I have a question for the group. Disguise Self allows the caster to change his appearance to "look different". This would seem to include all general humanoid possibilities based on the rest of the spell text, but I'm not sure about the scope for the spell to make you look like specific people. From a RAW perspective this would seem to be included inside "look different" but it would change the scope of the spell considerably, especially in intrigue/social pillar campaigns.
The specific reason I'm curious about the range of opinion is I've been looking hard at the utility of a 2 level warlock dip for Mask of Many Faces (disguise self at will) maybe combined with the mimicry ability that's part of the Actor feat, as part of a Bard-based Spy/Infiltrator skill monkey build. If Disguise Self lets you look like specific people, and Actor lets you perfectly mimic their voice, the possibilities are pretty sexy.
Personally, I think this might be more DMs discretion than straight RAW, but I'd like to know what people think.
I definitely think Disguise Self allows to try and look like a specific individual. What are the chances of success are another matter, and it's impossible to pin them down because of too many variables, so the DM has to make some judgement.
You can use the spell for a variety of purposes, in vague order of difficulty:
- you can look different enough from yourself (so that someone looking for you would fail to recognize you)
- you can look like another race
- you can look like another specific individual
The difficulty is circumstantial, for example if you're trying to look like an orc, it should be very different whether you then show yourself to a human who perhaps hasn't even
seen an orc personally, or an actual orc who should have an easy time spotting gross mistakes in your disguise.
Similarly, you might be able to fall for someone disguised as a famous individual you've seen only in pictures, but the disguise may not easily fool their mums.
In addition, as a DM I'd like to decide the difficulty also based on how much the caster herself knows about the look of the race/individual she's trying to pass for.