D&D 5E (2024) Getting ready to use the Portable Hole + Bag of holding trick

[GMMichael]

The only other thing to mention is there is a ton of party loot in the portable hole a that will be lost

The only thing? What about the lich's ego? Pay it some compliments. I bet it needs a friend.

If one PC jumps on the grenade, she could become the lich's minion, creating a window for the others to get away. At least it's not a TPK.

 

[Koloth]

Identify spell: "If the object is a magic item or some other magical object, you learn its properties and how to use them, whether it requires Attunement, and how many charges it has, if any."

I think this falls under "its properties and how to use them". It is also written on the both cards the DM gave me when I identified the items.

Not sure that Identify will cover every possible abnormal use of a magic item. Bag of Holding(BoH) and Portable Hole(PH) are designed as stuff holding devices. I would expect that Identify will return normal information like how much crap it will hold, any size/weight limitations on said crap, types of crap that can be stored, how to get crap into/out the thing. Being turned into a plane shifting device if combined with different stuff holding device may well fall outside the realm of information that Identify provides.

If a polymorph potion is Identified, I don't think Identify will return the complete list of possible potion miscibility effects. Just the info about what happens if you consume the polymorph potion. Mixing a BoH and a PH are a form of item miscibility and IMO, outside the realm of Identify.

I really think that the original ruling about plane shift and loss of items was to prevent the use of a PH full of several BoH to create a near infinite storage system. Not to create a standard use combo plane shift grenade. Would not be out of line for the GM to rule that putting a BoH inside a PH results in a pile of stuff as both things empty before falling inert to the ground. Or some other interesting but not plane shifting effect.

But as OP mentioned, the situation is dire, maybe the GM will buy off on the effort and resultant cost.

 

[TheSword]

Not sure that Identify will cover every possible abnormal use of a magic item. Bag of Holding(BoH) and Portable Hole(PH) are designed as stuff holding devices. I would expect that Identify will return normal information like how much crap it will hold, any size/weight limitations on said crap, types of crap that can be stored, how to get crap into/out the thing. Being turned into a plane shifting device if combined with different stuff holding device may well fall outside the realm of information that Identify provides.

If a polymorph potion is Identified, I don't think Identify will return the complete list of possible potion miscibility effects. Just the info about what happens if you consume the polymorph potion. Mixing a BoH and a PH are a form of item miscibility and IMO, outside the realm of Identify.

I really think that the original ruling about plane shift and loss of items was to prevent the use of a PH full of several BoH to create a near infinite storage system. Not to create a standard use combo plane shift grenade. Would not be out of line for the GM to rule that putting a BoH inside a PH results in a pile of stuff as both things empty before falling inert to the ground. Or some other interesting but not plane shifting effect.

But as OP mentioned, the situation is dire, maybe the GM will buy off on the effort and resultant cost.

It’s a pretty famous power. Not to mention the DM has already given them a card with that effect’s description on it.

I’ll be honest you don’t give out a portable hole alongside a bag of holding as a DM without at least contemplating that it might be used in this fashion.

It feels a bit unreasonable to say the player can’t use it for this reason.

 

[James Gasik]

To those of us unfortunate enough to have watched The Last Jedi, do you remember the Holdo Maneuver? This woman had the bright idea to accelerate a ship at relativistic speeds to ram a bigger ship, with predictable results.

I was left momentarily speechless. Not because of how awesome it was, but the implications. Surely, this can't have been a new idea. You have ships that can accelerate to the point they leave normal space. The drives required are small enough to fit on an X-Wing. An Astromech droid, of which the Galaxy far, far away is lousy with, can operate one. You could easily make a torpedo that's just a star drive with a droid brain and have it ram into anything you want gone.

The Death Star? No need to go looking for it's Achilles' Heel and a "one in a million shot". The Rebels could have sacrificed one ship! Or heck, why do you need a gigantic turbolaser array in the first place? For the cost of one Death Star, you could have two entire fleets of Imperial Star Destroyers- surely there's enough budget to create planet wrecking relativistic torpedoes?

The reason I bring all this up is, if it's known that two magic items, well known and apparently produced in enough quantities to be found in most campaigns (with one being an uncommon item, no less) can banish a problem to another plane of existence, why hasn't someone just skipped the middle man and created extradimensional grenades? Forget Beads of Force or a Necklace of Missiles, "Exilium Detonators" will be the new standard! Two tiny extradimensional spaces that are fragile enough to collide on contact with a solid object!

Any nation could afford to punt it's problems into the Phantom Zone! Has to be cheaper in the long run than supporting all these darned adventurers who wreck the economy and dodge taxes!

TLDR; it's cool if you allow this trick to be used, but if Bag/Hole/Haversack interactions are a known factor, someone would have weaponized them and streamlined the process by now to potentially impact the game world at large.

Not to mention paranoid immortal undead Wizards with nothing but time on their hands to create magical defenses against this sort of thing!

 

[TheSword]

To those of us unfortunate enough to have watched The Last Jedi, do you remember the Holdo Maneuver? This woman had the bright idea to accelerate a ship at relativistic speeds to ram a bigger ship, with predictable results.

I was left momentarily speechless. Not because of how awesome it was, but the implications. Surely, this can't have been a new idea. You have ships that can accelerate to the point they leave normal space. The drives required are small enough to fit on an X-Wing. An Astromech droid, of which the Galaxy far, far away is lousy with, can operate one. You could easily make a torpedo that's just a star drive with a droid brain and have it ram into anything you want gone.

The Death Star? No need to go looking for it's Achilles' Heel and a "one in a million shot". The Rebels could have sacrificed one ship! Or heck, why do you need a gigantic turbolaser array in the first place? For the cost of one Death Star, you could have two entire fleets of Imperial Star Destroyers- surely there's enough budget to create planet wrecking relativistic torpedoes?

The reason I bring all this up is, if it's known that two magic items, well known and apparently produced in enough quantities to be found in most campaigns (with one being an uncommon item, no less) can banish a problem to another plane of existence, why hasn't someone just skipped the middle man and created extradimensional grenades? Forget Beads of Force or a Necklace of Missiles, "Exilium Detonators" will be the new standard! Two tiny extradimensional spaces that are fragile enough to collide on contact with a solid object!

Any nation could afford to punt it's problems into the Phantom Zone! Has to be cheaper in the long run than supporting all these darned adventurers who wreck the economy and dodge taxes!

TLDR; it's cool if you allow this trick to be used, but if Bag/Hole/Haversack interactions are a known factor, someone would have weaponized them and streamlined the process by now to potentially impact the game world at large.

Not to mention paranoid immortal undead Wizards with nothing but time on their hands to create magical defenses against this sort of thing!

Here is a good write up for why you shouldn’t get your knickers in a twist about the Holdo Manouver… worth a read.

https://starwars.fandom.com/f/p/4400000000003436509

You say ‘allow this trick to be used’ , but the rule interaction is there in black and white in the magic item interaction. It is a fact, not some strange corner case interpretation. Clearly intended by the writers.

I’m cool with the portable hole being a rare magic item that most owners wouldn’t want to see destroyed in a one shot effect that can likely be undone by many of the things powerful enough to warrant using it on.

 

[Koloth]

It’s a pretty famous power. Not to mention the DM has already given them a card with that effect’s description on it.

I’ll be honest you don’t give out a portable hole alongside a bag of holding as a DM without at least contemplating that it might be used in this fashion.

It feels a bit unreasonable to say the player can’t use it for this reason.

GM's call of course. But just because it is long established canon, doesn't mean the Characters know about it. IMO, this falls into the same area of Players knowing every detail in the MM and supplements about critter X when there is little way the characters would have any info about the critter. Even if the Players know the equation BoH+PH=Astral Gate, doesn't mean the Characters know it. In a high magic campaign where items are common and handed out like candy on Halloween, sure, such a combo might be common knowledge. If magic items are rare, possible no one in the game universe ever tried the combo and lived to tell about it. Someone lucky enough to have both items AND get the idea to stick one inside the other also has to survive the Astral Plane for the knowledge to have a chance to become local knowledge. Otherwise it is just another adventurer that vanished in the Dungeon of DOOOM.

 

[TheSword]

GM's call of course. But just because it is long established canon, doesn't mean the Characters know about it. IMO, this falls into the same area of Players knowing every detail in the MM and supplements about critter X when there is little way the characters would have any info about the critter. Even if the Players know the equation BoH+PH=Astral Gate, doesn't mean the Characters know it. In a high magic campaign where items are common and handed out like candy on Halloween, sure, such a combo might be common knowledge. If magic items are rare, possible no one in the game universe ever tried the combo and lived to tell about it. Someone lucky enough to have both items AND get the idea to stick one inside the other also has to survive the Astral Plane for the knowledge to have a chance to become local knowledge. Otherwise it is just another adventurer that vanished in the Dungeon of DOOOM.

Except as @ECMO3 has said, identify was used to reveal this info.

 

[Clint_L]

To those of us unfortunate enough to have watched The Last Jedi, do you remember the Holdo Maneuver? This woman had the bright idea to accelerate a ship at relativistic speeds to ram a bigger ship, with predictable results.

I was left momentarily speechless. Not because of how awesome it was, but the implications. Surely, this can't have been a new idea. You have ships that can accelerate to the point they leave normal space. The drives required are small enough to fit on an X-Wing. An Astromech droid, of which the Galaxy far, far away is lousy with, can operate one. You could easily make a torpedo that's just a star drive with a droid brain and have it ram into anything you want gone.

The Death Star? No need to go looking for it's Achilles' Heel and a "one in a million shot". The Rebels could have sacrificed one ship! Or heck, why do you need a gigantic turbolaser array in the first place? For the cost of one Death Star, you could have two entire fleets of Imperial Star Destroyers- surely there's enough budget to create planet wrecking relativistic torpedoes?

The reason I bring all this up is, if it's known that two magic items, well known and apparently produced in enough quantities to be found in most campaigns (with one being an uncommon item, no less) can banish a problem to another plane of existence, why hasn't someone just skipped the middle man and created extradimensional grenades? Forget Beads of Force or a Necklace of Missiles, "Exilium Detonators" will be the new standard! Two tiny extradimensional spaces that are fragile enough to collide on contact with a solid object!

Any nation could afford to punt it's problems into the Phantom Zone! Has to be cheaper in the long run than supporting all these darned adventurers who wreck the economy and dodge taxes!

TLDR; it's cool if you allow this trick to be used, but if Bag/Hole/Haversack interactions are a known factor, someone would have weaponized them and streamlined the process by now to potentially impact the game world at large.

Not to mention paranoid immortal undead Wizards with nothing but time on their hands to create magical defenses against this sort of thing!

Setting aside that I think TLJ is easily the best of the new Star Wars films and the only one with fresh ideas, this is a good point. Yes, the Death Star doesn't make any sense, and you don't need aything like a hyperdrive to basically wipe out planets, given that they already have absolutely massive spaceships that can accelerate to significant sub-light speeds. The asteroid that finished off the non-avian dinosaurs was about the size of a super star destroyer, and it and earth collided at "only" about 20 kilometers per second.

Absolutely this arcane technology should be rampant in D&D world. I mean,why is every artificer not using this trick every time you run into a Big Bad?

But this is really just the tip of the iceberg, so it's best not to think too hard about the logical implications of the arcane on the setting. Castle walls are incredibly labour intensive and expensive; why are there so many in a world when there are so many easy ways to overcome them? Why are there diseases and hunger and thirst in a setting where all three are solvable by low level spells and abilities? Why is there not a "mending" shop on every corner? Why are there not spellcasters making a fortune off stays at their Magnificent Mansions?

Given that D&D, like Star Wars, is a fantasy setting (yes, shots fired), we can handwave the logical inferences in a way that we wouldn't for hard sci-fi.

 

[ECMO3]

Not sure that Identify will cover every possible abnormal use of a magic item. Bag of Holding(BoH) and Portable Hole(PH) are designed as stuff holding devices. I would expect that Identify will return normal information like how much crap it will hold, any size/weight limitations on said crap, types of crap that can be stored, how to get crap into/out the thing.

Both items have this listed in their descriptions, so I would tend to think this would be included. In any case it did cover it in this instance as it was on the card the DM gave me regarding the items.

If a polymorph potion is Identified, I don't think Identify will return the complete list of possible potion miscibility effects.

I agree. Miscibility is not a property of the item, this however is a specific property of the items.

If the planar rift was a general rule in the DMG regarding extra-dimensional spaces as opposed to a property of the Bag of Holding and Portable Hole it would be a different story IMO.