Matthew Downie wrote:
mrspaghetti wrote:
"smoke that only orcs can see" is not remotely the same as an illusion that looks different from different positions.
If you want it to look like a wall of stone on one side but a wall of iron on the other side, that's not an issue, because a wall could be stone on one side and iron on another.
If you want to create something that looks like an orc when you look at it from the north, but looks like an elf when you look at it from the north-west, you are going beyond what a normal phantasm ought to be capable of. I suggest creating a custom higher level spell with a name like 'Selective Illusion'.
If you want to create something that only lets light through in one direction so you can see your enemies but they can't see you, then you're trying to abuse a spell so you can blind your enemies.
(Feel free to create a wall with small holes in it that you can peek through, though.)
I generally agree with these points.
Note that the spell Darkness (evocation, not illusion) could result in exactly the situation you describe - your opponents blinded and your party unaffected - provided your party has Darkvision and your enemies don't.
An illusion of opaque smoke would make everyone within it blind unless they save. If your party had an advantage to make their save over your enemies, such as the caster Aiding them, that could allow them to successfully save before your enemies and could result in the same situation, effectively. But it is much less certain, and would affect everyone the same whether they had normal vision, low-light vision, Darkvision or even Greater Darkvision.
While I now agree with you regarding transparency from different angles, I disagree that other differences shouldn't be possible from different perspectives. You could make an illusion that looked like an elf from precisely one angle and an orc from another. But the moment the illusion moved, or the viewer moved, so as to change that original perspective, it would be obvious there was something wrong with the illusion as the viewers would see elf-sections and orc-sections and the boundaries where they changed on the illusion. Think of looking at the villain Two Face from a profile view on one side or the other, vs looking at him from an iso view.
