with excerpts from the 4-part "Rules of the Game: All About Illusions," written by PHB co-writer Skip Williams. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in these, but I’m considering it a secondary source. Still, feel free to read up. Part 1 is useless, but included for completeness: 1 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060207a) 2 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060214a) 3 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060221a) 4 (http://rpg.nobl.ca/archive.php?x=dnd/rg/20060228a).
Interaction
The first, and hopefully smaller, issue we face is that we have 3 tiers of potential interplay with illusions: Passive (during which the character is not allowed a save), interaction (which grants a save to see through the illusion), and proof (which disbelieves with no save, collapsing the illusion into transparency). We need to determine exactly what delineates these three tiers of interplay.
For instance, just viewing an illusionary wall or floor grants no save, if you’re just passing by it, but you can still get a save if you’re inching (”https://youtu.be/oSynJyq2RRo?t=2029”) down the hall, “studying” it carefully enough. What about direct contact? Well, you can interact with a floor if you probe it, but don’t even need a save if you poke it.* Probing a finger through a fake wall still needs a save, put poking one doesn’t.
Proof
Since Plato, many epistemologists defined knowledge as “justified true belief.” That is, if you believed something, and you had a reason to believe it, and it was true, you knew it. Then this absolute baller Edmund Gettier comes in swinging with this tiny little 3-page paper that says “What if you hold a belief of something, and you have a reason to believe it, and that thing is true, but not for the reason you think? What if you think 'Plato is old, and therefore Plato is wrong.' And then it turns out that Plato is wrong, but it’s just because Edmund Gettier is an OG. Your belief is justified and it’s true, but can you be said to know the idea in question?” And then everybody did the 1963 philosophy professor equivalent of playing clips of Phil Swift saying “that’s a lot of damage” and forgetting that Plato didn’t even really say that.
I know this sounds redundant, but D&D generally takes place in worlds with magic. In fact, worlds in which we have to determine whether characters believe in illusions? Those ones just about 100% have magic in them.
This vacuous statement needs to be said because we’re coming up on the worst part. Simultaneously pedantically insignificant and crucial, the question we have to answer now is: What is proof that an illusion is an illusion?
I’ll begin by running down 4 scenarios. After each scenario, consider whether the interplay of any potential illusions was passive, interactive, or proven.
Alice is greeted at the gate by a tall guard in burnished mail. She asks to be let in, and he tells her that the count is accepting no visitors. She tells him that it's urgent, and he says that the count is accepting no visitors. She asks for his name, and he tells her that the council is accepting no visitors. Frustrated, she pokes at him with her quarterstaff, but the staff somehow penetrates (and then exits) his midsection with no resistance. She repeats this trick twice more with the same result.
Bob receives a missive from his old sorceress friend that was training under a dragon. It looks a lot like the woman herself, actually. “Hey, Bob!” it yells as it runs into the room. “I figured out long-distance imaging! I’m still in the Magis Arcanis, but check out this figment projection!”
Clair tells her party wizard that she hears goblins moving in a passage ahead. "We'll lay an ambush," the wizard declares. "Everybody back into this nook. I'm going to make an illusion that it's solid rock." He casts a spell. She uses spellcraft to identify it as Silent Image.
Darryl approaches a possibly-locked door with trepidation. But his party’s not big on the lockpicking type, so he swings his axe into the door near the handle to try and break it. Somehow, the axe goes through with no resistance. The door smells of fine mahogany.
Let’s dig in. First, Alice and the guard.
The only think we have 100% determined as proof that something is an illusion is repeatedly poking it. It’s an example found in the player’s handbook and the Rules of the Game article. Poking through something that appears to be corporeal is proof that it’s an illusion, and lets you disbelieve it with no save, which reverts it to a translucent outline.
For the second scenario, with Bob, I’m going to quickly refer to the Rules of the Game articles. I didn’t want to quote long passages, and I do only plan to use them for divining designer intent and clearing up ambiguities, but this is something I consider ambiguous:
Characters hiding behind or under the illusions here need to make saving throws to successfully disbelieve them (assuming they want to do so). The caster, however, knows the illusions aren't real. If the caster points out the illusions, the characters get a +4 bonus on their saves; in this case, the DM might want to waive the saving throws and assume disbelief to save time.
In perhaps the second clearest example presented, the caster telling you that an illusion is illusory is also —sometimes, with DM approval— allowed disbelief with no save. This passage is a little weird, but for now let’s accept it. That means that our first two scenarios are both “Disbelief, no save, see translucent outlines.”
Do you see the flaw? You see it, don’t you.
What if I told you that in the first scenario, one of the following things happened:
A wizard made the tip of Alice’s quarterstaff ethereal.
Alice is ethereal, and forgot this fact.
A wizard cast Modify Memory on Alice to make her believe she had poked the guard several times when she had not.
The guard’s appearance is due to a nonmagical optical illusion or hologram.
Any other explanation (left as an exercise for the reader).
And in the second situation, Bob’s friend just teleported home for a visit and wanted to screw with him. In neither case are there Illusion (Figment) spells in play, and thus, in neither case is there a translucent background to see.
But the weirdest thing just happened in these two examples. Both of these apparent illusions got studied or interacted with, and yet regardless of whether they were illusions, no will saves were rolled. One situation in both cases was an evidence-based disbelief, and in the second case, there was no will to save because the guard and the sorceress were both real. It’s possible for the burden of proof to be met to allow for evidence-based disbelief in situations where there might not even be anything to disbelieve.
Let’s look at further examples.
In Clair’s case, the main thing I wanted to point out is that the above passage from Skip Williams, it suggests that the caster pointing out the spell he casts doesn’t necessarily void the will save, but could be considered as a time-saving measure (you know, because all saves rolled at +4 automatically succeed). This means that it’s possible for Clair’s wizard party member to say “I’m casting Silent Image,” then she Senses his Motive and believes he’s telling the truth, then spellcrafts his casting and identifies it as silent image, then rock appears around her, and if she rolls a bad will save, she thinks she’s encased in stone.
A suggestion I’ve seen to remedy this specific case is that characters can be “of two minds” about an illusion: What they believe can be separate from what they perceive. In other words, just like somebody on a roller coaster might have to shut their eyes and repeat “it’s safe it’s safe it’s safe,” maybe Clair has to shut he eyes and repeat “I can breathe, I’m not encased in rock” when she fails her save. I would consider this a partial fix, but be wary: It comes with a whole new axis of fuzziness grafted onto the existing fuzziness, since we’re tracking two different forms of consideration. And while it might make intellectual sense, it still means that Clair is the only member of the party that won’t see the goblins arrive.
As far Darryl, this is just a piece of trivia about figments. The key is in the final sentence. Swinging an axe straight through a door meets our standards for proof of disbelief, but there’s a twist. You see, smelling the door means that it can’t be made using Silent Image. Instead, it was most likely made with Major image, or one of the P images (Permanent, Persistent, or Programmed). Now, all of the P images act like major image, but they all inherit from Silent image, meaning they duplicate functionality, and do so imperfectly. Major Image has the following text: “The image disappears when struck by an opponent unless you cause the illusion to react appropriately.” This text is absent in silent image and all of its other children. So due to poor OO practices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_(object-oriented_programming)), we know a bit more about the spell in question.
Conclusion
Illusion spells are hard to adjudicate, and anybody pitching an easy solution is selling something. The more these spells come up in a game, the more the DM is just going to have to go with their gut and try not to let any players feel either omnipotent or cheated.
I hope that, at best, readers come away from this more skeptical of the idea of “proof.” 2022 is a post-truth society and we don’t have access to literal actual memory- and sense-altering magic cast by literal wizards.
The logic of “saving against an illusion lets you see through it” is commonly cited by optimizers (See: the ol’ “Shadow Evocation Deeper Darkness” trick), but frankly, I think it causes as many problems as it solves in typical play. Give it a thought and judge for your own table.
*Ok, technically if you “spend a few rounds poking” it. I stand by my conclusion that this text does not adequately give DMs or players tools to run or play games.