What happens when you turn a bag of holding inside out?

Same thing as when you divide by 0.

Depends on the edition. Some games say not much. Others say stuff gets lost. I'm not sure what else.
This message was last edited by the user at 02:53, Sun 13 Apr 2014.

In reply to Andrew Wilson (msg # 1):

You have a mess on the floor.

If I may, I am curious now. What exactly is a Bag of Holding?

Lots more surface area on the inside than on the out. Different with each source material.

In reply to Nirobo (msg # 5):

Kind of like a sack that's like a TARDIS (without the time traveling).   "Bigger on the inside".

Oh alright. Thank you very much.

depends on what, if anything was in the sack, if empty then you have an inside out bag, if full you got a mess. Provided the nature of the bag would allow it to be turned inside out. (The losing stuff is if you cut a hole in the bag more than turning it inside out.)

Since it's got more surface area and space on the inside, I imagine the bag looking really big and loose. Like bed sheets sown together, but with the original size opening. However much your bag could hold normally is how big it would be inside-out. Not very useful, though.

In reply to CoyotesGrin (msg # 10):

Can you say BAG WORLD?????????????????????????????????

When you turn it inside out, everything spills out on the floor and you're left with a bag of the same size and shape as the original bag.

In reply to Nirobo (msg # 5):

A bag of holding appears to be a common cloth sack of about 2 by 4 feet (0.61 by 1.22 m) in size. It opens into a nondimensional space (similar to a magic satchel) or a pocket dimension, making the space larger inside than it is outside. Each bag always weighs the same amount, between 15 and 60 pounds (6.8 and 27.2 kg), regardless of what is put into it. It can store a combined weight of up to forty times its own weight, and a combined volume of 30 to 250 cubic feet (0.85 to 7.08 m3). A living creature put in a bag of holding will suffocate after about 10 minutes.

If a bag of holding is overloaded, or if a sharp object pierces it (from outside or inside), the bag will rupture and be ruined, the contents lost forever in "nilspace".

I know one thing, I've seen a lot of bags of holding from a lot of sources that don't always have a connection to the original source. I'm not suprised if they wouldn't necessarily count. I saw a GM once use gates cast inside Bags of Holding to connect to other bags. It was a particular scenario involving sneaking into a dragon's lair. ;D
This message was last edited by the user at 06:26, Sun 13 Apr 2014.

Making magic items is like programming a computer code. Each Wizard does it a little differently, and some follow Good Magic Practices -- the world doesn't end if the user does something weird to the bag -- while others are perhaps more sloppy :)

That's a good analogy.  Apparently some wizardly programmers are more partial to writing spaghetti code, which I guess is how the Flying Spaghetti Monster was summoned into existence. ;)

I'd say you can't turn the bag inside out.  The mouth of the bag no longer leads to the inside of the bag, but to an other-dimensional space.  You push the bottom of the bag toward the mouth... and it just stops.

This article seems to give a pretty good opinion of what to do if you're GMing and someone asks what happens.  I don't know much about string theory, though.

http://askthedm.com/2011/08/16...out-bags-of-holding/

I don't currently play in the type of games where a bag of holding would exist so I have some questions.

At the size mentioned above, how do you reach what is at the bottom of a 4 foot container?

When the bag is empty, can it be flattened and folded?
As the bag is filled does it appear to be filling as seen from the outside?
If you feel the contents of the bag from the outside, does it feel like a smaller version of what you put in or something else?
Can you see into the bag to find your items?  What does it look like in there?
Can things get damaged from bumping around inside?
Can things inside get damaged by outside forces like if the bag got struck during combat?

Sorry if these are newbie questions, but in the little D&D I played years ago I never had a bag of holding.

Climb inside and dig around a bit. This is why I prefer the Handy Haversack, whichever item you reach in for is always automagically on top.



Absolutely.



Yes, until the Bag appears to be as full as a normal sack of it's size. You can still fill more until it's maximum capacity, but it will always look like a normally-sized bag.



As I understand it, it just feels like Generic Mystery Objects, you can't tell what's in the bag without opening it and looking inside. Unless you mean reaching into the bag, in which case the objects are normal sized; the items don't get smaller, it's the Bag that's bigger on the inside.



Yes, you can. It looks like the inside of a giant sack. As has been mentioned, Bags of Holding are much bigger on the inside.



As I understand it, the sack itself is only the orifice through which the pocket dimension is accessed; you could throw a Bag of Holding around with a person inside and he wouldn't know because the interior remains stationary. There is a chance that sharp objects (unsheathed weapons, rough rubble, etc.) can pierce the inside of the Bag, and everything inside gets sucked into the Astral Plane and lost forever. (Piercing the outside of the Bag just dumps everything out on the floor.)



No, see above.



Don't worry about it. Just remember to never, ever put a Bag of Holding inside a Portable Hole (or vice-versa).

Well, putting a portable hole inside a bag of holding is fine -- it's the easiest way to get a nice relatively gentle one-way ticket to the Astral Plane.  Putting a bag of holding inside a portable hole not only destroys both, but you don't even get to go along for the ride.

In reply to Genghis the Hutt (msg # 21):

So, this means we can sneak people around in them yes? TROJAN horse ain't got nothing on that!

Yes, Trojan Horses weren't a new concept in D&D and the 3rd edition rules at least specifically talk about hiding people in a portable hole and how much air there is to breath -- as I remember it, the rules say something about a portable hole having roughly 10 minutes of air for a regular-size Medium human and double that if it's a Small-sized halfling, and that you can close the opening from the inside so that nobody can see the opening from the outside.  Combine that with a http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Bottle_of_Air and you can really have a Trojan Horse situation.  It'd be super expensive, but when the prize is a king's treasury...

Nobody ever really bothers hiding people in a bag of holding, because it's obvious that there's a bag there and any guard will likely want to look inside the bag.

Ah, but unless Troy existed in your particular campaign, what would they be called?

"Hah!  They can't fool us with the old Velfoonian Wombat Trick!"

Breathing in a portable hole,

The funny thing is, they tell you how much volume is in a portable hole, and tell you how long a volume of air can last a character. Using that info gets you a different length of time that characters can breath in a portable hole then the 10 minutes specifically stated. So the question is, why don't they match?

When you announce you want to turn a bag of holding inside out, the GM either will say, "Are you sure...?" or "Creative idea! Go for it!"

When you do it, the GM is apt to say, "roll a d20." "Roll a d100."

The description states: "If a bag of holding is overloaded, or if a sharp object pierces it (from outside or inside), the bag will rupture and be ruined, the contents lost forever in "nilspace".

So to me turning it inside out is the same as overloading or rupturing it and ruining it, since the inside is nondimensional space.

Well, just to see, I tried it.

I can now report the effects.

Well.. first... to understand this, remember that the space inside the bag of holding is an extra-dimensional space.  That means it is not in our universe.

The second clue is in the fact that if you puncture the bag, the contents are not spilled out.  They are lost.  The bag is not "around" the extradimensional space, and our space is not "around" that space.  They are entirely separate spaces, linked by the mouth of the bag.

This means, the interior of the bag is not so much a "pocket universe" as it is another universe entirely.  A small and very boring one.  If it had inhabitants, then from the point of view of inhabitants of that universe, OUR universe is the extradimensional space.

That's right.  The bag of holding is merely a portal between two universes of two different sizes.

If you invert the bag, the two universes change relative locations- but they keep their relative sizes.  The effect is instantaneous.  No one in the universe could possibly sense it or measure it.  However, from the point of view of a being on the astral plane, it would be appear that our universe along with every galaxy, star, planet and living thing inside it instantly shifts about 8 inches to one side, while the much smaller universe of the Bag of Holding is instantly displaced about 46 billion light years* away in the opposite direction.

*No, not precisely.  I rounded.

I explain it in terms of dimensional stacking that occurs around the p-n barrier threshold

fairly decent introductory article (very little math):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract

Probably because the internet didn't when D&D was put together and they didn't want to pay a reference librarian to go figure it out for them?  Personally, I have no idea how long the air in a bag of holding *should* last for.  Is it more or less than 10 minutes?

On a very related note, since the portable hole/bag of holding interaction came up:


https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akam...34260304491155_n.jpg

In reply to Eur512 (msg # 31):

I've often considered the possibility of using portable holes and bags of holding as WMDs.  Fortunately for dms everywhere, most characters are much too stingy.

In reply to Eur512 (msg # 31):

How many of those would it take to forever alter climate because of changing air/water amounts or density?

In reply to Merevel (msg # 33):

I think the effect is fairly temporary and doesn't cause too much change, so it would have to be a  HUGE number of them.  Prohibitively expensive for sure.  You'd be better off opening a gate to an elemental plane of water or air, perhaps.

In reply to nuric (msg # 34):

Well that would solve the problem. Reminds me of "Stella Deuve: The Gate of Eternity" Good game.

What would happen if you stuck your hand in the bag. And then cut the.bag?

If I were the DM, I might allow a reflex save (a hard one) to avoid getting sucked into the Astral Plane.   A bit like explosive decompression in an airplane, or something.

In reply to nuric (msg # 37):

It would have to be a high dc reflex save. How far can you normaly move on one?

In reply to Merevel (msg # 38):

I'm not sure, but you use Reflex saves to dodge Dragon Breath and such, so I'd give someone enough space to pull back to the edge of the effect (though if it's the 10' radius, they might be out of luck).

In reply to nuric (msg # 39):

To be fair a successful reflex save implies you notice the dragon preparing for it right? (after all to save, you must be aware something is happening). Then again without uncanny dodge, you still take 1/2 damage and are assumed to be nicked, does that mean a successfull save makes you lose a finger, versus the whole hand?

Dragon Breath might be a bad example.  A Reflex Save to avoid a trap, like pincers or something else that catches your hand, might be a better analogy.
That's why the save would be very high, if allowed at all.

Fair enough I recon, but my example assumes you saw what was going to cut the bag. Now if you only saw it as it cut the bag, that is a different story.

Either way, it would suck to happen. One could complicate it by determining just how much of their hand is...?.. consumed? by the save roll, setting markers for the amount of hand left.

Example
so, that would be DC 25 to keep entire hand
roll 20 lose a finger.
roll 15 Lose multiple fingers.
roll 10 chunk of palm saved thats it.
botch lose the arm ouch.

I know it should not be staggered like that, just a quick list.

Well, let's see.  Let's go with an average of 80% humidity and 40 degrees Celsius across the entire world.  That would be 66.4 grams of water...

Some people rule it as the opening is the magic effect, so by turning it inside out you get a bag that is huge on the outside and really small inside. Which is really not very helpful.

It might be worse than that.   I almost picture it like the Dark Elf "Nothingness Grenade" from "Thor, Dark World", where you're entirely pulled in.  A save might get you out of the area of effect, but you were all in if you were in at all.

In reply to nuric (msg # 45):

Yeah thats how I interpreted it, in the 10ft void of space logic.
As for the climate change, A few well placed shots could cause some big havok. Creating avalanches, earthquakes(fault lines) messing with volcanoes ect. I doubt enough exist to directly affect ocean currents. But a few well placed ones could ruin ice shelves and in theory raise global water levels, which could alter ocean currents. Then again there are more conventional ways to do all of these.(cept fault lines, even that one is a stretch)

If you want to destroy things in a 10' area of effect, there are far, far cheaper methods than buying a new bag of holding, and a new portable hole, and destroying each for every explosion.  No matter how you combine them, you're not making a permanent gate to the astral plane, just a one-time trip that (depending on how you combine them) you may or may not get to go on (it may not affect anything around it).  I dare say, if you were a wizard who could create these devices, and you wanted to go destroy things, your time and energy would be far better spent crafting wands of fireballs (or if you only have the Craft Magic Item feat, then necklaces of fireballs).  Sure, you could remove about 65 grams of water with each "explosion" but that's barely a quarter cup of water being permanently removed from the plane/planet.  Meanwhile, you have everflowing bottles which continuously pull water from somewhere.  I think, planet-wise, there's really not much you could do to effect climate change with these devices.

In reply to Genghis the Hutt (msg # 47):

Heh, I was just thinking of what could be done taking out a 10ft diameter radius, or did I misread it? I never said it was feasible! and a 10ft sphere of water is a  lot more then 65 grams.

Permanent gate o.0 sounded like 1 time send off?

Ah, but you see, this is where they switch it up a bit.... while the guards are pointing and laughing at the wombat, the enemy soldiers are scaling the wall on the other side of the castle....

You misunderstand. They wrote rules for how long air lasts (can be found under suffocation in envirnmental rules). They would only need to research the they are writing.

The rules say that a medium creature can breath for 6 hours in a 10' cube of air. That boils down to about 1 minute per 3 cubic feet.

A portable hole opens a cylinder 6' wide and 10' deep. That comes out to about 283 cubic feet.

Put the two together and a portable hole has enough air to last a medium creature about 101 minutes, minus the volume of the creature.

A human is about 9 cubic feet, so that reduces the air by about 3 minutes.

So a medium creature in a portable hole should have about 98 minutes of air, by their own suffocation rules, yet they override that and give a portable hole only 10 minutes.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 50):

Every time the bag is opened it fills with air, however, when closed the bag is porous and "leaks" air out into the astral plane?

Is that the equivalent of an Astral Plane whoopie cushion?  :)

In reply to Eur512 (msg # 51):

If it does that, then one might want to know before trying to catch poisonous gases in there to make a trap.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 53):

Keep a tiger in their and shove random people into it. No one will ever know what happened.

I see where this is headed.  The next topic is obviously "accidentally sitting on a full bag of holding".

Which of course leads to:  what are contents?

I know there is something involving Halflings, a bag of holding, a lots of instant pudding mix, but I'm not sure I want to know the details.

Yes, but I think it was Black Pudding, a quintessential D&D ooze monster.

In reply to Heath (msg # 56):

The real secret origin of life eh?

I'm sure it resulted in something like the Fruitcake Elemental.  An attorney at Wizards gave me that Magic card for Christmas many years back...

Yes! Instant Black Pudding Mix!

I am using this!

In reply to Eur512 (msg # 59):

Go for it! rmail me the players reactions lol!