EDIT: Hey, Angry here with a funny story. This article was supposed to go live two weeks ago. I wrote it and then saved it as a draft, but never posted it. But since I think I already charged my Patrons for it, I’m not going to hold it. So, here it is. Sorry about that. Happy New Year
Hey all! Well, we’re a week from Christmas and two weeks from the New Year. And I’m gearing up for two very special articles to celebrate the New Year, one about the old and one about the new. They will both go live in the week between Christmas and New Year, since I’m taking the Christmas week off. That means, with this article, you’ve still got your four for the month. And since it IS a good time to look back, I’ve decided to go back through my e-mail and dig out a few old Ask Angry questions that went unanswered and, you know, un-unanswer them for you.
Meanwhile, since I will be off for Christmas, I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas or a Happy Chanukkah or a Joyous Whatever the F&$% You Celebrate. And if you want to see your question answered in 2017, see this page on how to Ask Angry a question!
Dazed asks:
Anyway, I was tinkering with an idea in my head: an illusionist mage creature, using spells like Phantasmal Force and Major Image to effectively control Big Stupid Fighters and Mirror Images for survivability. Then I see a problem, how do I prevent players from using player knowledge of the existence of the illusion? I am a huge fan of your statement of not making encounters that metagaming can break so I’m thinking of scrapping the idea of an illusionist entirely but want to consult your guidance for a way to possibly make it work.
This is actually a neat question. And it’s one that came in a long, long time ago. As I was going through the backlog looking for some questions to clean out as the year-end approaches, I couldn’t pass this one up. In fact, it is so neat that I’m going to ignore the fact that you gave your name as “Dazed” in an attempt to be funny. I actually feel really badly that you probably already ran this adventure without my awesome advice. But hopefully it will be helpful to someone else.
Okay, now, the big problem is you didn’t give me an edition to work with. And that’s tricky because illusions spells work somewhat differently in different editions. So, I’m going to have to be general here. But that’s okay. I can still help.
First of all, you have to get into the habit of lying to players. Remember, your job is to describe what the characters see, here, and perceive; NOT what is actually real. There ARE situations in which a GM is allowed to lie to the players. For example, when portraying a dishonest NPC, the GM lies because the NPC lies. And when portraying a trap, the GM lies about what’s in the room if the trap isn’t spotted. And when dealing with illusions, the GM has to lie to maintain the illusions. And that is perfectly fine.
For example, in D&D 5E, the description of the phantasmal force spell specifically notes that, after the creature interacts with the illusion, if they fail their saving throw, their brain will invent some other perception to explain what happened. If they step onto a phantasmal force bridge, fall through, survive the fall, and fail the saving throw, you will believe that you actually fell off the bridge. Or were blown off. Or a rotted board broke and sent you falling. And, as the GM, it’s your job to present that lie as fact.
That also means you have to get into the habit of rolling saving throws in secret and also in knowing WHEN to roll saving throws. For example, in the bridge situation, you need to know whether the PC will fail the save BEFORE you describe what happened. And that means rolling the save before the fall and then describing the lie or the truth based on the save. Now, the handy thing about that is that the PC will probably assume you rolled some OTHER roll in order to determine whether they fell through the bridge or whatever. “Obviously, the GM rolled a Dexterity saving throw for me to determine if I fell through the bridge or not.”
Now, you need to be very secretive. You need to know all the saving throws and perception scores and all that other crap for every PC BEFORE you deal with an illusionist in any edition. The players can’t know what you are rolling. And if you really want to get into a good, secretive habit, you can preroll some saving throws well before the incident in question requires it. That way, they won’t associate rolls with perception, illusions, etc.
Now, here’s the meaty part. That misdirection crap is just the warm up act. You CAN’T run an encounter with an illusionist. An illusionist has to be the end of an adventure. Or at least, the illusionist needs a warmup act. An illusionist needs a lair. And that lair needs to teach the players that they can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.
Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you’re exploring the Castle of Illusions. In your exploration, you encounter some pits that are covered with illusions. Step on the floor, it turns out it was an illusion and you fall. You encounter some other pits that are illusions themselves. Step on the pit, you don’t fall, it’s an illusion. Imagine other pits are illusions that cover pressure plates in the floor that spring other traps. And other pits are just normal, visible pits that work like pits. By the time you’ve run that gauntlet, you don’t know what the hell to think of a pit. Or the floor. You can’t tell what’s real or what’s not. Neither the players nor the characters can. So, then, when they end up fighting the illusionist whose room has several pits in it, they can’t tell which pits are pits and which ones aren’t without experimentation they don’t have time for. And if the illusionist can levitate and stand in a pit OR sometimes just stands on pits that aren’t real, the PCs can’t even tell by his movements which pits are pits.
THAT is the trick with illusion magic. Ruining the metagame knowledge. Forcing the players to evaluate EVERY situation as unique and possibly different. Because, then, when the situation is a furious and frantic fight, they don’t have time to evaluate things.
Replace the pits with fires. Fill the place with imaginary fire and real fire. Then, give the illusionist resistance to fire in his lair filled with flames, some real, some imaginary. See how many times you can get your melee fighters to blunder into real fires chasing after the illusionist.
And remember that wizards have other spells. So, sometimes that monster summoning spell is an illusion and can be ignored. Other times, it’s a real dangerous monster. And if the players have encountered a few of each already, they won’t know what to think. Imagine if the party has been encounter spiders all night (because the illusionist likes spiders). Some are real, some are illusions, and some are invisible and appear out of nowhere. Remember, the opposite of an imaginary spider you can see is a real spider you can’t see. Then, the illusionist summons a few spiders. Or unleashes a few spiders from a cage. Whatever. Do you attack them or ignore them? And are there any invisible spiders? The party will waste actions trying to figure out what’s real.
Imagine that the illusionist has set out some life-sized porcelain dolls of himself throughout his compound that are all dressed like him. At close inspection, you can tell they are porcelain. But some of them are animated objects and attack. They are easy to break. Whatever. Now, imagine that they breach the inner lair of the illusionist and find several illusionists and a few porcelain dolls that might or might not be animated. The actual illusionist is wearing a porcelain mask, disguised as a doll. Some of the dolls animate. And the illusionists are illusions. Go ahead, pick your target out of that mess, and good luck.
See, metagame knowledge shouldn’t break a challenge. I heartily agree with that. But there are times when it can. And then, the best thing you can do is find ways to ruin the knowledge. Poison the well. Teach the players that they can’t rely on their own knowledge. That reality is an utter mess.
Honestly, an illusionist could play cat and mouse with a party through his fun house of a lair. Illusory walls and floors everywhere. He lets the party see him and he flees through an illusionary wall. On the other side, he casts invisibility. Then, the party sees an illusion of the illusionist flee through another wall. They follow and smash into a solid brick wall while the illusionist backtracks. Or they follow and careen straight through into a pit on the other side.
I remember a story that I think David Noonan told about just such an illusionist. After the wizard realized he was losing, he fled up an escape tunnel and an illusionary boulder came careening down the tunnel. The party had to decide to ignore the boulder or dodge aside. Fine and dandy. Those that gave chase kept up. Unfortunately, the second boulder was not an illusion. And the illusionist escaped.
Now, running a cat-and-mouse fun-house of illusions or even just the lair of the illusionist where the illusionist is waiting in the center for the PCs to pass through his training ground, learning that they can’t tell real from imaginary, running those takes a lot of prep work. And it takes a lot of resource management. You have to figure out what the illusionist could have set up in advance. The illusionist might need scrolls, wands, or even a magical item or two to pull off all the tricks. So take that all into account. But that’s why I say you can’t run an illusionist encounter. You need a Castle of Illusions adventure.
Have fun.
Willgc asks:
You showed an interesting insight on the dnd alignments, so i got curious about your perspective on another classic aspect; what do you think about and how do you deal with the time it takes for different races to age? Do you change them to be more similar? If not, how do you justify things like the 110 year old elf behaving similarly to a 16 year old human?
Yeah. Look, once upon a time, the whole aging thing made sense. When the world was far less cosmopolitan and demihumans were rare and always visiting from the distant lands of their homelands ala The Lord of the Rings, the aging issue didn’t seem strange. Sure, elves lived in their groves for a hundred years before they were considered “ready to leave and adventure” and whatever. The problem is, nowadays, the non-human races aren’t rare and mysterious and always from far-off homelands. They often live right alongside humans. The races have gone from being disparate, isolated peoples to ethnic groups. And that raises questions.
See, those starting ages are more about when the creature is CONSIDERED an adult by their society. When they are out of their training. Elves, by the time they leave their groves, have not only learned several languages and whatever adventuring class they follow, they have also mastered several weapons including the sword and bow. All of that training takes time. Dwarves are the same way. Dwarves have a craft, an adventuring profession, several languages, and they also know enough about mining, tunneling, and construction to tell a lot about a structure by sight. You can assume those are supernatural talents if you want, but that does all go to explaining why it takes dwarves so much longer than humans to be adults.
The difference between race and culture, as I’ve said before, is kind of a mess now in D&D and Pathfinder. There’s all sorts of vestigial things still in the game that just don’t make sense in a world where race and culture aren’t synonymous. But, gods forbid we should have elves that can’t use a bow or dwarves that can’t stonecunning. Or if we go back to the days when a non-human race was a rare and special thing instead of the vast majority. No one plays humans anymore.
Grimm asks:
Hey Angry, I’ve been reading your blog a lot lately (lots of great stuff, by the way) and was wondering if you had any advice for running single-player campaigns. I see a lot of people who immediately jump up to talk about how you can’t get a good story out of a single-player campaign or that the player won’t be able to do anything without the giant list of skills you get across a party, but I’ve run a few single player campaigns – and played in a few as well – and they were actually very satisfying and fun. What are your opinions on single player campaigns?
Grimm, it’s funny that you ask this. I was recently talking to my girlfriend about just this problem. See, we’re both a little starved for gaming at the moment. We finally have a few interested players and we’re working on setting up a game, but scheduling difficulties keep pushing off that first session so it looks like it won’t start until the middle of next month at this point. Which sucks. But we got onto the subject of solo games. And, the thing is, once upon a time, they used to be a thing you did.
See, when I was a kid, and I was running BECMI D&D and AD&D 2nd Edition, there was a tendency to run games whenever you could get anyone together. If Alice and Bob were over your house, they could break out their characters and you could run a pickup game for them. They would even use their characters from the current ongoing game. Because classes leveled at different speeds and leveling was slower and didn’t have as much of an impact on game balance – a concept that was still considered OPTIONAL, I might add – it was just a thing you did. I ran many a solo game for friends of mine back in the day. Or duos. And if you died, you died. D&D was dangerous.
The thing is, though, that there’s now a heavy structure that underlies D&D. Game balance has been invented, and it is no longer considered optional. The GM is basically told that the game MUST be balanced or else disaster will happen. And the game’s balance system just isn’t designed around one, single player. Supposedly. And, I don’t know. Maybe that’s true.
But, here’s the thing: I think it’s a load of bulls$&%. People object to solo adventures on all sorts of grounds. One character is too specialized to handle everything that might come up in the game. One character isn’t powerful enough to survive the challenges. Or one player can get stuck and be unable to solve a problem, therefore stopping all progress. Or, if one PC dies, the game is over because there’s only one and there’s no one to rescue the PC.
And then people propose all sorts of solutions. Let them play multiple characters (we used to do that too, back in the day), give them NPC friends to balance their skills, and so on. Personally, I think people worry too f$&%ing much.
If the PC gets stuck and is unable to complete an adventure, there’s always another adventure. It’s okay for PCs to fail at adventures, retreat, and find something else to do. There’s nothing wrong with being able to lose. In fact, being able to lose is important. Likewise, if the PC dies, sure, that PC’s story is over. But there’s always another PC and another story and even another world. You just can’t freak out about that stuff. As for the challenge and balance and all of that s$&%? Run smaller. A PC can handle a single goblin. And if they get too badly hurt, they can retreat. Let them retreat. See, honestly, when you’re the solo player in the solo game, you tend to be more cautious. You tend to pick your fights, try to find clever ways around fights, and retreat when things aren’t going your way. And those are all GOOD things. They mean you aren’t JUST bashing skulls and taking names. There’s a lot more tension in the game when you know you have to survive on your own. A solo game reminds you that you, the player, are actually the one making the choices. You decide when to talk, when to fight, when to sneak, and when to run.
But, I think the biggest thing is that people take their games too f$&%ing seriously. Now, don’t get me wrong, I run a serious game. I don’t run the sort of funny dicky-aroundy games that Mercer and Perkins run online. A valley-girl paladin played for laughs won’t fly in my world. But I still don’t take my game too seriously. I’m not afraid that it might get broken. I’m not afraid of a TPK. Or a failed adventure. Because I know that, next week, there’s another game, another adventure, another party, whatever. And that’s the trick. If you want to run a solo game, you have to recognize that game is brittle. It can break easily. And you have to be okay with that. You have to be able to laugh off failed adventures and dead PCs the same way you laugh off dying in Dark Souls.
As it stands, my plan is to run at least one solo session for my girlfriend because I used to have a crap-ton of fun running solo and small group games. But, the thing is, I’m probably going to break out my old BECMI boxes and use those. Mainly, it’s a nostalgia thing. I’d do a solo adventure in 5E. Or 4E. Or Pathfinder. I’d run a solo game in anything.
EDIT: Since this article went live, I actually DID break out my Basic Red Box and DID run a game for @TheTinyGM and it was so much fun that we’re turning it into an ongoing thing. I structured it with influences from the Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior games because I’ve been playing through and reminiscing about them for a while now. Her character is currently trying to track down the parents that left her to be raised by her adopted aunt and uncle. She fought a goblin looter, found her old family home, and discovered some clues leading her to an ancient, ruined shrine that her parents visited. Tomorrow, she’ll be exploring her first real dungeon, so we might be celebrating the New Year by arguing over what a killer GM I am for murdering her stupid elf.
Either way, I wholeheartedly recommend running a solo game. Just do it. And don’t sweat it too much.
I am actually running an on-going solo game with my friend, and I’ve been wondering about some of the particulars. If I want to run fights with multiple combatants, could I give the PC more actions/HP, the same way you built solo monsters in 4E? Am I looking at that wrong?
I would think 4e minions, not 4e solos. Pretty sure Angry has a article on building them for 5e around here somewhere … yeah, here:
http://theangrygm.com/more-grist-for-the-mill-minion-groups-in-dd-5e/.
Question #1:
This is very useful to me because there is a villain the party is dealing with who is an illusionist. Thanks for the tips. While they won’t be encountering him in his lair as the boss fight, they will need to deal with him on the road at some point. You’ve provided the tools to make this encounter work the way it needs to. Thanks!
Question #2:
Character age: My world, my setting, my rules. Yes, elves and dwarfs live longer than humans. However, they mature at somewhat the same age. Done and done.
From my perspective, it’s broken that an elf remains in his nursery for a hundred years before adventuring. If this is the case, I must do either of two things: 1. establish that elves are really stoopid and it takes them 100 years to learn the same stuff it takes a human to figure out in 18. Or 2. that elf needs to have a hundred years worth of life experience reflected in their stats, skills, spell level, blah blah blah. Either answer is dumb and unbalanced. It’s fixed by saying that young elves mature at the same rate as humans (give or take a couple years, just for variety), so when the young elf strikes out at age 19, they have the same relative stats and level as the human, dwarf, halfling, halfelf, halforc, gnome, tiefling, and dragonborn. And whatever those new races are that are described in Volo’s guide.
Question #3:
In one of my groups, a player wasn’t able to make it. Rather than his character being “sad,” I decided to do something different. The characters were teleported from the town, Baron’s Hollow, to another town, Wickmire, by a wild-magic sorceress. Wild magic being what it is, something didn’t go right. The one character didn’t show up with the others.
This means I get to run a one-on-one session with that player to account for the time missed. This helps in these ways:
1. It gives me an opportunity for that character to do something important away from the rest of the party that doesn’t need to be done as a group. Basically, retrieve an artifact from a distant ally.
2. It helps maintain parity. I don’t want to use the word balance, but I could. This player has missed a couple other sessions and the character is already lagging behind the others in the group for experience. I don’t mind the character being one level behind, but we’re running the risk of her becoming two levels behind. The one-off solo session helps remedy this.
I’ve run single-player adventures before, back in the “day,” so it’s not something I’m afraid of. Skill balance is an issue, and the remedies described all work. What works better, though, is just making sure the adventure you’re running is fit to the character.
#2 The Iron Kingdoms (War Machine) setting for 3e did this. You could play elves and dwarves and goblins and half trolls, and elves could live to be 700 and goblins only 70 but all races were considered adults around 15-25. This made so much sense to me (now elf and human PCs can have grown up together) I’ve done this in all my worlds since.
In principle, an RPG with a single player character should be easier to write than one about a party. After all, most movies/books/television/video games center around a single protagonist.
And yet when I try to think about how that will actually work in the game, my brain just breaks.
I find that the relationships with NPCs become very important. Solo campaigns can be character driven in a way that you really can’t pull off when you have five diva players competing for attention.
And once the social element is developed, it is only a matter of time before the PC invites someone he interACTS! with to travel with him. Or the PC may travel with a buddy, squire, henchman, hireling, or pet.
You may also find that when the player doesn’t have to compete for attention, the PC will be much more assertive about developing and pursuing goals. Set up a local environment, a few interesting NPCs, and the first few things to the PC to do, and you may find that the player ends up writing the campaign for you.
About the Illusionist; cool idea, but as a player, going through an adventure like that sounds frustrating, rather than fun. But only because there was no mention of giving the characters a way to aid in determining the real from the unreal. Something like a crystal ball or lenses that see through illusions, but there is only one of them, so the players have to pass it around. That way, especially during combat, only the player with the item can determine what is real. Everyone else is still at the whim of the wizard when it is his turn. The player with the item could advise everyone else, but that would take up his turn. I don’t know, maybe that’s a stupid idea, but I know I personally would get frustrated if there wasn’t, at some point, a way to mitigate the illusions (though I do realize that such a solution may be beyond the scope of the question and answer).
I’m with you on this one. I mean, it’s random risks and frustrations. I mean, illusions should have ways that a clever player can spot differences. I mean, this is what the check or save is for, right? Spotting inconsistencies. Maybe not something for the middle of the fight, but something for navigating the dungeon better.
It does sound a lot like a Grimtooth trap if you ask me. 😉
I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt that the illusion thing, though clever, sounds like a terrible experience for the players. Since they can’t trust any information you give them, they essentially lose the ability to make meaningful decisions, which, if I recall, is exactly what Angry maintains that roleplaying is about…
Try running it.
What, managing uncertainty doesn’t involve making meaningful decisions? You can’t choose AoE attacks where target location is uncertain, or ranged attacks where the route to the target is uncertain? The illusionist just spent a whole dungeon showing the players his tricks, they can’t use those experiences to develop strategies to deal with him?
Exactly!
It’s also only one adventture. Not every future encounter….
Awesome questions and answers. Your illusionist gauntlet sounds like a living hell, and it sounds amazing! I had a lot of simple fun recently dropping an illusory pit in the path of my PCs. The party split up, and when the first half arrived at the pit I made it clear that the jump looked easy, and the three of them jumped it no problem. The thing was that there was no pit, and the illusion was nothing more than a crude alarm: if someone in heavy armour jumped the pit, they made noise, alerting a cloud giant zombie who was loitering deeper inside the temple. By the time the second half of the group came to the illusion (when the clever dwarf decided to touch the pit, dispelling it), they could hear the heavy slap of giant-feet on stone coming towards them, and they knew the first half of the party (thief types who managed to hide from the zombie as it passed them) had messed up good .
Wait… ANY armour I meant, not heavy armour haha 😛
Merry christmas you filthly animal!
I can’t wait to use this beautiful advice.
Just a thought on solo adventures. They often allow you to not worry about balance anymore or having characters take the really broken things as no one feels bad when the main character is more awesome than everyone else. They also work well for action hero type stuff.
I pretty much only run solo or two players games, it is a wonderful thing for most RPG’s with D&D being the only hard one to do it in.
Play a game of vampire or something and solo almost feels like how it should be played.
Hey, if you’ll decide to use BECMI, there’s a nifty little supplement called Black Streams: Solo Heroes. It’s free at Drivethru and presents a few simple adjustments to make your single PC durable while changing nothing on the character sheet. It’s made for Labyrinth Lord which means it’s made for B/X, BECMI or any oldschool D&D-type game, really. Fresh PCs feel like Nightwing or Geralt – clearly superior to the average Joe but still threatened by a gang of enemies if they decide to fight head on. You clearly don’t need it but it’s probably first time I can recommend it to anybody.
Author later released a whole game around this concept, which comes with the vaguely asian post-apocalypstic setting and sandbox tools, Scarlet Heroes, but I’m sure there’s a surplus of ideas in your head already. Also sandboxes, ahem.
Happy New Year and happy gaming.
Agreed. I’ve used Solo Heroes before and it’s really fun. It works really well if you just want to run traditional by-the-book adventures without adjusting the number of enemies or anything, and while it does make individual characters more powerful it still manages to maintain some of the tension and fear-of-death that comes with playing old school D&D.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the illusion thing, as described, is clever but sounds AWFUL. Because you are basically depriving the players of the ability to make informed choices. They literally can’t even say “Well, I fell into the last pit I tried to walk over, and now I’m low on HP, so no more walking over pits” because then they could end up falling into an invisible one. If they can’t trust any of their information, you have essentially taken away their ability to role play by making meaningful choices.
It doesn’t remove your ability to make meaningful decisions. After realising that not all the pits are the same, you can decide whether to slow down and check the path ahead with a 10 foot pole or not. Maybe that’s too noisy and slow so you just check pits when you get to them and risk falling into the invisible ones. Maybe you put the rogue in front because he’s better at catching himself when he stumbles into an invisible pit, but then what happens when he turns the corner to see a bunch of enemies to fight and the big stupid fighter is stuck behind him because the corridor is narrow, or because the rogue just jumped over a real pit and everyone else is on the wrong side of it?
If anything, the decisions just became more meaningful.
That’s exactly the defeatist attitude a master-mind-fucker wants to evoke in his victims. The goal of an illusionist generally doesn’t even need to be “kill the adventurers” but “make them cry over not knowing what is real anymore and giving up”.
Complaining about not being able to make informed choice is how an illusionist wins. 😉
Taken as a stand alone answer, I can see GMs/players not liking the Illusionist encounter, but if you read it and remember all the other advice Angry has given about traps, things like ‘tells’, you can start to piece together something that rewards the players for paying attention.
The illusionist will be setting up these illusion pits/traps by rote, so every one will be identical, which would not be true in real life (“Why is there always that dark red brick in the top left corner of pits that are illusions?”). Players travelling down corridors would take to poking the ground constantly, using their smarts, not just running around flailing (if they do, this encounter is not for you. Learn what players want. Hmm, that sounds like Angry advice too!).
In that final room, they get to make informed decisions “those might be illusions, should I waste time poking the ground and working out the terrain, or should I just pile in and hope that my natural skills/luck saves me”.
As others have said, this is not to be used constantly, but used during a longer campaign, it sounds like an effective and powerful tool to make sure players don’t get lazy.
Reading your comment makes me realise how much better this could work in a video game with decent graphics.
A problem I often encounter with D&D is the issue of narration.
It can be difficult to mention that something exists without drawing attention to it.
If you say that one of the floor tiles looks different, the players will immediately suspect a trap.
In a video game, however, there could be multiple near-identical sprites/models for a spike pit or floor tile, but illusions always use the same one, and the player might not notice until it’s too late.
Any advice on how to pull something like this off in D&D would be massively appreciated.
I played a 400yo High Elf Wizard in a party with a 30yo Dragonborn. Even though mechanically, we were total equals, I always flavored my spells with extra flourish and complexities that “only a trained elf could comprehend.”
What any shorter lived race could learn in a few years, longer lived races take exponentially more time to. Not because they couldn’t do in less time, but there are traditions to be honored. Any other way would be cutting corners, or sloppy, or brutish by comparison. This ignores that an elf could be born and raised completely isolated from any other elf, but that’s not something that’s supported by the (5e) PHB.
That’s also utterly a surface change. It’s window dressing. It doesn’t really address how the character thinks differently or how the years have actually changed how the character perceives the world or makes decisions. So, it’s just as unimportant as the number on the age line itself.
“This page on how to Ask Angry a question! ” isn’t available.
It’s not so much a page that’s linked somewhere. You have to be a bit diligent to find the *secret.* If you’re a GM wanting to create puzzles and challenges for your players, you gotta be able to figure out some yourself. 😉
Hey! I play humans all the time. They are easier to relate to and are more customizeable.
On the topic of the illusion dungeon: It seems like it would be prohibitively difficult to achieve the necessary complexity if you’re not running on a grid. Having to specify which specific chunk of floor they’re moving through, which specific pit they’ve learned is actually solid floor – I don’t see a way to convey that through description without it becoming so complicated and confusing as to bring the game to a halt.
Please feel free to correct me on that – I’d appreciate knowing how to plug something like that into my gridless game.
I believe you could just ignore the pit and use other illusions. Fake doors and walls could be easier to deal with. You have illusionary monsters and invisible monsters, as angry said. Or you could use just one massive pit per room (some real, some not). Or put them in positions where neither you or the players could possibly confuse them (one next to the door, the other next to the statue).
(My personal tip: a invisible wall or column in the middle of the room, just to see the players smashing their faces at it. Mostly harmless. Pretty much just to annoy them.)
But, I think the key idea here is realizing that you can build literally anything with illusions. Not just pits, and bridges, and fires, and walls. The problem is learning to look at something and think: “how could this be dangerous if it was (or wasn’t) an illusion”?
The whole idea about the illusionist is to deceive the senses of the characters! if you are an illusionist it probably means you have that kind of tricky personality too….so disguise and bluff are great skills to have
disguide is a powerfull tool,spells have saves, disguise not,use it with the porcelain dolls!
Persistent Spell (metamagic feat) in pathfinder is extremely helpful causing the players to save again when the times comes to roll that save and the whole idea of the illusionist is in game mechanics terms to raise that will save dc as high as you can manage!
also you should check shadow evocation and conjuration spells for 3.5 and pathfinder since you will probably specialize in illusion and evocation is the easiest school to dump. (also having ur base in the shadow plane helps a lot 😛 )
silent image spells is just amazing it can dublicate those pits and also create hiding places like a wall in which your real char can stay behind and no one will notice unless they search that specific part of the wall instead of the thousand other things in the final room, vanish, invisibility,mirror image, Project image and effortless trickery let you maintain an illusion spell as a swift action instead of a standard in path
Concealing the hole in the roof that the anvil is carefully stored in, so it can drop down on someone’s head when they walk underneath and step on the pressure plate
path: Solid fog+invisible spell=sucks to have true seeing! profit!
illusory wall aka floor and web or grease
disguise another wizard to look like the illusionist…one who hasnt banned evocation!