Disguising your true nature

[martixy]

What other ways exist within D&D that allow you to disguise your true nature besides (the obvious) - Disguise skill, Disguise Self spell and the various Polymorph spells?

I.e. if you have a monstrous appearance(say, you're a drider) and you want to pass for a regular human/elf/whatever so you don't have everybody running away screaming from you on sight.

I'm looking for something that is at least Su, or preferably Ex. Should fool everything besides True Seeing. Bonus points if there's a way even around that(is there?).

[Segev]

I'm honestly not sure what you're looking for once you've excluded "disguise skill." Anything that is "make this look like something else without using magic" is going to fall under that skill.

There's the veil spell, which can affect a whole room and its occupants to look like somewhere else filled with different kinds of creatures than are really there. But that's a higher-end Illusion spell.

You could, possibly, use Bluff with a permissive DM and a massive penalty to lie and claim they're just imagining things and hope they believe it.

[martixy]

I'm not excluding it. I am simply aware of it, just wanted to know of the more obscure ways to do so.

[Hiro Quester]

A 13th level Druid gets the Thousand Faces Su ability:


A Thousand Faces (Su)
At 13th level, a druid gains the ability to change her appearance at will, as if using the disguise self spell, but only while in her normal form. This affects the druid’s body but not her possessions. It is not an illusory effect, but a minor physical alteration of the druid’s appearance, within the limits described for the spell.

But even better would be a hat of disguise. http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm#hatofDisguise

[Bad Wolf]

You could, possibly, use Bluff with a permissive DM and a massive penalty to lie and claim they're just imagining things and hope they believe it.

"I'm not actually a black dragon, I'm a pixie."

[Segev]

"I'm actually a gold dragon."
"Really? You look like an elf."
"Well, you know how gold dragons are shapeshifters?"
"Yeah...?"
"And you know how your mom used to tell you not to make that face, or it would freeze that way...?"

[Zaq]

If you want to fool True Seeing, you actually can't do better than the mundane Disguise skill, since True Seeing doesn't pierce it. If you can afford a couple levels in Spymaster (Complete Adventurer), your cover identities get really hard to pierce, even by magical divination or attempts to read your thoughts.

If you just want a big bonus to Disguise, a level in Egoist (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/psm/20070314a) can get you a changeling's Minor Change Shape ability, which is an easy (and Supernatural) +10 on Disguise checks. (Technically, by the strictest RAW, it's a +20: it gives you the effect of Disguise Self, which is a typeless +10, and the text of Minor Change Shape also gives a +10 circumstance bonus, and as bonuses of different types, they stack. But very few GMs will allow that.)

[eggynack]

I'm a fan of fangshields druid substitution levels from champions of valor. They grant humanoid wild shape as one of their trades, and as you need to be a non-humanoid to take them, it's practically designed for exactly this purpose.

[Psyren]

The two options you've covered are:

- Look like something else
- Turn into something else

The one you haven't covered yet is "ride around inside something else" - e.g. possession. If you're inside an elf's head after all, to an onlooker you'd be an elf. Magic Jar is the core way to do this (stashing your body in a bag of holding, perhaps with a bottle of air, and carrying the gem.) You can also be shrunk down into/stored inside an object, and be carried by a patsy (willing or unwilling) past a checkpoint of some kind.

[Username.]

The feat Perceived Alignment alters alignment by one step, though the better choice is to simply convince the DM to remove alignment from the game. In addition, for 300 gp Planar Motes can disguise your alignment for days. Recommendation: take a Contacts feat of some kind to represent a permanent seller of these motes (or permanent access to harvesting them). That an a Hat of Disguise is more than enough to go disguised for a week. The Disguise skill and Metamorphosis (or similar) is best for anything else.

[atemu1234]

"I'm actually a gold dragon."
"Really? You look like an elf."
"Well, you know how gold dragons are shapeshifters?"
"Yeah...?"
"And you know how your mom used to tell you not to make that face, or it would freeze that way...?"

This is hilarious.

But also, it's always been tempting to me to find a way to run a Druid version of Mystique from X-Men (not the organization, the comic book name).

Then I run a Changeling Rogue and forget about that dream.

[ShaneMRoth]

"I'm actually a gold dragon."
"Really? You look like an elf."
"Well, you know how gold dragons are shapeshifters?"
"Yeah...?"
"And you know how your mom used to tell you not to make that face, or it would freeze that way...?"

Oh, now you're just being awesome on purpose.



Also... don't forget spells like Undetectable Alignment and Misdirection.

[Venger]

sure, beating true seeing is easy.

if for whatever reason you didn't want to use disguise (no ranks, no hat of disguise, whatever) and wanted to use a spell instead, use "cloak of khyber." it exp****ly blocks true seeing. the catch is whatever you were using to disguise yourself must've been up for at least an hour (since it's a rakshasa spell)