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Here's how I would think about it - when you are polymorphed, your heritage doesn't change. You might be a tiger, but your parents were still your parents, and your culture was still your culture. If your sense of personal identity, memories, and disposition can all stay intact while you polymorph I don't see why you couldn't also retain heritage traits.

Furthermore, your heritage does not change in animal form because (p33)

A heritage is not the same as a culture or ethnicity,

so becoming a tiger might change your ethnicity and species but these are not the things from which heritage stems.

But rules as written - these spells seem to be very specific about what you can and can't do in your animal form and what you gain. Since your heritage traits are not explicitly mentioned, I feel like they could stick around. The claws or bite attack from your ancestry is explicitly disallowed in the animal form spell description so that's easily ruled.

One or more unarmed melee attacks specific to the battle form you choose, which are the only attacks you can use.

As far as racial traits, those would go. Polymorph could GRANT you darkvision or something like that and in order to be able to do that it really needs to change your physiology in such a way that you would keep nothing from your previous physical form. If the thing that made your eyes keen was mental it might be debatable but it sounds like a physiological halfling trait to me.

The way I usually approach these situations is to imagine what the implications would be in the exceptional cases. For example, you would likely not want a rune of returning to be able to work on all objects, like houses, boulders for mechanical reasons, nor would you want it to work on all weapons (which come in ALL shapes and sizes).

I think the most fun and consistent way to rule this would be that a rune of returning would work on any object under a certain level of bulk, where both the weight of the object is important (force exerted by the rune) and the size of the object is important (propagation of the rune effect through the item).

That would be fun, consistent, and would not add undue power to the intended effect. It could also result in some creative gameplay. The bulk restriction would help with the edge cases and make sure the rune isn't abused with like... a great hammer...

But in the end I am a rules-as-intended kind of guy and not a rules-as-written. I value consistency of the world and its rules. If there is a world where a dagger can have a rune of returning but a 15 inch steel dowel can't until you sharpen it, it's a little harder for me to stay immersed.

If you want to go strictly with rules as written and ignore any intent here, it seems that the "Usage" section is both description and restriction. The etching is a necessary part of the usage, and a weapon without the "thrown" property is not a "thrown weapon" unless it is actively being thrown, and etching the rune onto a weapon while someone is throwing it seems impractical. I think it's safe to say they are referring to the "thrown" property here and not the act of the object being hurled.

You could etch it in a way inconsistent with the "usage" but then you could not expect it to work. The effect only comes into play after appropriate "usage", so you could no more etch it onto a non thrown weapon than you could dye it onto a thrown weapon or crayon it onto a thrown weapon.

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Yeah, I think my biggest hangup was trying to imagine a gameplay situation in which tactile stimulation would EVER make sense on an illusion or add to its verisimilitude. I guess a key example would be something that (apparently) gives off some heat or provides a tactile sense without much force (wind or molten iron at a distance, for example).

It seems like pain would also be on the table in that case, so running head first into an illusory wall of spikes would provide no resistance and do no damage, but it would hurt a ton. This might stretch beyond the spells intention but it seems to be within it's theoretical capabilities, as long as it's a stationary object and the senses are appropriate for the object in question. We have phantom pain, a first level spell that actually does damage with illusory pain, so a 2nd level illusory object I think would not be overpowered if it were also able to simulate pain without damage.

Here's what I've found:

Focus spells are automatically heightened to half your level rounded up, just like cantrips are.

then

If you’re a prepared caster, you have a number of cantrip spell slots that you use to prepare your cantrips. You can’t prepare a cantrip in any other slot. A cantrip is always automatically heightened to half your level, rounded up.

I think this is just a little bit of sloppy wording. If I were to write this I would say "A cantrip spell slot level is always half your level rounded up"

from heightening spells:

When you get spell slots of 2nd level and higher, you can fill those slots with stronger versions of lower-level spells.

So here's my hot take.

Focus spells occupy focus spell slots JUST LIKE CANTRIPS. They are spell slots that are never expended (but cost focus points to use) and are heightened to half your level rounded up. You might read this as "Oh so I need to prepare a specific level of cantrip when I prepare my spells each day" however

A cantrip is a special type of spell that’s weaker than other spells but can be used with greater freedom and flexibility.

So while the rules are written in a way that does not explicitly allow this, I would rule that cantrips can be cast at any level below their automatically heightened level, just like any spell slot can take a spell at a lower level.

I think the intent of the rules is to allow that but it sort of writes itself into a hole. It seems the intent of the authors was to allow cantrips to be flexible and at-will, with the only restriction being that you have to choose them ahead of time.

So why word it the way it was worded? Here's my second hot take:

Spontaneous casters have to learn each spell they know at the level they want to cast it. For regular spells this means if they know 4th level fireball they can't automatically cast 2nd level fireball and so on.

You must have a spell in your spell repertoire at the level you want to cast in order to heighten it to that level.

But (I guess) the authors did not want this restriction for cantrips, and might have had spontaneous spellcasters in mind with this wording. Otherwise, you might have wondered if spontaneous spellcasters had to learn the heightened versions of their cantrips separately. I think that would be a real P.I.T.A. for spontaneous spellcasters, so they get to rely on the automatic heightening rather than needing to relearn their cantrips.

I would also rule that spontaneous casters could choose which level to cast their cantrips as well.

I'd argue that *something* is there. There has to be a source of whatever sensory phenomenon is going on. For simplicity, let's call it the Effect.

...

What do your knuckle (and tongue) feel? The Effect. The Effect should generate a sensation against whatever you're doing. However, the Effect is only doing that: fooling that sense.

Thanks for that insight. So this was part that was tripping me up, like if it wasn't a mentally affecting spell, I couldn't imagine how it could fool the sense of touch, but maybe going back to the haptics that Gortle and OrochiFuror were talking about, that might be a reasonable interpretation.

The haptics would just be really really good. Like your arm would go through the table, but your body would feel your arm hit the table, and maybe you would bring your hand back and get disoriented because your hand came back a further distance than it felt like it went down.

So no physical reality causing the senses, but the illusion itself is like a projector of sorts that projects not only light but also sound, smell, taste, and EVEN projects touch. In this way it is not an mental effect (not affecting your brain) but fooling the nerves in your body to misdirect the brain.

In this way, you could grab an illusory door handle, feel it in your hand, sqeeze on it and feel how solid it is, but if you looked at your hand you would see yourself making a closed fist and phasing through the image. I think that makes the most sense to me.

This would also work for Illusory creature: https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=158

Where it says the creature feels believable to the touch, but apart from mental attacks "cannot... directly affect the physical world"

EDIT: Because I was previously wanting an example, here's a gameplay example I imagined.

You create an illusion of a door in an open door frame. A creature comes by and sees the door. Looking down the hall to his left, he reaches for the door handle and tries to open the door. He feels the brass doorknob in his hand as he turns it, but it's locked! Or... jammed. Or something? The handle doesn't even turn. He looks down at his hand, which is balled into a fist and intersecting with the handle of the door. How could that be? He feels the handle in his hand but his hand is... inside the door? He recoils slightly and then peers suspiciously at the door. He swipes a hand at the surface and feels/hears a dull *thud* on his fingertips as he hits the solid surface... but his hand has passed straight through! At this point he either uses actions to disbelieve the door or just tries stepping through. If he had never looked, he would have been completely fooled, it was only that the touch did not align with what his hand was doing that allowed him to realize the illusion.

Don't overthink it, it's magic and will never make sense.

Since this has come up twice in the last few comments I do want to point out that I don't mind a magical explanation but there needs to be SOME EXPLANATION of what happens. Knowing HOW it works is helpful but not necessary, I just need to know what happens in the rules-as-intended when someone touches an illusion that "feels right". Otherwise this becomes pretty difficult to predict or rule in a consistent basis as a game master.

If you had that same VR experience suddenly in the real world, would that not be jarring? If the contact was brief would you even know to think it could be fake? I think that is why you get a save, you suspect something is wrong but you have to take a few moments testing out why.

Yeah it would be jarring, I agree with this, however, the "feels right" feature (if interpreted this way) doesn't really give the player much tangible (No pun) benefit. So why include it at all? Regardless, the book specifically says "Feels right to the touch" which implies it would not arouse suspicion. Otherwise I would have expected it to say "Feels uncanny to the touch".

illusions could be "essences", "reflections of Platonic ideals", "shadow or dream substance", or a myriad of other types of immaterial woo (or all of them depending on the caster's tradition and culture).

It would be great if the book had some indication of the above, do you know of anywhere that talks about illusions in depth in this way?

Basically I could give up on all the theoretical talk if I could just answer the following questions:

1. Does "Feels right" mean the illusion can be touched?

2. Does touching the illusion still arouse suspicion?

3. Can objects still pass through the illusion unaffected or does the illusion now exert some force on objects now

4. Can illusions be used in this way to cushion falls, hold doors, deflect projectiles, trip creatures, make surfaces slippery, keep food cold, keep players warm, etc? IE: is the touch real? IF the illusion doesn't have the mental property, I guess it must be? Can an illusory spike draw blood?

I'm really looking for some official source I can go to. Like anywhere else in the rules that would clarify this. It seems like a really dramatic change to the original spell without any explanation.

And maybe it is just poor wording. I guess maybe at this point I can say for sure it's poor wording. Putting a subjective statement like "Feels right" into a spell description is kind of asking for these kinds of cans of worms.

Maybe it should just be ruled as "No longer arouses suspicion if touched, and the touching creature rationalizes whatever effects it perceives as a result of not being able to touch the illusion" like in phantasmal force from D&D:

The target rationalizes any illogical outcomes from interacting with the phantasm. For example, a target attempting to walk across a phantasmal bridge that spans a chasm falls once it steps onto the bridge. If the target survives the fall, it still believes that the bridge exists and comes up with some other explanation for its fall—it was pushed, it slipped, or a strong wind might have knocked it off.

Anyway, right now, because it doesn't have the mental tag, I'm leaning more toward "you just can't touch illusions" and chalk it up to a print error. Because it's not clear how this is meant to affect gameplay.

Back to the topic of the thread. I'm not really understanding your confusion. The illusion is creating an image of something. At higher level it includes sound, smell, and feel.

So when you reach out to touch it it still feels like it is there. Something about the illusion creates the sensation of touch in your fingers.

But it is still not really solid or actually there. So if you take a seek action or touch it you still get a chance to disblieve.

How do you touch something with Virtual Reality gear on? With haptic feedback through your gloves. It feels like its there but its not. I guess its the same, but magic and no gloves required.

Thanks for asking for clarification here, I think this is a good area for discussion.

Touch is a quite complicated sense, there are actually a few different types of "touch" sensors we have in our body. There's hot/cold, pain, texture, and pressure sensors in our skin (or just below), and there's probably a little more nuance in there but for this discussion I think that's fine.

So anyway, touch / my confusion - In order for something (say, a table) to "Feel right" my hand needs to stop when it comes in contact with it. One feels objects not just in their fingertips but also in one's knuckles, shoulder, etc. This is how you feel the "flatness" of the object and the "solidness" of the object, which are both parts of the "feeling" experience.

I like your example of haptic feedback in VR. That is a great example of what I was thinking as a potential description of what the book was going for here, but the problem is (and people who have used haptic feedback systems before will know) that while you do get a sensation, it's anything but "right". You can feel sensation but it's little more than fingertip stimulation. As an analogy this would be like an illusion of a bird opening its mouth and letting out a solid tone *Beeeep*. Yes it's auditory stimulation, but it isn't right.

The ONLY situation in which I could imagine this working is if you made an illusion of a satin sheet over a real brick wall. Your hand will touch the brick, but you will feel satin.

Now, I'm operating under the premise that an illusion is like a hologram, however it may be closer to a pure mental manifestation.

We all know illusions are not really the objects they represent, but do they even exist at all or are they purely in the mind of the beholder? If illusions are like global enchantments (they affect the mind / senses of everyone who can see them rather than actually being a hologram that you could take a photo of) then I could imagine more leeway in the touch realm. For example, I could imagine someone "touching" a brick wall and the illusion just makes them think they are touching it. If their hand passes through it a little, the illusion fools them to think that their hand did not pass through it.

I'm really looking for the INTENTION of the authors here, which I guess could be a subject of a lot of debate but I think the discussion so far has been helpful.

Illusory object has the following spell description:

You create an illusory visual image of a stationary object. The entire image must fit within the spell's area. The object appears to animate naturally, but it doesn't make sounds or generate smells. For example, water would appear to pour down an illusory waterfall, but it would be silent.

Any creature that touches the image or uses the Seek action to examine it can attempt to disbelieve your illusion.

Makes sense. Incorporeal visual illusions are a staple of D&D 5e and I think I have a firm grasp on the difference between disbelieving and knowing-it-is-an-illusion. No problem. However, the heightened version of the spell:

Heightened (2nd) Your image makes appropriate sounds, generates normal smells, and feels right to the touch. The spell gains the auditory trait. The duration increases to 1 hour.

FEELS RIGHT TO THE TOUCH?

How do I - how does an - what? It's an illusion. It's incorporeal. Touch is a VERY Corpreal sense. Baroreceptors man... touch is a sense that requires force. How the heck does an illusion "Feel right"? A brick wall only feels right if it supports my weight, but I don't expect an illusion to be able to do that. A hot coal only "feels right" if it burns me.

Does anyone have any idea how this actually manifests in gameplay or how we are supposed to interpret this? Does this somehow make the illusion semi-corporeal? Can I suddenly place a dagger on top of my illusory table? How does one touch an illusion at all?

Was thinking about this all last night, I'm flummoxed. Any help would be appreciated.