Question about the cantrip: Figment. If you are creating an illusion of something that normally would give off light, would the illusion give off light?
Ex: A torch in a dark room. Would you be able to see with the illusion, where you normally would not?
And if, yes, does that light end at the 5' area effect or is it considered an emanation from the effect, like sound is?
Thank you for any replies.
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The stricter reading would be that you create an illusion of light, which wouldn't actually be able to illuminate anything. It might be "visible" but it wouldn't actually function as light, but more like a weird graphical detail in the darkness.
A bit like the "lights" we see when we close our eyes.
The stricter reading would be that you create an illusion of light, which wouldn't actually be able to illuminate anything. It might be "visible" but it wouldn't actually function as light, but more like a weird graphical detail in the darkness.
A bit like the "lights" we see when we close our eyes.
Well here is my thought, if you had an actual object, a light source would have to bounce off of it, back to the observers eyes, so it's the other light source that produces the light. But with the illusion, the illusion would have to produce the actual light as there is nothing for the light waves to bounce off of.
It's why I mentioned the sound since both light energy (EM) and sound (kinetic) energy are both just different wave. For the illusion to work, it has to actually produce both these waves.
The spell clearly notes that beyond 15', the sound is undetailed, meaning you can still hear it past it's 5' AOE, and, by assumption, beyond 15' like normal sound.
In the end, it's magic but I do like to try and understand what is actually happening with the effects to best use these abilities.
Thank you for the reply.
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This is one of those things completely up to a GM. Illusions defitely don't follow normal optics rules, since Invisibility doesn't make the subject blind.
My general approach is "illusory light"- it can be seen normally, but stops illuminating objects outside the spell's affected area- in Figment's case, outside the square. There's nothing in the rules to support that, though, or any particular approach, really.
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Based solely on the fact that the Remaster replaced the Tangible Dream Psychic's cantrip Dancing Lights with Figment, I would allow it to give off the equivalent of candlelight. (Dim light in a 20 ft radius). Especally if you had built a character depending on that for visibility.
By strict RAW I would say it would glow (be itself visible in dim light/darkness) but not shed light in a radius.
Based solely on the fact that the Remaster replaced the Tangible Dream Psychic's cantrip Dancing Lights with Figment, I would allow it to give off the equivalent of candlelight. (Dim light in a 20 ft radius). Especally if you had built a character depending on that for visibility.
By strict RAW I would say it would glow (be itself visible in dim light/darkness) but not shed light in a radius.
Had not sound waves being specifically mentioned traveling well beyond the 5' AOE, it would make sense. As mentioned before, sound is just a kinetic wave, light a EM wave, both require ~equivalent amount of energy (not much, maybe a few volts) to produce.
But the cantrip itself has a 30' range so if you cast it in a darken room, not even pitch black, but just darken, and the illusion needed a light component to make it believable, it would have to produce light as there is nothing in the description that gives the observer any added ability to disbelieve it due to lighting conditions.
Thank you for the reply.
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This is one of those things completely up to a GM. Illusions defitely don't follow normal optics rules, since Invisibility doesn't make the subject blind.
My general approach is "illusory light"- it can be seen normally, but stops illuminating objects outside the spell's affected area- in Figment's case, outside the square. There's nothing in the rules to support that, though, or any particular approach, really.
Agreed.
A Figment can be heard because the spell says that it can be audible and gains the Auditory trait.
A Figment can be seen because the spell says that it can be seen with vision and gains the Visual trait.
A Figment does not illuminate any area because the spell does not say that it does.
The reason for that is not physics and science of light and sound waves.
The reason for that is game rules and 'magic'.
Light trait: "Light effects overcome non-magical darkness in the area..."
Figment lacks the light trait, so it does not illuminate. It is an illusion: "Effects and magic items with this trait involve false sensory stimuli."
false sensory stimuli. As in a figment of imagination
Attempting to argue that it creates light because of the physics of sound is a dead end because it does not create sound. It creates the illusion of sound, just as it creates the illusion of a visible object without creating light
So if it only creates the illusion of sound, then it's AOE is not actually 5' because it clearly notes that beyond 15' it becomes indecipherable... but you still hear it, and from the wording I would assume beyond 15' as normal sounds.
So either the AOE is greater than 5' of illusionary sound or the illusion is only 5' but it creates physical effects much like magical fire will light things on fire and create heat.
Thanks for the reply.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but illusion spells specifically target the mind, yes? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t it make more sense that it’s just triggering parts of your mind to make it seem like physical stimuli? In which case, it wouldn’t be creating light or sound so much as tricking your brain into thinking there’s light or sound.
With the 5 feet being louder and 15 feet being faint a trick to make it even more believable as physical stimuli. It’s magic pretending to be not magic. It’s trying to pretend to follow the laws of physics by manipulating your brain into accepting that it is.
I think that any attempt to argue that illusions are producing regular light that interacts with physics and eyes normally kinda breaks apart at the point where disbelieving one allows you to see through it, while someone next to you who fails that check still sees it.
Illusions aren't under any obligation to be convincing. A lit candle that illuminates nothing is just as valid as a miniature pink elephant clipping out of a chair. Good illusionists might also need Light on hand to sell these sorts of light-emitting illusions, if the GM wants to run it that way. But, in any case, an unconvincing illusion only prompts a Seek or other interaction, not automatically make everyone disbelieve in the mechanical sense.
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I think that any attempt to argue that illusions are producing regular light that interacts with physics and eyes normally kinda breaks apart at the point where disbelieving one allows you to see through it, while someone next to you who fails that check still sees it.
It works the other way too though: it has the auditory/visual traits which mean you actually have to see or hear it. If it's 100% all in the mind, there would be no reason someone temporarily blind or deaf wouldn't be able to hear or see it as it wouldn't need the sensory organ to work.
One might also think of Figment like a photo, where putting a torch image in shadow is as disjointed as if putting it underwater. It looks like it's there, but it isn't interacting as one might expect.
One might also think of Figment like a photo, where putting a torch image in shadow is as disjointed as if putting it underwater. It looks like it's there, but it isn't interacting as one might expect.Well, if we are talking modern comparisons, an illusion is a 3d model which doesn't have correct lighting in a computer game :) And no physical interactions.
Oh so whenever I code something, I’m casting Figment. Now I just need to learn how to cast something else…
So there's actually nothing about the maximum range it can be heard or seen. The range entry for the spell is how far from the caster it can be cast, and the only mention of 15' is in reference to a visual figment. And in addition, that mention is not how FAR it can be seen, but how CLOSE a viewer needs to get for the visual illusion to begin breaking down. Create a Diversion doesn't offer any help in deciding this either. Personally I don't believe there needs to be a limit to how far a figment can be heard or seen aside from the normal rules for senses
>it creates physical effects much like magical fire will light things on fire and create heat
Again, this is an ILLUSION. It's not a sound machine or a hologram. It doesn't CREATE any sound or light or objects. It causes observers to sense things that do not exist
Think about that. Say you are using one of those expensive spy glasses and you are 1,000+ft away. You look at the area that they 5'5'5 illusion of a bond fire. The spell effect would be 1,000+ range. If there were a thousand people looking at it, it would affect a 1,000 people. Etc.
Here is what I think "disbelieving" does. It simply means you still see it exactly the way it is, you just don't think it's real. Aka, it is less about actually affecting the mind, it more about how good of a hologram it was, how good the sounds was, and if you are wise or smart enough to realize it's just a hologram, aka, an illusion. This makes far more sense.
I seem to remember in D&D that illusions pulled shadow plane wisps of material to construct the illusion so you were actually seeing something. Being on the shadow plane is like standing on the Holodeck of the Enterprise.
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We did this already. And the answer is still no. Read the illusion trait. They are not holograms.
We are going a long way to define how this lights up, but my thought from the start was "so this is like a glow in the dark toy, right?"
It is visible, but it might not illuminate.
It could still be useful though. Like if you put a door in an empty doorway, you will see something that gets past it and stand between you and the door- obstructing your line of sight.
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Light trait: "Light effects overcome non-magical darkness in the area..."
Figment lacks the light trait, so it does not illuminate. It is an illusion: "Effects and magic items with this trait involve false sensory stimuli."
I would disagree with this conclusion as it's not the full quote. "Light effects overcome non-magical darkness in the area and can counteract magical darkness." There is no reason a spell couldn't "overcome non-magical darkness" but be unable to "counteract magical darkness" hence not qualifying for the Light trait. For instance, the Sparkler manages to overcome non-magical darkness without the Light trait but a Glow Rod does. There is no reason Figment can't illuminate an area as long as it can't counteract magic darkness.
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I'm not sure if sparkler's lack of the light trait was an oversight, a relic of items pre-remaster, or if its author believes the fire trait does double duty here, but regardless; the sparkler accomplishes illumination because its effect text says it produces light and that's good enough for me. The glow rod certainly can't counteract magical darkness because if, as you said, we continue quoting the light trait, "You must usually target darkness magic with your light magic directly to counteract the darkness, but some light spells automatically attempt to counteract darkness." Glow rod isn't a spell and doesn't say anything of the sort, so the "and" in the light trait's first sentence isn't the important word. The "can" is. "Light effects overcome non-magical darkness" is the always present effect of the light trait and its defining feature, but the "can" in "and can counteract magical darkness" means a light effect might not be able to do the rest, as is the case with the glow rod. You know I'm willing to rule differently than a strictly pedantic RAW reading if there's cognitive dissonance between elements of a rule. figment doesn't say it produces light like the sparkler does in its description, so I don't see a reason to rule it does so without the light trait
That's not to say the illusion of light or an illuminated scene (that fits w/i 5x5x5') couldn't be created with figment, and the thought of how that would look once someone approached w/i 15' and it became "clearly crude and undetailed" is something I've had fun visualizing
I mean there are other items that can illuminate, like a torch, that don't have the Light trait so i don't see that Light is required to have illumination. As to "You must usually target darkness magic with your light magic", it's written from the perspective of magic spells: as such, I don't agree that an item falls under the same restriction: an alchemical item literally can't be 'cast' and isn't magic. If the counterspell is limited only to spells specifically used against darkness, then 95% of things with Light can't do it and it's a meaningless addition to the trait and could be moved to the individual spells that could do it.
Now on to "figment doesn't say it produces light": the spell is an open ended spell. It also doesn't say it can make an illusion of a dog or a rock either. Pretty much anything goes as long as it fits in a 5' cube and is composed visual and auditory components. A torch is as valid an illusion as a dog and I don't see why it can't replicate a non-magic effects of a torch: it's not a very effective illusion if a torch, campfire or lantern [or even a candle] only illuminates a 5' square.
Going by the 'but the spell doesn't say it can illuminate', it means if you cast spells like Project Image, Mislead or Mirror Image and have a light source that everyone can tell which one is you as only 1 has a light source that illuminates: NO illusion spell specifically states it illuminates [unless I missed some] meaning even spells like Illusory Scene are unable to produce convincing lighting. It seems like a big weakness of Illusion spells.
Similarly, an illusion of a blinding light would not burn your corneas or allow you to use a magnifying glass to burn an ant or to solve a mirror light puzzle unless the text stated otherwise.
We are going a long way to define how this lights up, but my thought from the start was "so this is like a glow in the dark toy, right?"
It is visible, but it might not illuminate.
It could still be useful though. Like if you put a door in an empty doorway, you will see something that gets past it and stand between you and the door- obstructing your line of sight.
So I looked up Illusion and I am not seeing anything in the description that supports your conclusion. It does not state specifically that it affects your brain or such. Does not state that it is not a holographic.
Now in the above description it does clearly state that some illusions can have the "mental" trait, but figment does not, only the illusion trail. Is there a book or a supplement that goes into greater details about illusions that I am missing as I am mostly doing online searches.
And, again, going back to my example of a thousand people seeing the illusion, all a 100 feet away. If this were some AOE mental spell, that would be VERY POWERFUL. Occam's razor suggest the simplest solution is that it's a hologram only affecting that 5x5x5 area and disbelieving it is just using your wisdom (which will is based on) to understand that it is not real.
It even states that the act of disbelieving does not make it go away, you just kinda see though it. It can still, say, give cover if its covering something.
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I think that, without an official piece of clarifying text, positions will not change. As a general rule, there will be significant resistance to anything that could be perceived as power creep via rules lawyering or rules haggling, even if that is not the intention. Those who have been around for a decade or two, especially those familiar with the Bag of Rats or even the TSR days, have seen or heard of a lot of it, and anything that so much as smells of it sets our heels anytime someone tries to eke out extra power from a rule or feature.
It would be nice if Paizo would provide more clarification on illusions, certainly, whatever side of the debate they may fall on, and I think we can all at least agree on that.
Again, look at the illusion trait. Specifically in the remaster, since you're citing an outdated book.
Illusion
Source Player Core pg. 457 2.0
Effects and magic items with this trait involve false sensory stimuli.
It is FALSE sensory stimuli. They are hacking your senses. They no more generate light than they generate heat. A second rank illusory object of a torch might seem to give off heat, but it will never burn you.
Trying to cite how eyes and light work in real life is futile when you can become magically invisible without blinding yourself. Or use dark vision to see when there is literally zero light, and dark vision is equally fooled by illusions as well. Only exceptionally alien creatures like the froghemoth see through illusions.
What's interesting to consider is whether a creature without dark vision would be able to see an illusion cast in a pitch black room. It might be that the false stimuli projected by the illusion works on similar principles as light and only tangible obstructions can block it from viewing. Or the darkness might be enough to obstruct "line of sight" since the eyes think they are blinded. Either way it probably works just the same for a torch figment as a bush figment.
But what is clear is that if a human bard without darkvision cast a figment of a campfire, and then a shadow sorcerer cast darkness over it else and a then snuck into the square of the campfire, the sorcerer would not be visible to the bard. The image is being generated in the brain of the bard, who doesn't know the person is in the square.
Again, look at the illusion trait. Specifically in the remaster, since you're citing an outdated book.
Illusion
Source Player Core pg. 457 2.0
Effects and magic items with this trait involve false sensory stimuli.It is FALSE sensory stimuli. They are hacking your senses. They no more generate light than they generate heat. A second rank illusory object of a torch might seem to give off heat, but it will never burn you.
Trying to cite how eyes and light work in real life is futile when you can become magically invisible without blinding yourself. Or use dark vision to see when there is literally zero light, and dark vision is equally fooled by illusions as well. Only exceptionally alien creatures like the froghemoth see through illusions.
Why does "false sensory stimuli" have to mean it is affecting your actual body, aka, your sensory organs? You are making an assumption there. Streaming out a fake image from a centralized point could also be "false sensory stimuli". For example the Illusions of self-motion is an illusion that is false sensory stimuli but is an illusion that happens in the real world.
Thank you for the rely.
Sensory stimuli is things that affect your senses.
So a false sensory stimuli would be something that affects your senses that doesn't actually exist, or doesn't exist the way that is normally expected. It is sensory stimuli that is ... false.
So a Figment of a torch will look, to your senses, like it is producing light. But the light that it produces is false. It doesn't produce real light. So other things that real light would do, like illuminating an area, don't happen.
Yes, there are other contexts that use the term as well. That is fine. English is ambiguous like that.
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So a Figment of a torch will look, to your senses, like it is producing light. But the light that it produces is false. It doesn't produce real light. So other things that real light would do, like illuminating an area, don't happen.
Agreed on premises up to the conclusion, to which I'll suggest a nuance:
Take our figment torch conjured in a featureless dark room.
It produces, as you say, false light. False light produces all the sensorial (visual) qualities of light, including false illumination. False illumination would look to the observer as normal illumination.
The difference is false illumination is illusion, not light.
In other words, what is within the figment illumination AOE does not necessarily correspond with what actually exists in that space. The illusion would approximate the minimum contextual detail to make it acceptable.
Such a "light source" would provide unreliable vision.
For example, if a pig-footed pickle plushy was standing within the 5-foot cube of the figment torch in said featureless dark room, then the plushy would be concealed—and likely undetected &/ unnoticed—to an observer, assuming normal vision w/o prior knowledge or special senses. They would see the torch and some nondescript floor/wall, no plushy.
That's not to say the illusion of light or an illuminated scene (that fits w/i 5x5x5') couldn't be created with figment, and the thought of how that would look once someone approached w/i 15' and it became "clearly crude and undetailed" is something I've had fun visualizing
Leaning further into that thought:
If you consider that "...[a vision] is clearly crude and undetailed if viewed from within 15 feet", then the notion of using a figment as a proxy torch or light spell is recontextualized. Doing so will almost certainly lead to interesting experiences.
So a Figment of a torch will look, to your senses, like it is producing light. But the light that it produces is false. It doesn't produce real light. So other things that real light would do, like illuminating an area, don't happen.Agreed on premises up to the conclusion, to which I'll suggest a nuance:
Take our figment torch conjured in a featureless dark room.
It produces, as you say, false light. False light produces all the sensorial (visual) qualities of light, including false illumination. False illumination would look to the observer as normal illumination.
The difference is false illumination is illusion, not light.
In other words, what is within the figment illumination AOE does not necessarily correspond with what actually exists in that space. The illusion would approximate the minimum contextual detail to make it acceptable.
Such a "light source" would provide unreliable vision.
For example, if a pig-footed pickle plushy was standing within the 5-foot cube of the figment torch in said featureless dark room, then the plushy would be concealed—and likely undetected &/ unnoticed—to an observer, assuming normal vision w/o prior knowledge or special senses. They would see the torch and some nondescript floor/wall, no plushy.
That's not to say the illusion of light or an illuminated scene (that fits w/i 5x5x5') couldn't be created with figment, and the thought of how that would look once someone approached w/i 15' and it became "clearly crude and undetailed" is something I've had fun visualizingLeaning further into that thought:
If you consider that "...[a vision] is clearly crude and undetailed if viewed from within 15 feet", then the notion of using a figment as a proxy torch or light spell is recontextualized. Doing so will almost certainly lead to interesting experiences.
Good illustration. I'll only correct that if something is completely invisible but you know the location (or the square(s) it is in) that is HIDDEN, not concealed. Only noting it since you mentioned being new PF2e and those detection rules are tricky.
Here's another tip: when a creature is Avoiding Notice and rolls stealth for initiative, they are unnoticed if they both win initiative and beat the enemy perception DC. If they beat the perception DC but lose initiative, they are undetected but the enemy might take cautious action by instinct or intuition. If a creature fails against the perception DC, they are hidden from the enemy, meaning they can still make a ranged attack while the foe is off guard. And if the creature critically fails against the perception DC, it is straight up observed.
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In other words, what is within the figment illumination AOE does not necessarily correspond with what actually exists in that space. The illusion would approximate the minimum contextual detail to make it acceptable.
Such a "light source" would provide unreliable vision.
I'm fine with that ... as long as the figment illumination is within the area of the spell's effect - that 5 foot cube where you can create your figment in.
I'm not entirely sure that this is what you are intending to mean.
I wouldn't allow creating figment illumination on an area 20 feet away from the figment of the torch. That exceeds the size of the allowed figment. The area inside the 5 foot cube area of the figment torch can have that figment illumination though.
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Think about that. Say you are using one of those expensive spy glasses and you are 1,000+ft away. You look at the area that they 5'5'5 illusion of a bond fire. The spell effect would be 1,000+ range. If there were a thousand people looking at it, it would affect a 1,000 people. Etc.
Here is what I think "disbelieving" does. It simply means you still see it exactly the way it is, you just don't think it's real. Aka, it is less about actually affecting the mind, it more about how good of a hologram it was, how good the sounds was, and if you are wise or smart enough to realize it's just a hologram, aka, an illusion. This makes far more sense.
I seem to remember in D&D that illusions pulled shadow plane wisps of material to construct the illusion so you were actually seeing something. Being on the shadow plane is like standing on the Holodeck of the Enterprise.
Disbelieving Illusions
Sometimes illusions allow an affected creature a chance to disbelieve the spell, which lets the creature effectively ignore the spell if it succeeds at doing so. This usually happens when a creature Seeks or otherwise spends actions to engage with the illusion, comparing the result of its Perception check (or another check or saving throw, at the GM’s discretion) to the caster’s spell DC. Mental illusions typically provide rules in the spell’s description for disbelieving the effect (often allowing the affected creature to attempt a Will save).If the illusion is visual, and a creature interacts with the illusion in a way that would prove it is not what it seems, the creature might know that an illusion is present, but it still can’t ignore the illusion without successfully disbelieving it. For instance, if a character is pushed through the illusion of a door, they will know that the door is an illusion, but they still can’t see through it. Disbelieving an illusion makes it and those things it blocks seem hazy and indistinct, so even in the case where a visual illusion is disbelieved, it may, at the GM’s discretion, block vision enough to make those on the other side concealed.
The rules are pretty clear that disbelieving a visual illusion changes how you see through it. The brick wall illusion could become translucent to one observer, but not another. That's not "an illusion is just a hologram" behavior, so drawing conclusions about illumination based on treating it like a hologram is a deliberate choice on how you want to run it, not some foregone conclusion that follows from the illusion rules.
(... Fun aside; I don't think you can have a good real hologram of a lit candle, because a strong light source other than the reference laser beam will mess with the holographic film. Even if it doesn't, the laser light will mostly pass through the candle flame instead of reflecting off, so the candle in the hologram will appear unlit. But people are almost never talking about real holograms when they talk about holograms.)
Anyway, I wouldn't call that having a 1,000 foot range, or affecting thousands of targets. The illusion makes a small effect in a small range. The illusion can be interacted with from a distance, and the disbelief rules are both interesting and already the subject of some long threads. I definitely recommend a GM/player talk about how things will be handled for any illusion-heavy character, just to make things go smoothly. It's the tradeoff for having many of the spells be open-ended rather than some simple damage rolls.
The OP might be too hung up on figment, which is just a paltry cantrip which was added in the remaster after the illusion spells were fully cooked. It would be more illustrative to consider the original illusion spells at 2nd rank: invisibility (mentioned already how it doesn't blind you, heighted illusory object, and illusory creature. The latter two feel right to the touch but don't actually generate any physical force or barrier-- so why would they generate actual light?