Fun with Mage Hand...

[Kyramus]

One of the more creative ways I've seen this used was a rogue 3/wiz1.

He was scouting/spying on a wizard who was scribing a scroll, and he used mage hand to add a whole bunch of dashes of powdered ingridients to the ink while he was reading intently on a book.

The encounter later resolved when there was a face off with the group vs the wizard. The wizard brtought out the scrolll, tried to cast it, spell failure came in, boom. After that the wiz was not so tough to fight.

 

[MojoGM]

@MojoGM: If you allow the use of Mage Hand to deeds like Djeta described them it is o.k. for your campaign.
I as a GM would not allow such use as Djeta described them.
If I would allow such deeds all wizards can pick pocket non-magical items in combat from their enemies...

I'm of the mind that if a player tries a new and imaginative use of a spell, unless it is totally out of whack and will throw the balance of the game off (like crushing someone's throat), I let them do it.

Being told "no" constantly is going to make players stop thinking of new uses for spells, since they never work anyway.

Her inventive use has made the other players start to look for other ways to attack problems rather than the old boring "I swing my weapon" or "I cast magic missile". Anything that promotes creativity is good.

Besides, mine is a fairly casual game so if something becomes an abuse problem, I can just remove it and the players won't whine (much)

~Mojo

 

[Centaur]

Mage hand was the instrument to cause a 90 degree shift in power in my current campaign. At the beinging of the game, I decided that the most powerful wizard in the area was 14th level. High enough when the PCs were all 1st to be a significan't threat and the only person that could cast "Analyze Dewomer". So they had to stay on her good side if they wanted to have their magical items analyzed.

Durring one adventure, while the PCs were investigating the Ancient ruins of a powerful wizard (22nd level) from a previous era in the world, they encounterd, fought and destryoyed a number of "minor constructs" that were fashioned to look exactly like the wizard. They learned that the constructs wouldn't activate until they were within 10' of them, so they were careful.

Then they came accorss a room with another one of the statues, but it looked much tougher than the other ones. On a table beside it was a large glowing ruby and a small ledger.

The plan was that they would buff up, and all jump into the room at once and attack the statue. I was going to let them all get in their shots as a surpirse before telling them that the statue was just a statue as it crumbled to dust before them.

They would then read the ledger and find that the wizard who lived here was trapped here with no way out (magical cataclysm and all) and had decided to cast "Flesh to Stone" on himself with a note in the ledger to the same prommising great reward to anyone who saved him.

It never occured to me that the party sorcerer would "Mage Hand" the ledger to the party and read it first, discover the truth and act accordingly....

Ah players, they have a way of screwing up a DMs best layed plans......

 

[Pants]

I can see a lot of uses for this spell, if you're a lonely mage, in your own room...

I thought that was Bigby's Sweaty Palms?

 

[Hand of Evil]

One I saw was puppet, mage hand was used to do a sock puppet to distract some orcs...basicly a item floating moving just down the way. This was also done with a clicker, the hand carried it and would drop it to make a noise, the players called it an orc caller.

 

[MarauderX]

Used mage hand to pull aside some curtains once... although there weren't bathing beauties on the other side, it did help to see what was on the other side before getting that wizard killed trying to cross through a room full of dancing ghosties.

As a DM, I tried to peal away the 'dumbest' PC from the party with a dancing feather that kept tickling him and then leading him away. But alas, the others PCs noticed as well and spotted the wizard with his cronies on the roof waiting to pounce on just one PC at a time. Yeah, not much of a fight, and strangely the PCs didn't even bother to take a prisoner for questioning, so they had to be force-fed the next plot direction.

I can only imagine what theivery could go on in a marketplace with the hand, but have yet to witness a PC do anything like that with it...yet.