Deception specialist with 1 charisma, let’s go.

Europe gets information about Americans from American media.

Oh no! the last remaining soul who knew the hiding place of a holy avenger… guess it’s lost forever.

She likes to pull her hair back out of her face, and wrap it around a bone to hold it firm - but some of the front tufts always escape.

Well, you could just buy one.

It’s a classic. I wish the movement didn’t require your full action though - the spell is level 5.

I’m pretty sure that the rules as intended for this one are that it just affects attacks, I’m afraid. Sage Advice repeatedly argues that the intention of wordings like this is that they don’t extend to other effects.

Of course, it’s perfectly fine to run your table different to sage advice. There’s a lot of stuff in there that I think is rather silly, or bad design.

Were you able to see the whole space, you should be able to see the illusory duplicates fine (they’re not “vampires” mechanically), but not the real vampire, so I’m in full agreement there.

It’s a common trope in media and fantasy lore, Quite a few tropes of vampires are listed in the flavour text, rather than the statblock, and this is one of them.

…All of this is pretty sketchy though, it’s definitely pushing the limits of what these spells or abilities are intended for, and “having your image move around inside you perfectly so nobody notices” would require an extreme level of control that I imagine most, if not all casters wouldn’t have.

If we’re trying to design an NPC vampire to foil the mirror check, it’s probably better to have them use a custom spell or magic item that’s explicitly for this purpose than to try and repurpose an existing spell to do it. “This amulet creates an illusory duplicate of you that fills the same space as your body. When you turn invisible, the illusion remains visible and moves in a random direction away from you” for example.

This approach has a lot of advantages I think.

1. If you let NPCs do it, then PCs can do it.
2. It doesn’t feel like you’re creatively abusing the rules to give NPCs an advantage
3. When the PCs beat the vampire and get the treasure they get a lightbulb moment when they realize what happened
4. The players get an interesting niche treasure out of it they can come up with clever uses for later.

I don’t I can make a good case for “looking in a mirror” to use the “attack” rules. If it’s an attack you’d have to make an attack roll (if you’re not making an attack roll, it’s not an attack.)

Likely, if there was a d20 roll involved, it’d be a perception check.

I think the illusory duplicates made by the magic are designed to “move around in your space” to make it hard to tell which one is actually you - the purpose of the spell is to make you harder to hit, so it’s behaviour probably works to let that happen. It’d also be very difficult to get away with it in a social setting because you have to cast the spell first, it makes four duplicates, and they don’t last that long…

Now on the other hand… Trickery Cleric “invoke duplicity” allows you to control the movements of the duplicate (which is incorporeal), so it might be possible to hide it inside you if you were really practiced. Konsi sometimes summons it in her exact position while standing still, then uses her second channel divinity slot to turn invisible and run away.

It’ll only give you cover for a moment, but if they’re doing some sort of “check every visitor for vampirism” check on the door, it might get you past.

I’ll make a nice transparancied version and post it :)

Yeah, she has a few goblinoid features, larger ears, lack of pronounced tusky teeth. She’s taller and prettier than most goblins (4ft) because she’s free of Maglubiyet’s hold, which twists and corrupts his servants.

I think the idea of the initial post is that, when presenting someone with a “guide” for running a game, you kind of expect someone to have read the whole thing at least once, and then use it for reference.

With the case of the 5e DMG, it actually has quite a lot of good advice in it, but most people running games haven’t read it fully… You constantly see complaints about 5e saying “there’s no advice for (x)” where the advice is just in the DMG

When I first picked up the Nobilis RPG, I read it cover-to-cover, the margins were always crammed full of stories and examples that really helped develop the setting and ideas and contextualize everything. I think the majority of RPGs that I’ve picked up have been read back to front… because what else are you going to do on your first pass?

I’ll definitely agree that it’s good to have books that work as decent reference manuals, especially for rules heavy games… but… have you tried to use the indexes in the 5e books - the PHB index is an experience and a half.

It’s true. The fastball special is all about positioning, and closing the gap.

This is why you polymorph the fastball into something small and fuzzy first.

I think this happened once in Buffy.

Fortunately, Faelys is an unreliable narrator.

“Worker productivity” has been going up for 50 years, but compensation hasn’t been. That extra money goes into the pockets of the board and shareholders and CEOs.

80 years ago, the average CEO pay was about 20x the lowest pay in his company. Now, instead, we have billionaires.