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Stegyre
2009-08-27, 04:47 PM
This went absolutely nowhere in the RAW thread, perhaps because these aren't so much RAW questions as game balance questions. (Or perhaps just because I'm not patient enough to wait a whoel 24 hours for an answer.:smallredface:)

Psionic power Dimensional Pocket (lurk level 1, Complete Psionic)
By RAW, the target of this spell must be a single item, within weight limitations depending upon the level at which the spell is cast. I'm wondering what uses would be available:

(a) A single bag, full of items/gold/etc., up to the weight limit. Voila! A power to create your own, small, (hand)bag of holding. Seems to me, this isn't abusive: the bag meets the single item requirement, and we shouldn't worry about the contents. Otherwise, we get silliness like this: "Do the jewels on the pommel of my sword count? No, because they're attached. I glue all the gold pieces together into one 'item.'"

Unless the pocket is being generated by a custom item, it's probably not a good use of power points and not abusive. Even with a custom item providing the pocket, it's duplicating an existing item with both positive and negative differences that compensate quite well:

Bag of Holding: weight (15 lb), contents weight limit (250 lb), contents volume limit (30 cu.ft.) cost (2,500).

Command-word Dimensional Pocket item (ML 6): weight (negligible), contents weight (6 lb), contents volume limit (na), cost 1800*1*6 = 10,800.

(b) Multiple manifestations of this power to have several "pockets" in existence simultaneously. In practice, this could work very much like a handy haversack, with the character simply "dismissing" whichever pocket held the item he wants. Perhaps not too practical if these are actual manifestation using power points, but if someone created a command-word activated psionic item, one character could conceivably carry around a dragon's horde (!!) Would that be RAW? More importantly for this thread, would it be imbalancing? Is it the sort of thing you'd permit in your own campaign(s)?

Considering the above comparison, this is an item four times the cost of the smallest bag of holding, and a character would have to generate no less than 42 separate "pockets" to equal the carrying capacity of the bag, or over 160 pockets to approach price parity. As each activation, renewal, or dismissal is a standard action, this character would have to spend 16 minutes every 6 hours to renew all of his pockets.

On the other hand, if he spent the time, he could have up to 1,800 pockets, if he was willing to spend half of his time constantly renewing them. (That's spending 3 hours out of every 6 renewing pockets, probably not the most optimal use of his time, but I'm just trying to find the limits of abuse.) So he carries 10,800 lb at no encumberance (but an awful lot of wasted time), as much as 42 of the smallest bags of holding, minus the 630 lb weight.

Considering all the pluses and minuses, I'm of a mind that this would be okay, but maybe I'm missing some well-known BoH cheese that this would aid.

WWGITPD?
(what would GITPers do?)

Skorj
2009-08-27, 04:55 PM
5 tons at the expense of that much effort seems fine to me. The critically important thing is that there is a limit (both to size and volume) and a cost.

EDIT: BTW, I love plans by the party that are complicated to keep going and get messy when they fail. There's always entertainment to be had with stuff like this.

Stegyre
2009-08-27, 05:25 PM
EDIT: BTW, I love plans by the party that are complicated to keep going and get messy when they fail. There's always entertainment to be had with stuff like this.
I was thinking about that, too:
"Oops! You overslept. You awaken to find yourself buried in 1,800 bags of treasure. Once you dig yourself out, I'm sure you'll remember not to sleep for longer than 3 hours at a stretch."

Practically speaking, even one hour's worth of pockets (600) would be a real chore for a character. However, ten minutes (100 pockets) I could see, and a character could get a lot of versatility. An archer doesn't need to worry about running out of arrows, when he can put a double-sized quiver of 40 arrows in ten or so pockets, etc.

With large numbers of pockets, maybe a concentration roll would be appropriate to remember which pocket an item is in, making the DC depend on the number of pockets: pockets/5.

AstralFire
2009-08-27, 05:32 PM
I keep reading this thread title and all that comes to mind is, "I wonder what kind of really awesome hotpockets you could make with extradimensional spaces."

Stegyre
2009-08-27, 05:50 PM
I keep reading this thread title and all that comes to mind is, "I wonder what kind of really awesome hotpockets you could make with extradimensional spaces."
Now, I'm hungry! :smallannoyed: