bb@lanl-a.UUCP (10/27/83)
============================================================================== A while back I posted a solution to the Kill Orcus problem that involved getting Orcus into a bag of holding and whisking the bag away to the Seven Heavens. I mentioned that that sol'n would work only if the way the DM understands bags is the same as my own. How do you out there (Flame about English -- I wish we had a reasonable 2nd person plural) handle bags? I tend to let mine be smaller and lighter than recommended in the DMG, and I have never burst any of my player's bags for being overweight (they do tend to be careful about that). I allow them to get large items into a bag, telling them that the mouth of the bag seems to stretch around an object but shrinks very quickly once the article is mostly inside. Other issues are: how does one get something out of bag with lots of stuff in it? (random rolling or does the desired item come into the pc's hand when she goes for it?) Can one dump a bag, emptying it of all of its contents? Do sharp items placed inside a bag have any chance of puncturing it? What happens when one tries to turn a bag inside out (I just say it turns inside out and nothing is lost -- the bag looks just the same as always and has the same properties it had before -- ie, topological transformations in xyz space have no effect on it. Can living objects be placed in the bag and if so what happens to them? ( I say they come out dead, though dead meat will stay fresh forever in such a bag -- my pc's have dragon meat stuffed in theirs). What's the safest way to destroy a bag? What happens when one places one bag inside another? I know that some of these questions have been answered in the Dragon and in the DMG, but I usually don't like their answers about such things, they tend to be explosion happy. I am interested in how you handle these issues. Bags of Holding are very good items for characters to have, they covet such things and are very distressed when they lose them. This last week my group started with 5 bags (3 of which they stole/won), and ended with 1 (they destroyed the three and their contents so their owners couldn't trace them, and had one encased in stone when fighting a xorn) and now the magic user is essentially level 0 weak, having only a cat familiar and those spells memorized from the last time he looked at his books. He is not happy and is urging the rest of the group to go and recover the bag while he stays in the hideout doing the cooking and cleaning. b2 Bryan Bingham ...ucbvax!lbl-csam!lanl-a!bb
rigney@uokvax.UUCP (11/09/83)
#R:lanl-a:-320600:uokvax:2400005:000:1627 uokvax!rigney Oct 30 10:50:00 1983 Back in my [A]D&D days, we allowed living matter in Bags of Holding as long as they were open to provide an air supply, or when closed as long as there was enough air (typically a very short time). This made them quite useful for smuggling people past guards and such. Two especially strange uses are fondly remembered: 1) The bag was secured to the top of a large fighter's helmet, and a platform was placed inside, upon which a hobbit could stand and fire arrows while being carried by the fighter, yet protected from the waist down. Thus, we gave a turret to the human tank. 2) The bag was fastened onto a shieldface, with the open side facing outwards. Any arrows that would strike the shield would just go into the bag (and could be later recovered, if we cared). If you bags kill whatever goes into them, this is deadly indeed for shield rushes and for countering thrusts (the thrusting arm enters the bag and dies, frex, not that we ran it that way - still, your balance can get really screwed when your weapon doesn't thunk against a shield but rather keeps going...) Both these tricks work even better with Portable Holes. The fastening is left as an exercise for the reader, although it wasn't very hard to do. As for turning the bag inside out, from a topological point of view couldn't you think of the universe then being inside the bag with the bag's contents on the outside - no practical difference, perhaps. As a final thought, what happens when you put a bag of devouring into a stream while open? Carl ..!ctvax!uokvax!rigney ..!duke!uok!uokvax!rigney or so I'm told...