Hey all,
Playing my first illusionist in a few days and wanted to see if the following were possible:
Using a low-level spell like silent image or major image is it possible to create the illusion of something very large and terrible, let's say a flying dragon, but that it's very far away through optical tricks? For example, making the illusion smaller than normal would make it seem far away, as would tinting it light blue to increase the perception of atmospheric perspective.
Thoughts?
I don't know that there's any RAW on the issue.
It feels like it's trying to squeeze extra power out of a spell, which I'm always uneasy about; still, I wouldn't just ban it on sight, but I wouldn't just allow it out of hand either.
First off, as a minor point, is my question of how the character comes to knowledge of how to leverage atmospheric diffusion over distances to support tricks of perspective. Look at medieval art -- understanding the effects of dimension on perception was a process. You might think Leonardo Da Vinci's artwork is kind of 'standard' for how you expect things to be realistically depicted, but his use of perspective and shadowing was actually revolutionary for the time. These were tools that had to be imagined and invented -- not methods intuitive to all people before him.
Anyway, if somebody asked me how I'd do this, I'd consider the starting point; you would just be targeting one creature, or possibly square, for the effect. Illusions of perspective deal specifically with that perspective, so a secondary target that's viewing the image at a different angle than that of the first would perceive visual irregularities (as such, even creatures rather close by would likely be entitled to saving throws for interaction, even when just casually observing).
To maintain the illusion of perspective, it would be necessary to Concentrate on the illusion to move and react with the movements of the target (as such, you would need line of sight to the target in addition to the illusion). If the target moved from his square, he too would notice visual irregularities; even shifting from foot to foot in the same square could break the illusion if the uncontrolled illusion were close enough.
It gets hairier with nonstandard creatures. I'm not sure how possible (or easy, if possible) it would be to make visual illusions effective against particularly large creatures, whose two eyes will perceive the illusion at sharper angles even when at the same distance; or against creatures that, for example, are covered in eyes.
I suppose you'd also have to see rather well in the ambient lighting conditions. If your human illusionist tries to artificially alter the clarity and coloration of an illusion on a moon-lit night to fool an elf, it's probably not going to work well because he can see the illusion better than you can. I would compare it to altering an image with microsoft paint to trick somebody that's going to open it up and check the pixels in high resolution.
Further, my logic tells me that your illusion will be affected by local lighting conditions normally. For example, if you have an illusion flying ten feet above a guard with a torch and you are trying to mimic a great dragon hundreds of feet above, then the illusion will be illuminated by the torch, which would make the guard think the dragon appeared to be underlit by some great light source -- that probably isn't present.
We were being decimated by imps in our CotCT campaign, so my bard 'silent image'd a group of pseudodragons coming around the corner. The GM ruled that it basically caused the imps to stop attacking us until one of them figured out that it was an illusion, so we bought a round to run for cover. I thought it was a fair ruling - I pretty much got a 'daze' affecting three creatures for a first level spell.
Perhaps your GM would rule similarly.
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I'd say sure. It creates an illusion visualized by you, and if you visualize the dragon as far away, it should be able to create a dragon that looks far away. Possibly some sort of skill check if you want to do anything complicated - Disguise sounds like a good skill to cover optical tricks, or maybe a specialized Profession skill - since this would represent your ability to visualize the image.
But honestly I don't think even that is required by RAW, since there's no restriction saying your ability to visualize is strictly limited by technical knowledge - nothing saying you can't create a realistic image of a firearm unless you are a Gunsmith with knowledge of the firearm's working parts. There's also no reason to believe that torches or similar ambient light would illuminate the illusion and give it away, since the illusion isn't actually real and doesn't directly interact with the ambient light (you just visualize the illusion as fitting in with ambient conditions).
The problem with this approach is that perspective is very much based on the location of the observer, so what looked exactly like a far-away dragon approaching from one observer's perspective might look like a tiny dragon flying slowly to another observer. You can't make a different illusion with the proper parallax for every observer, and even slight differences will make a significant difference in what the observer sees, so I would rule that an attempt to do this would not affect more than a few observers.
Remember, your illusion can only occur within a very limited box, so you really do have to deal with parallax from different perspectives.
Hmm, so because the perception of the dragon as distant is an optical illusion that would have to be altered substantially based on where an observer is standing, managing the illusion to dupe more than one person is virtually impossible. I can understand and agree with the logic behind that. I get a sense that it might be possible, supposing that I was only attempting to deceive a single, stationary creature. That's more than I was expecting, really, so I'll bring it up with my GM and get his thoughts.
Thanks, y'all!
i highly suggest you and your gm go read the 3.5 D&D articles about how to deal with illusions i posted links to here