Be ye warned…

This article’s a load of bullshit. Once a month — when I feel like it or when I need a break from producing good, useful content — I write these rambling, meandering screeds about whatever the hell I want to write about. I don’t promise it’ll be useful or constructive or entertaining. I don’t even promise it’ll be interesting to anyone but me. I just promise it’ll be words.

I’m shoveling out this pile of bullshit in response to a conversation that happened over a month ago in my Supporter Discord Server and, full disclosure, I only saw the conversation in passing. I didn’t actually read it, I’m not even sure how it started, and I never went back to check. I just saw a few remarks about a thing, got pissed off at what I saw, and resolved to rant my head off about it when the next chance presented itself.

Really, I’m blowing my stack at an argument I mostly imagined. I caught a snippet of conversation, nothing more, and then imagined the kind of protracted discussion that might produce that snippet. And then I got mad.

That said, I do think this article is worth writing. And that’s not just because I needed a topic for my Random Bullshit column. First, this rant will show you just how powerful all my True Game Mastery shit really is and how many problems its core ideas can prevent. Especially if you put down the damned rulebooks and just run the game. Second, this rant has to do with something Game Masters argue about a lot. And it shows how you can avoid these sorts of fights by actually reading the damned rulebooks once in a while.

I know what I said.

Look, it’s best if you learn to put the rulebooks down and run the game. But if you can’t do that — and lots of you can’t — the next best thing’s to actually read the rulebooks and run the game that’s in there. Lots of you do neither. You skim the rulebooks and then piss and moan and fight about how the rulebooks are a waste of paper because they don’t tell you how to do this or that or even what the game’s actually about. Even though they do.

Third, this rant gives me a chance to tell you again how great previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons handled things and how its current iteration is a steaming pile of garbage.

Fourth, this rant gives me the chance to show off my extensive knowledge of gaming history by explaining how a single, specialized rule for handling a single game effect in an ancient version of D&D turned into a bunch of urban legends that have since fucked up five plus editions of D&D.

So… let’s talk illusions.

The Illusion Debate

As alluded to above, last month, I saw this long-ass discussion in my Supporter Discord Server about handling illusions. Which makes last month perfectly normal. Every forum in which gamers gather features a long-ass discussion about illusions with disturbing regularity. Illusions are one of those topics.

Such discussions always start with the same dumbass questions. Can invisible people see themselves? What happens when invisible people drop things? Can casters see through illusions? If you know an illusion’s an illusion, can you see through it even if you’re not the caster? Can you just refuse to believe your eyes and dispel any illusion before you?

The question that triggered the fight doesn’t matter. It never does. I think it had something to do with an invisible mirror. I sure as hell didn’t ask anyone to clarify the issue — pun intended — because I didn’t really give a shit. I’ve been gaming long enough to have participated in every version of the Illusion Debate you can imagine. Because they’re all the same. There’s only one Illusion Debate. Just like there’s only one Divination Debate. But that’s bullshit for another month.

Me? I don’t struggle with illusions. Why? Because I’m a True Game Master. And I ain’t trying to get you to dance for a True Game Mastery lesson on illusions. I’ve already told you everything you need to know about how True Game Masters effortlessly handle illusions at the table. You just didn’t see it. But I promise you that, before I end this pile of crap, I’ll point out the single sentence I’ve written dozens of frigging times that tells you everything you need to know about adjudicating illusions.

But you’ll have to earn it by wading through a few thousand words about illusions and how D&D handles them so badly.

The Obligatory Third Edition Did It Better Section

I’ve said countless times that one of the big problems with D&D in general — and 5E in particular — is how little of its page space is given over to explaining how its fantasy world actually works. Especially when it comes to anything fantastical. As a Game Master, you’re expected to describe the game’s world and adjudicate the players’ actions so that everything behaves in a logically consistent and real-seeming way so as to trick the players into thinking you’re actually simulating a real, explorable, world-that-could-be.

And really, it’s down to how shit interacts with other shit. Or rather, how shit responds to player-character interactions. That’s what adjudication’s about. It’s about figuring out how the world reacts to the things the player-characters do. And players guess how the world’s going to react based on all the information they’ve got. They use those guesses to pick their characters’ actions. And if they can’t reliably guess the likely outcomes of the things their characters do, they’re stuck acting randomly. And that ain’t roleplaying.

And that is why, by the way, if you’ve got a player who rolls dice to choose their character’s actions or who plays a chaotic-neutral character the way the book says to, you’re allowed to garrote them with the drawstrings on their dice bag.

Anyway…

Pretty much every fight about illusions comes down to one of two things: how do you present illusions and how do illusions respond when the players mess with them.

Okay, there’s a third thing, but I’ll get to it later if I have time and if I don’t forget. Because sometimes I forget how many things I’m supposed to cover. But then I sometimes just miscount and say the wrong number. And man does that confuse people.

Anyway…

Generally speaking, Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t bother with a lot of general, universal laws of magic. Instead, it’s got a massive pile of magical effects and magic can do whatever any of those effects says it can. If there’s a spell or a monster trait or a magical item that makes something possible, then magic can do it. And if there isn’t, then magic can’t do it. Until a new spell or trait appears in a supplement or the asshats at Sage Advice open their stupid noise holes.

Every magical spell and every magical item and every magical creature does what it does. And that’s all it does. That’s how magic works. This is fair enough; magic has no limits or explanations and defies systematic understanding. But that means literally every effect — every spell and every item and every cetera — must include every bit of information the Game Master needs to adjudicate it. And given how open-ended this roleplaying crap is, there are a lot of potential interactions to adjudicate.

D&D 5E leans especially hard into the every effect does what it does and must be handled as a unique case. And that means you — as a Game Master — must refer to the specific rules for each and every effect to adjudicate it. That’s precisely what I was bitching about when I talked about whether detect magic detects invisible dragons. More or less.

The result is that you can’t talk meaningfully about adjudicating illusions in D&D 5E because every illusion works how it works and has nothing to do with any other. You can talk about adjudicating invisibility and adjudicating minor image and adjudicating hallucinatory terrain, but not about illusions in general.

Actually, invisibility is a weirdly special case, but I’ll come back to that. And also what I’m saying isn’t quite true. But I’ll come back to that too.

By contrast, the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook v.3.5. — take a shot — did feature general rules for lots of different kinds of magic. There was a single passage in that PHB that told you exactly how illusions work in general. In fact, it explained the five different broad categories of illusion magic: glamer, figment, pattern, phantasm, and shadow. If you’re curious, you can check out the brief mechanical summary of the passage in question at The Hypertext d20 SRD under Magic Overview: Illusions. That’s not the full text of the rulebook, mind you, just a mechanical distillation of the key points.

Honestly? It was a bit too much. But when a player cast an illusion spell, you at least only had to ask the player what descriptor the spell carried and then consult a single page in the rules for whatever answer you needed.

There was even a little section about what to do when a player declared that they didn’t believe what their character saw.

The Unbelievable but True History of Disbelief

Can we talk about this disbelief shit? Because it’s just that: it’s shit. And someone needs to call it out.

The phrase, I disbelieve is now an indelible part of gamer pop culture. We all know the joke in every form, right?

Game Master: An orb-shaped monstrosity covered with writhing eye-stalks drifts on an unseen air current from the darkness…
That Player: I disbelieve!

And we all know that comes from an old-edition rule that said that if you thought your character was facing an illusion, all you had to do was say “I disbelieve,” and then your Game Master had to grant you a saving throw. It’s the gamer equivalent of asking, “Are you a cop?”

Well, cops don’t actually have to admit they’re cops, and the whole “I disbelieve” thing has gotten totally blown out of proportion. Disbelief was a thing, but it was a feature in one, specific effect in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook published in 1977. That effect? Phantasmal force.

Phantasmal force was a unique part of the Illusion/Phantasm school. It produced a visual illusion that also affected the minds of those who saw it which made it basically real. If you were attacked by a phantasmal ogre, your brain was so convinced it was real that you’d get hurt. Or even die. Because of some limitations built into the spell — and a few limitations on Illusion/Phantasm spells outlined in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide — it wasn’t great by itself for creating phantasmal creatures. But it was great for producing quasi-real spell effects without having to actually cast the spell in question. An illusionist using phantasmal force to fling a fireball could kill you and your friends dead. Or he could just set the room on illusionary fire and let you imagine yourself burning to death so hard you died.

Neat, huh?

Now, there was this line in the spell description that read…

Creatures that disbelieve the phantasmal force gain a saving throw versus the spell, and if they succeed… [they] add +4 to their associates’ saving throws if this knowledge can be communicated effectively.

A similar line was included in one other spell, audible glamer, which was specifically described as being able to provide sound effects for a phantasmal force spell. And that’s how all this “I disbelieve” bullshit got started.

Phantasmal force was a powerful spell. It was a bread-and-butter spell for mid-tier Illusionists and a favorite of Dungeon Masters back in the day. Sure, it couldn’t produce sound and the illusion would vanish if you hit it, but there were lots of creative ways to kill someone dead with it. And players realized there was no cost to saying “I disbelieve” whenever any kind of magical effect happened. Or any mundane effect. If something threatened to kill your character, shouting, “I disbelieve” might save you if it was an illusion. And if it wasn’t, it cost you nothing to try.

It was shit game design, but what can you do.

And so disbelief became a thing and various editions of D&D have had to address it. And meanwhile, it’s spread from quasi-real phantasmal effects to all illusions ever. So, in most editions of D&D, a player could try to pierce an illusion just by declaring a refusal to accept the reality the GM described.

Thanks, Gary.

Meanwhile, Back in the Present

Remember how I said D&D 5E lacks general rules for illusions? Well, I lied. And several questions that I saw pop up in that long-ass discussion last month would have been better resolved by cracking a book than debating the chimerical shortcomings of the rules. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like 5E, but I prefer to not like it for things it actually fails at and not things I only think it fails at.

For example, there’s a general rule for invisibility. Spells, magical items, and creatures that can grant or become invisible invoke the Invisible condition described on PHB 291. So, can an invisible wizard see himself? No. Invisible creatures are “impossible to see without the aid of magic or a special sense.” It’s as simple as that. That’s why invisible creatures can’t be seen in mirrors. Because they can’t be seen at all. It’s impossible.

The invisibility spell described on PHB 254 is also very explicit about the target’s possessions. “Anything the target is wearing or carrying is invisible as long as it is on the target’s person.” If the target drops an object, it’s no longer on their person, so it becomes visible. If they pick it up, it’s a carried thing on their person again, and it becomes invisible.

It’s all there, black-and-tan, transparent as hell. And this is the part in the debate where half the debaters pretend they didn’t actually miss the very clear and very explicit rules but rather that they made a choice to handle things differently so as to avoid losing an argument on the Internet even though we all know they just didn’t bother checking the rules of the game they were running.

But if you’re attentive, you might also notice there are general rules for adjudicating illusion spells. They’re just not spelled out in their own section. Instead, the same passage of text appears at the end of almost every illusion spell in the Player’s Handbook.

Physical interaction with the image reveals it to be an illusion because things can pass through it. A creature that uses its action to examine the image can determine that it is an illusion with a successful Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC. If a creature discerns the illusion for what it is, the creature can see through the image.

And that covers all the common questions that start most instances of the Illusion Debate.

If you know an illusion’s an illusion, you can see through it. Which means that you can see it and you can see what’s beyond it. That’s how words work. Illusions you know are illusions become transparent.

If you touch an illusion, you know it’s an illusion. As such, you can see through it. Moreover, if you touch an illusion, everyone who sees you do so also knows it’s an illusion. Again, that’s how words work. If some random object rolls through an illusion, everyone who can see it happen knows it’s an illusion. And so everyone can see through it. No roll necessary.

So what’s that line about examining illusions? That’s the fucking Disbelief Rule hamfistedly crammed in there. Because D&D must allow players to yell, “I disbelieve” and roll a die or else it’s not D&D. But years of experience have demonstrated that you can’t let players do that without a cost. So, “Fine, you can disbelieve, but it’ll cost you a turn.”

More specifically, though, it’s for piercing an illusion by inspection alone. If you touch an illusion, you know it’s an illusion. So does everyone else. But if you can’t touch it — or don’t — you can study it with your other senses and maybe see through it if you’re smart enough to put the clues together. And if you stand around squinting at it for six seconds.

Really, it’s a dumb rule. If you think something might be an illusion, you’re almost always better off prodding it or stabbing it or throwing a rock at it. Either way, it costs you an action, but if you interact physically with the illusion, you dispel it for everyone. And that, by the way, is how you can identify a throwback rule included because “it isn’t D&D unless…” It’s a rule that does the game no good — it’s an option no smart person would ever use — but it keeps people from bitching and whining about it’s absence.

Declare Your Non-Actions

And this is where I go from pointing you dumbasses to the rules that would solve your problems to complaining about the rules.

Disbelief is stupid. It was stupid in AD&D, but game design was different back then and no one knew better. Now, it’s inexcusably stupid.

Disbelief exists solely to let players ask for die rolls. If you — a hypothetical game designer — want to include a mechanic whereby characters might see through illusions because they’re smart enough to spot the inconsistencies or whatever, that’s fine. But make it an automatic thing. If you make it an “ask for your die roll” mechanic, you just end up with players screaming, “I disbelieve” at everything. And adding an arbitrary mechanical limit to it — it takes six seconds of squinting and head-tilting to spot the inconsistencies — doesn’t make it better. Really, this is no different than the “spot a lie” skill that means players are forever interrupting social scenes with, “I don’t believe him; Insight check! Insight check!”

If you want to make a game where characters can spot inconsistencies and deceptions, just make it an automatic frigging check. Or a Passive Score. Whatever. Like, for illusions, maybe you could have a mechanic whereby those viewing the illusion could throw a die to see if they can save themselves from being fooled. If only such a mechanic existed.

Seriously. Why the motherloving fuck don’t illusion spells grant Intelligence saving throws?

But even that perfectly logical, rational solution that would require no additional game design still fails to address the real problem. And that’s that the disbelief mechanic is a mechanic that lets players solve a puzzle by rolling a die. Seeing through illusions — recognizing illusions and figuring out how to dispel or circumvent them — is a perfect mental challenge for roleplaying game players.

And frankly, if you don’t bog illusions down with this crap, they’re super easy to adjudicate.

True Game Master of Illusions

Let me say this for the umpteen thousandth frigging time…

A Game Master’s job is to tell the players everything their characters perceive and then to determine and describe the outcomes of the players’ characters’ actions.

Is there seriously anyone left fighting me on that point?

So what’s an illusion. It’s literally just a perception. So how do you present an illusion? You present it exactly as it is. Tell the players what their characters see, hear, and perceive.

Take a simple illusionary wall: a passage through a wall that’s covered with an illusion so it appears to be part of the solid wall. Classic, right?

When the characters see the wall, you describe the wall. Exactly the way you’d describe any wall.

When a character touches the wall, what’s the outcome? Well, there’s nothing to touch. The outcome is that their hand passes through the wall as if it weren’t there. And everyone can see that happen. So that’s the outcome you describe.

Every illusion spell neatly spells out which senses it fools and whether it can move and how big it can be and all that crap. Short as they are, the D&D 5E illusion spells in the PHB are totally complete in that respect. They tell you exactly what to present to the players. And yes, some illusions are dead giveaways. Silent, heatless, lightless fire is pretty obviously an illusion, and any illusionist that thinks it’ll fool anyone is a dumbass.

But what about subtle details? And what about using illusions in clever ways to hide their flaws? A silent image of a creature seen at a distance in poor lighting is much more likely to pass muster than one at close range in a sunlit meadow, no? And that’s when passive, automatic disbelief mechanics are your friend.

Consider again your deception-in-social-interaction best practices here. You tell the players what the NPC says. And if you know the NPC’s being somehow deceptive — whether by lying, omitting, hedging, deflecting, or whatever — you roll a die or check some numbers in secret. The mechanics themselves don’t matter. What matters is that if the characters spot a flaw, you describe what’s off without saying why it’s off or what it means. Then, it’s on the players to figure out what’s going on or ask probing questions or act with caution. And if the check fails and you don’t clue the players into the flaws, the players can still decide to probe or investigate or act with caution if they don’t trust what they see and hear.

When the player-characters become aware of an illusion, roll a check and describe what they perceive. Either you describe a distant figure shrouded in shadows, standing still and watching, or you describe a figure that is unnaturally still. “His cloak isn’t even moving in the wind.” Then you let the players do the work.

This goes back to what I said about how information gained through die rolls alone should invite interaction rather than ending it. If the dice tell you the NPC’s lying, there’s nothing left for you to investigate or deduce. You have the answer. If the dice tell you the illusion’s an illusion, there’s nothing left for you to work out. Especially if the illusion then conveniently turns itself transparent.

Personally, I ain’t a fan of illusions that turn see-through just because you pierced them. Sensory impressions keep right on impressing your senses whether you believe them or not. Maybe they get disrupted when objects pass through them. Maybe they pop like bubbles. That’s cool. But beyond that, you don’t get to see through illusions just because you know they’re illusions. Not even if you’re the caster.

You can hide inside the illusion of a rock, but you can’t see out of it. And even if you know a rock’s an illusion, you still can’t see what’s under it. Maybe there’s nothing. Maybe there’s a pit. Maybe there’s a treasure. Maybe there’s an assassin hiding under there.

Honestly, I don’t give a crap how you handle illusions vis a vis physical interaction. It doesn’t much matter as long as you’re consistent. D&D 5E does, in fact, offer a consistent explanation of how it all works. If you know an illusion’s an illusion, it’s see-through. If you touch it, it doesn’t vanish, but you know it’s an illusion.

That’s beside my point, though, insofar as any of my bullshit columns ever have a point. My point is that adjudicating illusion spells only seems weird because they represent game situations in which the characters’ perceptions and the outcomes of their actions give two different answers. But don’t let that fool you. Your job’s the same no matter what. You describe perceptions and you describe outcomes. And if they don’t match up, it’s up to the players to figure out what the hell’s going on. Or figure out how to investigate.

And that’s all there is to it.

Weaving Artful Illusions

Except that’s not all there is to it, is it?

Some of you have probably noticed there’s another side to the Illusion Debate I haven’t touched on yet. And some of you remember my alluding to a third thing — beyond perception and interaction — that plays into the Illusion Debate. And that’s how to adjudicate player-created illusions. How does the world respond when a PC wizard weaves a phantasm?

Really, though, that ain’t an issue. The world is just a game construct. As are all the NPCs in it. NPCs don’t make deductions; NPCs act based on game mechanics. So if a PC spellcaster conjures a figment and that figment passes whatever game-mechanical muster you use, the NPCs going to react to the figment like it’s reality. This isn’t any different from asking a player to roll a Bluff check to see if an NPC buys into their con. The dice decide whether the NPC is fooled.

It’s as simple as that.

But…

Illusion spells do highlight a major omission in Dungeons & Dragons game mechanics. Because spells always work — spellcasters never roll checks to see if their spells go off — a D&D illusionist’s skills are never tested the way a charismatic con artist’s skills are. And that’s a shame because it’d open up a lot of depth of play if illusionists did need some skills to weave good illusions. And it’d emphasize that illusions are tools, not keys. You can magically change your appearance, but without acting chops, you can’t play a convincing part. You can conjure an illusionary dragon, but if you know nothing about dragons — if you’ve never seen a picture of one — anyone who has seen a dragon is likely to know something’s amiss.

Illusion spells are like makeup and wigs. They’re like paints and canvas. And nothing more.

And that’s why, on the flip side, I don’t think a generic Intelligence saving throw’s the best tool for determining whether to tell a player that something seems off about what they see. Depending on the illusion, it could rely on any number of skills. And I’m pretty sure the designers of 5E used Investigation because, well, they had to come up with some uses for that skill. I mean, it seems to me that there’s a pretty obvious skill that has to do with noticing oddities in sensory Perceptions. But when it comes to a disguised illusionist pulling an act, Insight’s the better choice. And any illusory anything that pertains to any knowledge skill can be foiled by the same knowledge skill.

This ain’t a problem for me, of course, or any True Game Master. We’ve got no problem calling for whatever skill and ability tests suit the situation and to hell with the rules. This is why I roll whatever secret tests are best when I put an illusion in front of my players and before I describe anything.

Then again, considering my approach to knowledge and perception, my players are used to me making secret rolls every time they encounter anything. Which only helps me keep up the illusion.