FASA Games, Inc.

Tue Mar 26, 2019 6:53 am

I'm talking about the part where a target can freely decide that a spell being cast is an illusion or not, even before the actual spell even being cast, and by doing so totally ignoring any of its effect, no roll needed whatsoever. So the poor Illusionist that just tried casting Phantom Flame just wasted two full rounds of weaving and casting.

Illusions with short durations are less subtle in their effects, and allow for a target to disbelieve what is happening. These types of illusions are mainly damaging spells, and it will be noted in the spell description if the spell can be disbelieved. If a target chooses to disbelieve one of these spells, they will not suffer any effect from the spell. If the spell is not an illusion, however, the target’s Mystic Defense is considered to be 2 for the purpose of determining the number of successes, as they have opened them-selves up to the magic. In addition, the target cannot use any active defenses (such as Steel Thought) to resist the spell.Illusionists have access to spells that are both real and illusory. The target must decide if they are going to disbelieve prior to the Spellcasting test being made. No test is required—if the spell is an illusion, it simply has no effect.

I'm stating that this automatic "ignore a spell before it is being cast" is way to powerful. Doing the math, which isn't really that hard in this case, shows that if the target known that if you're attacked by and Illusionist you might as well go ahead and always automatically disbelieve all damage spells being cast, since the True versions of the spell has its base damage lower than its illusory counterpart, meaning that even if you lower your MD to 2 you'd still walk away "winning" with much less incoming damage than if you would believe all damage spells, since you'd be automatically ignoring all spells with the Illusion keyword, as in the example above where two full rounds of weaving/casting just goes up in smoke. If I in the example above would've cast True Ephemeral Bolt instead I would have had two guaranteed damage sources that can't be disbelieved, no matter what, and even though the damage is lower than its illusory counterpart it is still 100% guaranteed damage.
I know what I would choose, ten times of ten.

I just want to understand why this has been added? And please prove me wrong in my assumptions if I've missed some vital parts in this.