I have been doing some research, and it has some implications.
Quote from the bag of holding page: “Placing a bag of holding inside an extradimensional space created by a handy haversack, portable hole, or similar item instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane. The gate originates where the one item was placed inside the other. Any creature within 10 feet of the gate is sucked through it to a random location on the Astral Plane. The gate then closes. The gate is one-way only and can’t be reopened.“
A similar paragraph exists in the portable holes and handy haversack pages, substituting italicized words accordingly.
Quote from the artificer page:
Replicate Magic Item
Using this infusion, you replicate a particular magic item. You can learn this infusion multiple times; each time you do so, choose a magic item that you can make with it, picking from the Replicable Items tables. A table’s title tells you the level you must be in the class to choose an item from the table. Alternatively, you can choose the magic item from among the common magic items in the game, not including potions or scrolls.
In the tables, an item’s entry tells you whether the item requires attunement. See the item’s description in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for more information about it, including the type of object required for its making.
Replicable Items (2nd-Level Artificer)
Magic Item
Attunement
Alchemy jug
No
Bag of holding
No
Cap of water breathing
No
Goggles of night
No
Rope of climbing
No
Sending stones
No
Wand of magic detection
No
Wand of secrets
No
Quote from the Artificer Page:
Infusing an Item
Whenever you finish a long rest, you can touch a non-magical object and imbue it with one of your artificer infusions, turning it into a magic item. An infusion works on only certain kinds of objects, as specified in the infusion’s description.
The most common way to access the Astral Plane is with the Astral Projection spell, which is ninth level. This suggests that the Astral Plane is one of the most dangerous places possible in DnD, even if you go through one of the color pools early on, most likely it will lead to another extremely dangerous place, this is the most common way to exit the Astral Plane.
At 2nd level, you can have up to two items infused at a time, At 2nd level, you can replicate bags of holding, therefore, you can send pretty much anything to one of the most dangerous places in the game as just a first level character.
All you need is a renewable 110% expendable servant to walk up and put one bag within another. This can be accomplished by replicating a Spellwrought needle and casting Find Familiar with it, or having a druid expend one use of Beast Shape to cast find familiar without expensive components, Or leveling once more as a battle smith and sacrificing your Steel Defender. Either way you would need to level up more if you are the only artificer, or have another character to rely on. But once this is done, you have the most deadly kamikaze minion in the history of the game.
Overly powerful boss? Banish them to the Astral! Being chased by a giant dragon or something similar? Banish them to the Astral! Hired to assassinate somebody? Send them an anonymous present, a supposedly harmless mechanical trinket or friendly animal buddy with extremely versatile saddlebags, and banish them to the Astral!
The one limit is that some DM’s, despite the fact that it doesn’t say anywhere that you cannot use the same infusion multiple times(the key word in the artificer page is learn) they will claim that you cannot create two bags of holding, If this happens, you can just have another artificer in the party make the other bag.
The best part? It is entirely free. From the bags, to the kamikaze minion, all of it doesn’t cost a copper. The attack doesn’t allow a saving throw of any kind, just automatic banishment, it works on any creature with just a part to be sucked away(such as a dragon being sucked in by their foot into the astral), and it pretty much ensures death to the targets(up to 8 creatures).
There are only two shortcomings: It is single use per day(until later levels when you have more infusions or unless you have multiple artificers), and it will take up at least two infusion slots, possibly three if your minion is a spellwrought tattoo familiar, per Astral Implosion Device(A.I.D. for short). But if anything is worth those slots, it would be this.
A single Artificer can only make a single Bag of Holding. You cannot take the same infusion twice and a single infusion can only affect one item at a time. Gonna need two Artificers for this.
Artificer infusions are extraordinary processes that rapidly turn a nonmagical object into a magic item.
The description of each of the following infusions details the type of object that can receive it, along with whether the resulting magic item requires attunement.
Some infusions specify a minimum artificer level. You can’t learn such an infusion until you are at least that level.
Unless an infusion’s description says otherwise, you can’t learn an infusion more than once.
You can infuse more than one nonmagical object at the end of a long rest; the maximum number of objects appears in the Infused Items column of the Artificer table. You must touch each of the objects, and each of your infusions can be in only one object at a time. Moreover, no object can bear more than one of your infusions at a time. If you try to exceed your maximum number of infusions, the oldest infusion immediately ends, and then the new infusion applies.
You can learn the Replicate Magic Item infusion multiple times but you cannot learn the same infusion from the Replicate Magic Item table more than once.
This lets you, for example, take Boots of Elvenkind and Cloak of Elvenkind (because you can take this (ie. Replicate Magic Item) infusion more than once) but not two Boots of Elvenkind (becauseyou can’t learn an (ie. the same) infusion more than once.)
FWIW, dndbeyond implements it such that you can't have duplicate replicated infusions. You can have a Rope of Climbing and a Bag of Holding, but not two Bags of Holding.. (That is often dismissed out of hand, but at least demonstrates that this is a reasonable and playable ruling. And dndbeyond is official WotC, now.)
Furthermore, you can still pull off the astral plane trick with 2 Artificers...
Lastly, if someone wanted to get extra litigious about this, it's easy enough to point out that the RAW never actually specifies that 2 Bags of Holding would interact this way. You'd need a Portable Hole or Handy Haversack to create the rift with a Bag of Holding --- "or similar item" is pretty much left to DM interpretation, so you shouldn't rely on it. But hey, we wouldn't want to let literal readings to get in the way of broken tactics, would we?
The Astral Plane isn't any more deadly than anywhere else. This is why many choose to live there. If anything it's potentially safer since you have no need to eat or drink and dont age. The reason Astral Projection is 9th level is because it lets you travel through there while being almost unkillable. It is very difficult to cut the Silver Cord and the otherwise worse thing that can happen is you wake up in your body safe and sound and unharmed. Plane Shift and Gate require knowledge and can be blocked. Astral Projection allows you to travel to other planes without being blocked and considerably safer than travelling physically.
As for color pools leading to dangerous places - not likely. You choose which color pool, get to it (10 to 40 hours travel) and just go through it. You appear in a random location on the chosen plane. If you want to be cautious choose The Outlands and go to Sigil, the City of Doors - which has many safe routes back to the Material Plane or any plane you want. It's a big marketplace for interplanar trade with people travelling nice and safely between all manner of planes and places.
The worst your tactic does is cause inconvenience. It can make a temporary solution when you need it, just as sending the enemy away if you're having difficulty to give you time to get away and recover, or something. Or maybe as a prank.
Overuse your tactic and your DM may well just use it against you, or worse, or just tell you stop. Or the big bad can just use a Gate to summon you into a Demiplane filled with spell glyphs of all manner of nasty things - like a forcecage + sickening radiance trap. Don't overly cheese stuff to piss of the DM, they can do far worse to your characters.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
This combo is as old as D&D lore and is used in almost every long term game at least once. In older games I've played, it wasn't just a means of banishment, it explosively ripped a hole between the planes. When the DMs were not being particularly precise, it was "grab two handfuls of dice" style damage to everything in a wide radius as well. It kept it interesting, and respected.
This should not be encouraged as a frequent means of dispatching foes, and should put the party or at least the surrounding environment in considerable danger as well as be inherently unpredictable. If it became common at my table, the explosion, if not enveloping the party due to extreme distance, might rip a permanent hole to the Astral plane that could generate encounters from there. Or maybe it is unstable and growing and now the party has to stop a near apocalypse event for your world.
The progressive consequence would need to be such that a party would be seen as Chaotic Neutral at best or Chaotic Evil at worst to use it frequently and quite possibly earn attention from other characters who would defend the world, plane, or planer integrity in general. Oath of the Watchers Paladins come to mind or maybe a god or two that have planer travel as part of their portfolio.
As most things in D&D, it might be possible, and the combo you found might even make it cheap to do, but there should always be plot consequences especially with abusive game mechanics.
The Astral Plane isn't any more deadly than anywhere else. This is why many choose to live there. If anything it's potentially safer since you have no need to eat or drink and dont age. The reason Astral Projection is 9th level is because it lets you travel through there while being almost unkillable. It is very difficult to cut the Silver Cord and the otherwise worse thing that can happen is you wake up in your body safe and sound and unharmed. Plane Shift and Gate require knowledge and can be blocked. Astral Projection allows you to travel to other planes without being blocked and considerably safer than travelling physically.
As for color pools leading to dangerous places - not likely. You choose which color pool, get to it (10 to 40 hours travel) and just go through it. You appear in a random location on the chosen plane. If you want to be cautious choose The Outlands and go to Sigil, the City of Doors - which has many safe routes back to the Material Plane or any plane you want. It's a big marketplace for interplanar trade with people travelling nice and safely between all manner of planes and places.
The worst your tactic does is cause inconvenience. It can make a temporary solution when you need it, just as sending the enemy away if you're having difficulty to give you time to get away and recover, or something. Or maybe as a prank.
Overuse your tactic and your DM may well just use it against you, or worse, or just tell you stop. Or the big bad can just use a Gate to summon you into a Demiplane filled with spell glyphs of all manner of nasty things - like a forcecage + sickening radiance trap. Don't overly cheese stuff to piss of the DM, they can do far worse to your characters.
The grand majority of the color pools are to some dangerous plane if you are the wrong alignment, or just strait up dangerous. If you do have intimate knowledge of the Astral plane and are in a large group, such as with the Githyanki, then it becomes much less dangerous, but planar knowledge is not usually well known. Plus there are several dangers in the Astral Plane in general, designed to make travel even with Astral Projection dangerous, such as roving bands of Githyanki which want to murder anyone who isn’t themselves, Astral Dreadnoughts which want to eat everything, Morkoths which want to permanently add you to their collection, and Astral Winds with a range of effects from blowing you off course, delaying travel and increasing the likely hood of an encounter with one of the aforementioned groups, to shoving you through a random color pool most likely leading to an outer plane with extremely high CR creatures and usually a passive alignment warping effect, to large amounts of psychic damage. If in your campaigns the Astral Plane is extremely tame and basically an inter dimensional highway where everyone gets along and demons can fall in love with angels and the like, at minimum this could be used as the easiest form of travel and possibly marketed, making spells like Astral Projection and all the extremely expensive components obsolete. If you take account of the continuous list of dangers, many of which are designed even to counteract the silver-line damage immunity of Astral Projection, then it becomes a dangerous weapon. Either way, such a trick would become a game changer.
The easiest way for a DM/GM to get around this would be to homebrew the rules a bit to say, “no it doesn’t suck everything in a 10 ft radius into the Astral Plane, it just destroys both items, launching all contained items just as a bag of holding would if it were ruptured” rather than deciding to punish their players severely for exploiting a game rule, causing the DM and players to not like each other and possibly ruin any possibility of future games. Instead of all that, the loophole is eliminated, the players are disappointed partially, and all involved are able to continue on with the worlds greatest game. Win-win.
Or you could take AgniGnu’s tactic and allow it to become a story hook or even increase the potential consequences, doing so might interest the players and seems a plausible compromise to me.
There are many options other than, “Okay, a Solar appears and murders you all, you loophole manipulating jerks.” as you seem to be suggesting Cyb3rM1nd. Or possibly warning that other DM’s might do. Care to elaborate?
The Astral Plane isn't any more deadly than anywhere else. This is why many choose to live there. If anything it's potentially safer since you have no need to eat or drink and dont age. The reason Astral Projection is 9th level is because it lets you travel through there while being almost unkillable. It is very difficult to cut the Silver Cord and the otherwise worse thing that can happen is you wake up in your body safe and sound and unharmed. Plane Shift and Gate require knowledge and can be blocked. Astral Projection allows you to travel to other planes without being blocked and considerably safer than travelling physically.
As for color pools leading to dangerous places - not likely. You choose which color pool, get to it (10 to 40 hours travel) and just go through it. You appear in a random location on the chosen plane. If you want to be cautious choose The Outlands and go to Sigil, the City of Doors - which has many safe routes back to the Material Plane or any plane you want. It's a big marketplace for interplanar trade with people travelling nice and safely between all manner of planes and places.
The worst your tactic does is cause inconvenience. It can make a temporary solution when you need it, just as sending the enemy away if you're having difficulty to give you time to get away and recover, or something. Or maybe as a prank.
Overuse your tactic and your DM may well just use it against you, or worse, or just tell you stop. Or the big bad can just use a Gate to summon you into a Demiplane filled with spell glyphs of all manner of nasty things - like a forcecage + sickening radiance trap. Don't overly cheese stuff to piss of the DM, they can do far worse to your characters.
The grand majority of the color pools are to some dangerous plane if you are the wrong alignment, or just strait up dangerous. If you do have intimate knowledge of the Astral plane and are in a large group, such as with the Githyanki, then it becomes much less dangerous, but planar knowledge is not usually well known. Plus there are several dangers in the Astral Plane in general, designed to make travel even with Astral Projection dangerous, such as roving bands of Githyanki which want to murder anyone who isn’t themselves, Astral Dreadnoughts which want to eat everything, Morkoths which want to permanently add you to their collection, and Astral Winds with a range of effects from blowing you off course, delaying travel and increasing the likely hood of an encounter with one of the aforementioned groups, to shoving you through a random color pool most likely leading to an outer plane with extremely high CR creatures and usually a passive alignment warping effect, to large amounts of psychic damage. If in your campaigns the Astral Plane is extremely tame and basically an inter dimensional highway where everyone gets along and demons can fall in love with angels and the like, at minimum this could be used as the easiest form of travel and possibly marketed, making spells like Astral Projection and all the extremely expensive components obsolete. If you take account of the continuous list of dangers, many of which are designed even to counteract the silver-line damage immunity of Astral Projection, then it becomes a dangerous weapon. Either way, such a trick would become a game changer.
The easiest way for a DM/GM to get around this would be to homebrew the rules a bit to say, “no it doesn’t suck everything in a 10 ft radius into the Astral Plane, it just destroys both items, launching all contained items just as a bag of holding would if it were ruptured” rather than deciding to punish their players severely for exploiting a game rule, causing the DM and players to not like each other and possibly ruin any possibility of future games. Instead of all that, the loophole is eliminated, the players are disappointed partially, and all involved are able to continue on with the worlds greatest game. Win-win.
Or you could take AgniGnu’s tactic and allow it to become a story hook or even increase the potential consequences, doing so might interest the players and seems a plausible compromise to me.
There are many options other than, “Okay, a Solar appears and murders you all, you loophole manipulating jerks.” as you seem to be suggesting Cyb3rM1nd. Or possibly warning that other DM’s might do. Care to elaborate?
"The grand majority of the color pools are to some dangerous plane if you are the wrong alignment, or just strait up dangerous."
Half are as safe as the material plane, regardless of alignment, and a few are actually safer. Also, it's "straight".
"Plus there are several dangers in the Astral Plane in general"
Yes, and there are as many if not more in the material plane which include, but are by no means limited to: wild beasts, venomous bugs, giant bugs, giant beasts, dragons, ghosts, some demons, some devils, skeletons, zombies, liches, mind flayers and intellect devourers, krakens, wild elementals, living spells, trolls, ogres, and every humanoid race all of which hold some evil peeps happy to rob or kill you. There's more inhabitants of the material plane than there are the astral plane resulting in a significant greater chance of encountering danger. And that's creatures. There's also greater hazards from falls, earthquakes, violent storms, natural disease, accidents, and more. Gravity is a heartless ***** through the material plane and in the astral plane you can fly - gravity ain't doin' shit.
"If you take account of the continuous list of dangers, many of which are designed even to counteract the silver-line damage immunity of Astral Projection"
There is actually only 1. The silver swords. Even the psychic wind, despite being mentions as being able to, actually can't as you can note in the list of the effects the silver cord thing isn't mentioned. There may be one or two things that can but even amongst the githyanki the swords are rare and very unlikely to be encountered.
There is absolutely nothing to suggest the Astral plane is more dangerous than the Material plane. And there is some text to imply it can, in some cases, be safer.
There are no words in existence you can say to tell me otherwise. I'm not saying it's some safe puppyland. I'm just saying it's not an instakill or even a "very likely kill".
"The easiest way for a DM/GM to get around this would be to homebrew the rules a bit to say, “no it doesn’t suck everything in a 10 ft radius into the Astral Plane, it just destroys both items, launching all contained items just as a bag of holding would if it were ruptured” rather than deciding to punish their players severely for exploiting a game rule, causing the DM and players to not like each other and possibly ruin any possibility of future games. Instead of all that, the loophole is eliminated, the players are disappointed partially, and all involved are able to continue on with the worlds greatest game. Win-win."
Or just allow it to work, have the enemy find a way back and be extra pissed off and might even try the trick against them for revenge. If they abuse this exploit, the DM can tell them to stop.
My point about "the DM can do nastier things" is that just because something is permissable by rules does not mean it should be overused, because if "but it's RAW" is your argument, so are the far worse shit the DM can throw at you. A great trick, is great, but if you're going to repeatedly use it, to knowingly make the game less fun and more difficult for the DM then you deserve what you get.
Don't be a dick to the DM.
"There are many options other than, “Okay, a Solar appears and murders you all, you loophole manipulating jerks.” as you seem to be suggesting Cyb3rM1nd. Or possibly warning that other DM’s might do. Care to elaborate?"
Elaborate on what? Made up shit in your head? Your lack of reading comprehension? Nah, mate, you carry on. But since you struggled enough to invent this nonsense, let me repeat myself and add some emphasis, to help you.
Overuse your tactic and your DM may well just use it against you, or worse, or just tell you stop. Or the big bad can just use a Gate to summon you into a Demiplane filled with spell glyphs of all manner of nasty things - like a forcecage + sickening radiance trap. Don't overly cheese stuff to piss of the DM, they can do far worse to your characters.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
Smarter people than us have near automated this attack. Whether it would work or not isn't the question. The question is, should you use this regularly in a game.
One critique is that the bag holding weighs 15 lb by default. I'd say, if you could craft it, you could make a smaller one. But even by default, a heavy crossbow could probably get it 20 to 30 feet.
elaborate on whether you would do this, or whether you are warning that other DM’s might do so.
this is what I meant
it seemed clear to me but apparently it wasn’t
I'm the "tell them to stop" type.
In game consequences are better only if there's a nice story element to it. In this case, there's not much room for story and I'm too old and tired to deal with petty shit. I also shouldn't have to invent houserules to deal with it - especially since doing it once or twice is, indeed, a sound and creative thing to do. If they're deliberately trying to ruin my fun and don't stop exploiting the oversight after being asked to stop using it for everything - then they're finding a new DM.
Other DMs might use the tactic and far worse things though. So, either way, over-using this is not going to result in anything positive.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
I have been doing some research, and it has some implications.
Quote from the bag of holding page: “Placing a bag of holding inside an extradimensional space created by a handy haversack, portable hole, or similar item instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane. The gate originates where the one item was placed inside the other. Any creature within 10 feet of the gate is sucked through it to a random location on the Astral Plane. The gate then closes. The gate is one-way only and can’t be reopened.“
A similar paragraph exists in the portable holes and handy haversack pages, substituting italicized words accordingly.
Quote from the artificer page:
Replicate Magic Item
Using this infusion, you replicate a particular magic item. You can learn this infusion multiple times; each time you do so, choose a magic item that you can make with it, picking from the Replicable Items tables. A table’s title tells you the level you must be in the class to choose an item from the table. Alternatively, you can choose the magic item from among the common magic items in the game, not including potions or scrolls.
In the tables, an item’s entry tells you whether the item requires attunement. See the item’s description in the Dungeon Master’s Guide for more information about it, including the type of object required for its making.
Replicable Items (2nd-Level Artificer)
Infusing an Item
Whenever you finish a long rest, you can touch a non-magical object and imbue it with one of your artificer infusions, turning it into a magic item. An infusion works on only certain kinds of objects, as specified in the infusion’s description.
The most common way to access the Astral Plane is with the Astral Projection spell, which is ninth level. This suggests that the Astral Plane is one of the most dangerous places possible in DnD, even if you go through one of the color pools early on, most likely it will lead to another extremely dangerous place, this is the most common way to exit the Astral Plane.
At 2nd level, you can have up to two items infused at a time, At 2nd level, you can replicate bags of holding, therefore, you can send pretty much anything to one of the most dangerous places in the game as just a first level character.
All you need is a renewable 110% expendable servant to walk up and put one bag within another. This can be accomplished by replicating a Spellwrought needle and casting Find Familiar with it, or having a druid expend one use of Beast Shape to cast find familiar without expensive components, Or leveling once more as a battle smith and sacrificing your Steel Defender. Either way you would need to level up more if you are the only artificer, or have another character to rely on. But once this is done, you have the most deadly kamikaze minion in the history of the game.
Overly powerful boss? Banish them to the Astral! Being chased by a giant dragon or something similar? Banish them to the Astral! Hired to assassinate somebody? Send them an anonymous present, a supposedly harmless mechanical trinket or friendly animal buddy with extremely versatile saddlebags, and banish them to the Astral!
The one limit is that some DM’s, despite the fact that it doesn’t say anywhere that you cannot use the same infusion multiple times(the key word in the artificer page is learn) they will claim that you cannot create two bags of holding, If this happens, you can just have another artificer in the party make the other bag.
The best part? It is entirely free. From the bags, to the kamikaze minion, all of it doesn’t cost a copper. The attack doesn’t allow a saving throw of any kind, just automatic banishment, it works on any creature with just a part to be sucked away(such as a dragon being sucked in by their foot into the astral), and it pretty much ensures death to the targets(up to 8 creatures).
There are only two shortcomings: It is single use per day(until later levels when you have more infusions or unless you have multiple artificers), and it will take up at least two infusion slots, possibly three if your minion is a spellwrought tattoo familiar, per Astral Implosion Device(A.I.D. for short). But if anything is worth those slots, it would be this.
More Fodder! Mua Ha Ha!
A single Artificer can only make a single Bag of Holding. You cannot take the same infusion twice and a single infusion can only affect one item at a time. Gonna need two Artificers for this.
You can learn the Replicate Magic Item infusion multiple times but you cannot learn the same infusion from the Replicate Magic Item table more than once.
This lets you, for example, take Boots of Elvenkind and Cloak of Elvenkind (because you can take this (ie. Replicate Magic Item) infusion more than once) but not two Boots of Elvenkind (because you can’t learn an (ie. the same) infusion more than once.)
You're wrong, but it looks like I'm not gonna convince you of it.
FWIW, dndbeyond implements it such that you can't have duplicate replicated infusions. You can have a Rope of Climbing and a Bag of Holding, but not two Bags of Holding.. (That is often dismissed out of hand, but at least demonstrates that this is a reasonable and playable ruling. And dndbeyond is official WotC, now.)
Furthermore, you can still pull off the astral plane trick with 2 Artificers...
Lastly, if someone wanted to get extra litigious about this, it's easy enough to point out that the RAW never actually specifies that 2 Bags of Holding would interact this way. You'd need a Portable Hole or Handy Haversack to create the rift with a Bag of Holding --- "or similar item" is pretty much left to DM interpretation, so you shouldn't rely on it. But hey, we wouldn't want to let literal readings to get in the way of broken tactics, would we?
Yes, for the artificer who infused them. (They couldn't just use a magic item they found elsewhere as a focus.)
The Astral Plane isn't any more deadly than anywhere else. This is why many choose to live there. If anything it's potentially safer since you have no need to eat or drink and dont age. The reason Astral Projection is 9th level is because it lets you travel through there while being almost unkillable. It is very difficult to cut the Silver Cord and the otherwise worse thing that can happen is you wake up in your body safe and sound and unharmed. Plane Shift and Gate require knowledge and can be blocked. Astral Projection allows you to travel to other planes without being blocked and considerably safer than travelling physically.
As for color pools leading to dangerous places - not likely. You choose which color pool, get to it (10 to 40 hours travel) and just go through it. You appear in a random location on the chosen plane. If you want to be cautious choose The Outlands and go to Sigil, the City of Doors - which has many safe routes back to the Material Plane or any plane you want. It's a big marketplace for interplanar trade with people travelling nice and safely between all manner of planes and places.
The worst your tactic does is cause inconvenience. It can make a temporary solution when you need it, just as sending the enemy away if you're having difficulty to give you time to get away and recover, or something. Or maybe as a prank.
Overuse your tactic and your DM may well just use it against you, or worse, or just tell you stop. Or the big bad can just use a Gate to summon you into a Demiplane filled with spell glyphs of all manner of nasty things - like a forcecage + sickening radiance trap. Don't overly cheese stuff to piss of the DM, they can do far worse to your characters.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
This combo is as old as D&D lore and is used in almost every long term game at least once. In older games I've played, it wasn't just a means of banishment, it explosively ripped a hole between the planes. When the DMs were not being particularly precise, it was "grab two handfuls of dice" style damage to everything in a wide radius as well. It kept it interesting, and respected.
This should not be encouraged as a frequent means of dispatching foes, and should put the party or at least the surrounding environment in considerable danger as well as be inherently unpredictable. If it became common at my table, the explosion, if not enveloping the party due to extreme distance, might rip a permanent hole to the Astral plane that could generate encounters from there. Or maybe it is unstable and growing and now the party has to stop a near apocalypse event for your world.
The progressive consequence would need to be such that a party would be seen as Chaotic Neutral at best or Chaotic Evil at worst to use it frequently and quite possibly earn attention from other characters who would defend the world, plane, or planer integrity in general. Oath of the Watchers Paladins come to mind or maybe a god or two that have planer travel as part of their portfolio.
As most things in D&D, it might be possible, and the combo you found might even make it cheap to do, but there should always be plot consequences especially with abusive game mechanics.
The grand majority of the color pools are to some dangerous plane if you are the wrong alignment, or just strait up dangerous. If you do have intimate knowledge of the Astral plane and are in a large group, such as with the Githyanki, then it becomes much less dangerous, but planar knowledge is not usually well known. Plus there are several dangers in the Astral Plane in general, designed to make travel even with Astral Projection dangerous, such as roving bands of Githyanki which want to murder anyone who isn’t themselves, Astral Dreadnoughts which want to eat everything, Morkoths which want to permanently add you to their collection, and Astral Winds with a range of effects from blowing you off course, delaying travel and increasing the likely hood of an encounter with one of the aforementioned groups, to shoving you through a random color pool most likely leading to an outer plane with extremely high CR creatures and usually a passive alignment warping effect, to large amounts of psychic damage. If in your campaigns the Astral Plane is extremely tame and basically an inter dimensional highway where everyone gets along and demons can fall in love with angels and the like, at minimum this could be used as the easiest form of travel and possibly marketed, making spells like Astral Projection and all the extremely expensive components obsolete. If you take account of the continuous list of dangers, many of which are designed even to counteract the silver-line damage immunity of Astral Projection, then it becomes a dangerous weapon. Either way, such a trick would become a game changer.
The easiest way for a DM/GM to get around this would be to homebrew the rules a bit to say, “no it doesn’t suck everything in a 10 ft radius into the Astral Plane, it just destroys both items, launching all contained items just as a bag of holding would if it were ruptured” rather than deciding to punish their players severely for exploiting a game rule, causing the DM and players to not like each other and possibly ruin any possibility of future games. Instead of all that, the loophole is eliminated, the players are disappointed partially, and all involved are able to continue on with the worlds greatest game. Win-win.
Or you could take AgniGnu’s tactic and allow it to become a story hook or even increase the potential consequences, doing so might interest the players and seems a plausible compromise to me.
There are many options other than, “Okay, a Solar appears and murders you all, you loophole manipulating jerks.” as you seem to be suggesting Cyb3rM1nd. Or possibly warning that other DM’s might do. Care to elaborate?
"The grand majority of the color pools are to some dangerous plane if you are the wrong alignment, or just strait up dangerous."
Half are as safe as the material plane, regardless of alignment, and a few are actually safer. Also, it's "straight".
"Plus there are several dangers in the Astral Plane in general"
Yes, and there are as many if not more in the material plane which include, but are by no means limited to: wild beasts, venomous bugs, giant bugs, giant beasts, dragons, ghosts, some demons, some devils, skeletons, zombies, liches, mind flayers and intellect devourers, krakens, wild elementals, living spells, trolls, ogres, and every humanoid race all of which hold some evil peeps happy to rob or kill you. There's more inhabitants of the material plane than there are the astral plane resulting in a significant greater chance of encountering danger. And that's creatures. There's also greater hazards from falls, earthquakes, violent storms, natural disease, accidents, and more. Gravity is a heartless ***** through the material plane and in the astral plane you can fly - gravity ain't doin' shit.
"If you take account of the continuous list of dangers, many of which are designed even to counteract the silver-line damage immunity of Astral Projection"
There is actually only 1. The silver swords. Even the psychic wind, despite being mentions as being able to, actually can't as you can note in the list of the effects the silver cord thing isn't mentioned. There may be one or two things that can but even amongst the githyanki the swords are rare and very unlikely to be encountered.
There is absolutely nothing to suggest the Astral plane is more dangerous than the Material plane. And there is some text to imply it can, in some cases, be safer.
There are no words in existence you can say to tell me otherwise. I'm not saying it's some safe puppyland. I'm just saying it's not an instakill or even a "very likely kill".
"The easiest way for a DM/GM to get around this would be to homebrew the rules a bit to say, “no it doesn’t suck everything in a 10 ft radius into the Astral Plane, it just destroys both items, launching all contained items just as a bag of holding would if it were ruptured” rather than deciding to punish their players severely for exploiting a game rule, causing the DM and players to not like each other and possibly ruin any possibility of future games. Instead of all that, the loophole is eliminated, the players are disappointed partially, and all involved are able to continue on with the worlds greatest game. Win-win."
Or just allow it to work, have the enemy find a way back and be extra pissed off and might even try the trick against them for revenge. If they abuse this exploit, the DM can tell them to stop.
My point about "the DM can do nastier things" is that just because something is permissable by rules does not mean it should be overused, because if "but it's RAW" is your argument, so are the far worse shit the DM can throw at you. A great trick, is great, but if you're going to repeatedly use it, to knowingly make the game less fun and more difficult for the DM then you deserve what you get.
Don't be a dick to the DM.
"There are many options other than, “Okay, a Solar appears and murders you all, you loophole manipulating jerks.” as you seem to be suggesting Cyb3rM1nd. Or possibly warning that other DM’s might do. Care to elaborate?"
Elaborate on what? Made up shit in your head? Your lack of reading comprehension? Nah, mate, you carry on. But since you struggled enough to invent this nonsense, let me repeat myself and add some emphasis, to help you.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
elaborate on whether you would do this, or whether you are warning that other DM’s might do so.
this is what I meant
it seemed clear to me but apparently it wasn’t
Smarter people than us have near automated this attack. Whether it would work or not isn't the question. The question is, should you use this regularly in a game.
One critique is that the bag holding weighs 15 lb by default. I'd say, if you could craft it, you could make a smaller one. But even by default, a heavy crossbow could probably get it 20 to 30 feet.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/100984/can-i-really-craft-an-arrow-of-total-destruction-by-raw
I'm the "tell them to stop" type.
In game consequences are better only if there's a nice story element to it. In this case, there's not much room for story and I'm too old and tired to deal with petty shit. I also shouldn't have to invent houserules to deal with it - especially since doing it once or twice is, indeed, a sound and creative thing to do. If they're deliberately trying to ruin my fun and don't stop exploiting the oversight after being asked to stop using it for everything - then they're finding a new DM.
Other DMs might use the tactic and far worse things though. So, either way, over-using this is not going to result in anything positive.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
Okay, I understand. Thank you for your input!