Re: The Reputation Hilarity/Insanity thread New version
Little late, but been following the conversation and I have to throw in on this one.
The entries specifically state that the rifts and the gates only go one-way, from material to astral.
And yes there are cursed bags of holding that will transmute +5 weapons into rusty turds.
But a portable hole costs 20k and bags of holding aren't cheap either. Oh, and you won't get any loot the enemy had on their person, either. So you really, really only want to do the trick in emergencies. And by the time you can afford to use it without breaking the bank, anything you'd really need to make go away has a fair chance of having access to planeshift or similar abilities.
We actually destroyed an army this way in one of our games. Massive amount of orcs (and other nasties) gathered outside the city and we really didn't have the means of protecting it from the siege. So we come up with the idea of wrapping a bag of holding around a volunteer's hand (so it can't be dropped) and having the other inside his armor (so it can't be grabbed/stolen), we teleport/dimension door him into the center of the army, he shoves tab A into slot B and BOOM! No more army and there's now a crater some ways outside the city where there's also now some sort of "mysterious dimensional rift." Also prompted one of the better quotes in our game. One of our friends was playing something of a one-off character, so he's fighting to go instead of the paladin (because the pally was a pally, not to mention the player [and to some extent the DM] kinda had the game revolving around them) and the friend looks at the pally and goes "You can always get another knight for your church, you can't get another father for your children." Everyone was like "Give him the bags."
I believe most GM's aren't the typical "you don't play my way I kill you all...create your own game you scrubs!" type of elitist draco-douche...it's nice to see players make creative ways to "circumvent" any challenges dropped by the said GM provided they are not being a draco-douche themselves...
Same DM as above was...kinda like this. He would put us in scenarios where it was either railroading or if we didn't do things
just right it usually wound up in TPKs or very damn near. Lost two mages that way. Not that I'm bitter. (I say bitterly. With a bitter expression.) On the plus side, at the end of sessions, we could write down how we contributed to the game and he would take that into account when awarding xp.
Or wait for a group of enemies to surround a teammate and then cast fireball at them, either nuking the enemies and nearly killing the teammate, or nearly killing the enemies and downing the teammate. Either way, you've gained a tactical advantage in that fight.
Someone mentions it as a feat, but you could also do this in the Baldur's Gate game as long as your rogues had 'improved evasion' (probably could do it in pen and paper, too, with the right tweaking.) Stealth rogue into middle of enemies, wizard targets rogue with fireball, rogue takes no damage due to feat, enemies are crispy critters.
