Mirror of Opposition

[Trellian]

In one upcoming adventure, the characters walk into a room with a mirror of opposition. How should I handle this? SHould I automatically duplicate everyone, only those who actually say that they look into the mirror, or pick one or two randomly?

The latter seems most fair and reasonable, as it is unrealistic that nobody accidentally looks into the mirror, and I guess all of them don't either. Anybody had any past experiences with this magic item?

 

[AuraSeer]

It depends on how dangerous you want the encounter to be.

If you duplicate the entire party, and play the hostile versions intelligently, there is definite potential for a TPK. After all, any tactic the PCs could use to assure victory would also be accessible to their opposites. When this happened to my party some time ago, we won only because of good initiative and a few lucky criticals.

If you don't want to run the risk of killing everyone, only duplicate half of the party. One way is to give everyone in the party a Spot check, and dupe the few who rolled highest. (Only creatures who see their reflections are duplicated, so in this case it's good to be unperceptive.

Note also that the mirror functions at most 4 times per day, so if you have a large party they couldn't all be copied anyway.

 

[Stalker0]

I say just make the mirror very cool and ornate looking and most pcs will go looking at it anyway

But barring that, 1 or 2 randomly sounds fine.