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Re: seeing through an image or illusion's eyes?



The original rules said, "A wizard can see through the eyes of [...] illusions brought by his creation spells." (AW 4) There's a long section following on the limitations of illusions but it says nothing about vision. In the Legacy Beta version, this line has been copied verbatim on p137. I think it's fairly clear the intent is that it is possible to use an illusion as a scout. To say that the intent is that the illusion can only show you what you already know about is to make the ability a useless humorous mockery, a lot like Invisible Boy's power to be invisible only when nobody is watching (Mystery Men). There's no reason I know to think this was what was intended and it seems like the sort of thing that would be mentioned.

The idea that illusions can only see things the wizard knows about is, IMO, absolutely in the spirit of illusions. When I GM, I say illusions can't be used as scouts. But I think it's pretty clear that's a widely-used house rule, and in RAW they can.

I think the decision was driven by the designer believing that the ability to see through the eyes of a summoned creature was cool (see the last paragraph of the battle in Wizard) and perhaps realistically required if the illusion was to be teleoperated in combat.

Curiously, there's nothing in the rules saying that an illusion can hear or smell, though it seems in the spirit of the rules to think this should work the same as vision.

I think it's an open question whether illusions and other created figures should have enough intelligence to operate independently. Perhaps some or all of them should be smart enough the wizard could say, "run around the corner and kill whatever you find." This could be a magical talent, or a more advanced version of the spell.

--
David


On Wed, 10 Jul 2019 at 03:14, Joe Hartley <jh@brainiac.com> wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jul 2019 09:45:35 -0700
PvK <pvk@oz.net> wrote:

> That is part of the argument, yes, but there's also RAW confusion because of the line somewhere where it says illusions behave as the wizard thinks the world exists, not as it actually is.

I had a discussion over this decades ago, using the case of an illusion going
around a corner that the wizard hadn't yet gone around himself.  With no other
magic in play, the illusion lacks the optic wetware to actually see anything,
so if the wizard hadn't yet seen/sensed that dragon in wait, he's not going to
be able to see the dragon.

It seems to make using that sort of mechanism rather worthless, and no one
ever bothered with it in that group again.

>  And also unclear about whether an illusion of an owl would see well in the dark if the wizard didn't have Dark Vision or Mage Sight cast on himself.

Same as above, the illusion would only have the same vision capabilities as
the wizard.

That's how we played it back in the day, anyway.

--
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       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh@brainiac.com
 Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa
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