Why the heck are bags of holding so heavy?

[Darklone]

Hide check: 42.

 

[werk]

Makes very little sense to me for an *empty* bag to weigh 60lbs.

There is no empty, just varying degrees of full.

 

[DJCupboard]

There is no empty...<snip>

<keanu>Woah...</keanu>

I think the idea is that a demiplane ways 60 lbs, no matter what. If you could find the means to pick up Ravenloft in your two hands, this would be a fact that is easily verifiable.

My favorite bag of holding story was in 2nd edition, when my Paladin, Sir Pentmore, was low on HP and out of turning attempts for the day, exploring some old ruins. He ran into two skeletons and rather than fight them, when he won intiative, he baged them in a type IV. After a while he got tired of carrying around the bag of screaming skeletons and, happening upon a bottomless chasm, he tossed them in, bag and all, creating the Chasm of Endless Wailing, which became a polular tourist spot for years to come.

DJC

 

[scrubkai]

BTW: A Bag of Holding might fit inside a Handy Haversack if you rule that it is just a sack of cloth - and does not appear full when items are in it. In that case, you could fold up the bag and put it in your haversack - a neat trick, that one. Only works for up to the Type II bag (70 lbs), but is a way to get 550 pounds to weigh only 5 lbs., with only 50- lbs of "stuff" readily accessible, though.

That works right up until you run into an old school DM like myself. Then you try that trick and get sucked into the astral Plane.

 

[IanB]

That works right up until you run into an old school DM like myself. Then you try that trick and get sucked into the astral Plane.

Agreed. Extradimensional space stacking is the one place I won't play nice.

 

[mvincent]

That works right up until you run into an old school DM like myself. Then you try that trick and get sucked into the astral Plane.

From the 3.0 FAQ:
“Putting one bag of holding within another is just like putting the bag into a portable hole. Items that function like bags of holding, such as Heward’s handy haversacks, cause the same mishaps when mishandled."

Skip Williams seems to change his mind on this in a later RotG article, but you can bet I won't be the first one to try this in any campaign.

 

[Space Coyote]

I like the idea of Bags of Holding reducing the weight of the contents, then the bag looks as full as how much weight it is holding. For example, lets say a normal bag can hold 40 lbs. A Bag of Holding will always hold 40 lbs, but different Bag of Holding will reduce the weight of the contents by a factor of 1/5 (I), 1/10(II), 1/20(III), 1/50(IV).

So a Type II bag that has 200 lbs worth of contents would reduce that to 10 lbs and the bag would look 1/4 full. Empty BoH looks like an empty bag. The dynamics of how much the magic bag can hold would be similar to current BoH, but it still looks like a regular bag.

 

[RigaMortus2]

Makes very little sense to me for an *empty* bag to weigh 60lbs.

But a bag that contains an extradimensional space capable of holding 1.5 tons of weight DOES make sense to you?

 

[Artoomis]

I like the idea of Bags of Holding reducing the weight of the contents, then the bag looks as full as how much weight it is holding. For example, lets say a normal bag can hold 40 lbs. A Bag of Holding will always hold 40 lbs, but different Bag of Holding will reduce the weight of the contents by a factor of 1/5 (I), 1/10(II), 1/20(III), 1/50(IV).

So a Type II bag that has 200 lbs worth of contents would reduce that to 10 lbs and the bag would look 1/4 full. Empty BoH looks like an empty bag. The dynamics of how much the magic bag can hold would be similar to current BoH, but it still looks like a regular bag.

While it sounds good, who wants that level of bookeeping? Are not the rules complex enough?

 

[Thurbane]

Oh, I don't know..

Maybe because it's letting you carry 3/4ths of a ton?

Yeah, maybe the Type IV isn't as efficient as the Type III (25 lbs per lb of bag weight as opposed to 28.5 lbs per lb of bag weight), but... 1500 lbs of junk. For 60 lbs.

I'd say that's more than acceptable.

Exactly...