Mirror Images, AoE damage, Magic Missile, and such

[Segev]

Why am I not surprised you would chime in next...

Honestly, not sure. Do you have some sort of analysis of my posting patterns by which you're running? (It's actually a bit unusual for me to post at this time of day on this forum.)

Par for course, indeed, as I literally expected you to post before I went to bed.

"Literally," huh? As...opposed to figuratively? I am genuinely curious, why me, specifically, and why before you went to bed? I don't even know what time zone you're in. (I'm in CDT.)

But, lets see if you are your own person and not just another convenient parrot, aka BurgerBeast alt number 3.

I have my suspicions...

Adorable. Ad hominem attacks and baseless accusations. I assume you haven't actually paid attention to many threads other than ones BurgerBeast posts in, since I rarely remember interacting with him, and, if you'll take a few moments to examine my subtitle, I'm hardly a new account-holder. I am rather prolific.

It's kind-of disturbing that you feel your best rhetorical approach to disagreeing with this position is to insist that only BurgerBeast holds it, and that anybody who voices agreement with him must be a sock puppet account. Perhaps you should have gone to bed and responded in the morning, after sleeping off whatever ire is driving you to be nasty and personally aggressive.

The RAW regarding Mirror Image is 'silent' when it comes to non-Attacks simply because the spell does not work against non-Attacks. You don't have to pick 'which is real', because the spell does not say anything about ever having to identify one over another, anywhere.

So, your argument is that there is nothing that this spell's mechanics are trying to model? IS that correct?

If this spell were an illusionist's free-form effect in a fictional story, what does this look like? What effects does it have?

IN FACT, the spell specifically says 'when you are targeted', and before the Attack roll, you roll a d20 to see if the Attack is redirected to a duplicate.

So, then, your argument is that the duplicates are actually window dressing, and do not fool anybody. Is that correct? The spell actually creates a forcible re-direction that works with a particular probability (that decreses each time it works), and doesn't rely on the illusory images at all to achieve this other than as a visual counter for how many more times it possibly can work.

To be clear of how I'm understanding your position, the illusions are fluff, and could instead be just a force field with gaps that whirls around the character, interposing itself at random with decreasing regularity as bits get hit and broken. Is that correct? Is that what the spell is doing, in terms of what is happening in the story/narrative/game world?

Or is that just a mechanic that is being used to model the difficulty of correctly identifying which of a number of identical-seeming targets is the one you actually mean to hit?

You end up ignoring the entire RAW of the spell when you opt to allow non-Attacks to interact with it, as well as ignore the entire RAW of the spell when you force people to choose their target outside of selecting the caster and then allowing the Spells Mechanic to work as Written.

False. I do not ignore the words written in the spell in either case. In the case of things which require an attack roll, I use the resolution system given by the RAW. (Actually, I would house-rule it to let the attacker pick in a different fashion, possibly involving index cards, but that's not what we're discussing, here.) The d20 resolution mechanic is modeling the confusion the opening text indicates the spell creates as to which of the "wizards" is real, and which are images.

I likewise am not "ignoring the RAW" when I say that the images are indistinguishable, and, if you're not making an attack roll against the wizard, you need to resolve whether you successfully determined which of the "wizards" there was the real one. Claiming that I am is inventing text. To ignore the RAW, there would have to be text there that says, "If it is not an attack, the wizard may be targetted without the images confusing the one doing the targeting." Or something similarly specific about "non-attacks" not being confounded by the images.

The absence of a rule doesn't mean one secretly exists. It means, the spell does what it says, and doesn't do anything else. You don't think that makes sense, that is fine. You don't have to, just know as soon as you add these new layers to the spell (and subtract that actual verbiage of the spell), you are house-ruling. Which, again, is fine. Just be honest about it.

The spell creates images that are impossible to tell apart. The spell text gives a resolution mechanic that, if one is working according to the RAW, must be used under specific circumstances. It does not suggest a resolution mechanic for cases other than that where picking out the real wizard is important. The DM is left to make a ruling as to how to make that determination. There are at least three possible methods:

1) Use the same resolution method that is already spelled out. (The d20 roll.)
2) Assume that the wizard can always be infallibly picked out, because the spell doesn't provide a means to determine if he wasn't. (Erys's position.)
3) Come up with some other resolution method the DM likes better than (1) or (2). (I prefer drawing cards, so much so that I'd house rule even the case of making an attack roll to use it, when possible.)

All three are technically within the RAW, because the RAW do say that the images exist and are indistinguishable, but do not, outside of the case of "attacks," specify how one picks out the true wizard from the fakes. I could argue, in fact, that (2) requires ignoring the RAW that the images are indistinguishable, but I think that that's splitting hairs a bit finely.

This is a really good post. I wish BurgerBeast/Cybren/Segev would read it in its entirety.

It is a shame it will most likely be parsed into small little bite sized sections with each sentence being dissected so that the overall point can be twisted and lost.

Quoting you again because your post is shorter than the one to which you're referring, and your cute rhetorical trick of claiming that responding to it in detail is "twisting its meaning" means I need not bother doing so, and will just say this overall response to the post in general:

If you assert that the d20 resolution "redirection" text applies only when the wizard is "attacked" (as in, attack rolls are made), and at no other time, then any other form of targetting never triggers it. The attempt to say that requiring picking the wizard out of the images for any sort of targetting means that he then, if he's picked, gets the attack redirected with a certain chance, is trying to play three-card-monty with the conditions being explored.

Either the redirection rule applies, or it doesn't. If the wizard is attacked, the redirection rule unequivocally applies to the attack. There is no additional need to determine if the right wizard is chosen; the redirection rule is modeling the selection of the wizard from the images. If the wizard is targetted by a non-attack (i.e., an effect which specifies calling out a target, but does not make an attack roll), and non-attacks explicitly DO NOT use the redirection rule, then some other means of determining whether the real wizard or an image is chosen is necessary. This can be the DM deciding that the one doing the target-selection automatically gets it right. It just doesn't make much sense to those of us who are looking at the diagetics that have been asserted - in the post which Erys has requested I (and two others) read and respond to - not to be in question.

There is no case where you first must determine if the wizard was chosen, or an image, and THEN need to make a redirection roll, because the redirection roll is already modeling the target selection. Only if you interpret the redirection roll as some sort of independent deflection or parry that has a chance of interposing or shoving aside the attack does the redirection roll not serve as a mechanical means to model the confusion engendered by multiple images of the wizard.