Illusion
From D20advanced
| ILLUSION | ||
| Type: Sensory | Action: One (active) | |
| Range: Perception | Duration: Concentration (see description) | |
| Resistance: Perception, see text | Cost: 1-4 points per rank | |
You can create false sensory impressions. This ranges from visual images to phantom sounds, smells, or even radar or mental images. For 1 point per rank, you can create an illusion affecting a single sense type. For 2 points per rank, you can affect two sense types. For three points per rank, you can affect three sense types. At 4 points per rank, you can affect all sense types. Visual senses count as two sense types. Your rank determines how convincing your illusion is, including the DC for the Perception check (10 + rank).
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Illusion Area
Your illusion occupies an area 5 feet in radius by default. To increase the size of the illusion you can create, apply the Progression FX feat).
Illusionary Effects
Illusions have no substance and cannot have any real-world effect. So illusions cannot provide illumination, nutrition, warmth, or the like (although they can provide the sensations of these things). Likewise, an illusory wall only prevents people from moving through an area so long as they believe it’s real, and an illusory bridge or floor is revealed as false as soon as someone tries to walk across it, and falls through it!
Disbelieving Illusions
Characters encountering an illusion do not resist it or recognize it as illusory until they interact with it in some fashion. A character must make a successful Perception check (DC 10 + ranks in Illusion) against an illusion to reveal it as false. A failed check means the character fails to notice anything amiss. A character faced with clear proof an illusion isn’t real needs no check (such as falling into a pit covered by an illusory floor). Enhanced Senses with the Counters Illusion trait automatically detect illusions as well. If any viewer successfully uncovers an illusion and communicates this fact to others, they gain another Perception check with a +5 bonus. Circumstances may grant additional modifiers to the Perception check to uncover an illusion, depending on how convincing it is.
Maintaining Illusions
Maintaining an active illusion (such as a fighting creature) requires concentration, but maintaining a static illusion (one that doesn’t move or interact) is only a free action, effectively a sustained duration.
FX Feats
- Progression: Each time you apply this FX feat, your Illusion’s area moves one step up the Time and Value Progression Table (10-ft. radius, 25 feet, 50 feet, and so forth). You can create a smaller illusion than your maximum area, as usual.
- Subtle: Illusion is a Subtle effect by default, since it wouldn’t be much use otherwise. Therefore, Illusion doesn’t require—and cannot apply—this FX feat.
Extras
- Damaging (+3): Your Illusion is so realistic it can actually inflict psychosomatic harm on anyone fooled by it. Your illusions are capable of making attacks, which automatically hit (since your illusions are as “skilled” as you choose to imagine) and inflict damage up to your Illusion rank, or the damage normally inflicted by whatever you’re creating an illusion of, whichever is less. Anyone who successfully overcomes your illusion cannot be harmed by it and immediately recovers any damage inflicted by it. This extra is essentially the same as a Linked Damage effect with perception range, so the GM may allow you to apply other modifiers directly to the Damaging extra like an independent effect.
- Duration (+1): Reducing Illusion’s duration affects the type of action required to maintain an active illusion. Sustained Illusion allows you to maintain an active illusion as a free action each round. Continuous Illusion allows you to create illusions that continue to exist (even interacting) until you choose to dismiss them.
- Selective Attack (+1): With this extra, you choose who perceives your Illusion and who doesn’t.
Flaws
- Feedback (–1): Although Illusion does not have a physical “manifestation” per se, it can apply this flaw, in which case a successful damaging attack on one of your illusions causes you to suffer damage, using the guidelines given in the description of the Feedback flaw.
- Limited to One Subject (–1): Only a single subject at a time can perceive your Illusion.
- Phantasm (–1): Only creatures with Int 1 or more can perceive your Illusions, making them a mental sensory FX. They are undetectable to machines like cameras and microphones. This flaw is commonly combined with Selective Attack, making your phantasms detectable only to those intelligent beings you choose.
- Range: It is left to the GM’s discretion whether or not Illusion’s range can be reduced at all, since being able to perceive the affected area is important in creating and directing the illusion. If Illusion is touch range, the character is only able to alter the appearance of subjects in physical contact. In order to solely alter your own appearance, see the Morph FX, possibly with the Phantasm flaw.
- Sense-Dependent: Illusion is already sense-dependent and so cannot have this flaw.
