Disguise Self Inspections

[MarkVIIIMarc]

Hello, I am probably typing the wrong search terms into Google for a basic question.

If you cast Disguise Self how do the inspections work?

1 Does everyone walking past you on the street automatically inspect your appearance and get to try to beat your spell save DC?

2 Do only the people who have reason to inspect your appearance? For example a merchant may think, "Why does this Dwarf male in my shop sound like a female elf with an accent from Neverexistia?

2a Who would automatically be inspecting everyone? The one most over dedicated solder of the town guard who is hunting for your party? Does that mean he spent 100 actions over the last hour investigating everyone he saw?


******************Spell Text********************
1st-level illusion
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 hour
You make yourself – including your clothing, armor, weapons, and other belongings on your person – look different until the spell ends or until you use your action to dismiss it. You can seem 1 foot shorter or taller and can appear thin, fat, or in between. You can’t change your body type, so you must adopt a form that has the same basic arrangement of limbs. Otherwise, the extent of the illusion is up to you.
The changes wrought by this spell fail to hold up to physical inspection. For example, if you use this spell to add a hat to your outfit, objects pass through the hat, and anyone who touches it would feel nothing or would feel your head and hair. If you use this spell to appear thinner than you are, the hand of someone who reaches out to touch you would bump into you while it was seemingly still in midair.
To discern that you are disguised, a creature can use its action to inspect your appearance and must succeed on an Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC.

[Unoriginal]

Hello, I am probably typing the wrong search terms into Google for a basic question.

If you cast Disguise Self how do the inspections work?

1 Does everyone walking past you on the street automatically inspect your appearance and get to try to beat your spell save DC?

2 Do only the people who have reason to inspect your appearance? For example a merchant may think, "Why does this Dwarf male in my shop sound like a female elf with an accent from Neverexistia?

2a Who would automatically be inspecting everyone? The one most over dedicated solder of the town guard who is hunting for your party? Does that mean he spent 100 actions over the last hour investigating everyone he saw?


******************Spell Text********************
1st-level illusion
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 hour
You make yourself – including your clothing, armor, weapons, and other belongings on your person – look different until the spell ends or until you use your action to dismiss it. You can seem 1 foot shorter or taller and can appear thin, fat, or in between. You can’t change your body type, so you must adopt a form that has the same basic arrangement of limbs. Otherwise, the extent of the illusion is up to you.
The changes wrought by this spell fail to hold up to physical inspection. For example, if you use this spell to add a hat to your outfit, objects pass through the hat, and anyone who touches it would feel nothing or would feel your head and hair. If you use this spell to appear thinner than you are, the hand of someone who reaches out to touch you would bump into you while it was seemingly still in midair.
To discern that you are disguised, a creature can use its action to inspect your appearance and must succeed on an Intelligence (Investigation) check against your spell save DC.

As said in the spell, inspecting your appearance takes an action, so it is not a "passive" thing.

Passerbies in the street who don't pay attention to you won't take that action. If you attract attention,they may take a closer look, which would be that action.

Ex: the PC has paint fall on them, passerbies have a good laugh but then notice the PC's illusory disguise shows no trace of paint, so they get curious.

Other NPCs can attempt scrutiny as part of their job, because of the context, or just because of their personalities.

Ex: a guard checking everyone who want to meet their boss, a person who is engaged in sonething illegal and as such check if they can find any trickery in the criminal contact they're meeting with, or a suspicious individual who think anyone could be a spy after their secret.


Also worth noting: people know that disguises, both magical and mundane, exist. If you meet with a casino owner to tell them they have to check their cash registers for counterfeited coins because some of their current customers are con artists, you can bet several people will be investigating your appearance. If you run into a crowd after shooting the captain of the guards, you can bet the guards will try to inspect everyone in that crowd (even if it will be extremely difficult to do so for everyone).

[Segev]

Ultimately, it comes down to, "Does this creature have a reason to spend specific action to see if you are who you appear to be?"

Though, too, I would say that any sort of intent to investigate your person at least qualifies for an Investigation check against your illusion DC. If he's patting you down for weapons, he should probably get that Investigation check even if your disguise is such that nothing "goes through" it when he touches it. At that point, it's the incidental, maybe-it-does-maybe-it-doesn't, maybe-it-isn't-noticed sorts of things. Will he notice that patting your shirt down has a slight ripple as your real shirt moves slightly differently, or that his hand went through a decorative flourish on your illusion that isn't there on the real underlying clothing? Maybe, maybe he won't. That's what the Investigation check will tell the people on our side of the fourth wall. If he succeeds at it, THEN he noticed something that revealed the illusory nature. If he fails, then either the illusion "was perfect" for that moment, or he didn't notice the imperfections.

I tend to fall into a camp where the "physical interaction reveals" thing has to be so obvious it can't be missed AND obviously flawed. A hand sinking into a "fat belly" to feel the skinny abs underneath. A noogie going straight through the hat it tried to knock off. But just shaking someone's hand, even if he's disguising his leather gloves as fancier leather gloves, at best gives an Investigation check. And I would only grant an investigation check, not an auto-success, to "arrow shooting into illusory fog" type things, too. But that's me; there are lots of long arguments on these boards about this topic.

[Chronos]

Yeah, it has to be someone making a conscious effort to spend a bit of time to take a close look at you. Even if they don't suspect that you're under an illusion, and are inspecting you closely for some other reason, they still have a chance to notice it. But if they're not making that effort and taking that time (i.e., spending an action), they don't notice anything.

And I also agree with Segev that physical interaction only breaks an illusion if it reveals an incongruity. An elf disguised as a human and shaking someone's hand won't break the illusion, because an elf hand feels basically the same as a human hand. An elf disguised as a lizardfolk shaking someone's hand will break the illusion, because an elf hand doesn't feel scaly.

[Corran]

1 Does everyone walking past you on the street automatically inspect your appearance and get to try to beat your spell save DC?

Nope. But you can use passive scores if it matters. Advantage/disadvantage at DM's discretion.

2 Do only the people who have reason to inspect your appearance? For example a merchant may think, "Why does this Dwarf male in my shop sound like a female elf with an accent from Neverexistia?

Yep. You dont need to roll to know that something is up, or to even understand that this must be an illusion. But rolling and succeeding can take the uncertainty away, however small it was.

2a Who would automatically be inspecting everyone? The one most over dedicated solder of the town guard who is hunting for your party? Does that mean he spent 100 actions over the last hour investigating everyone he saw?

Yes. This soldier is rolling. Except for when they are distracted, in which case you decide if they fail automatically or if they suffer disadvantage.

[Chronos]

This isn't a good case for passive checks, because the check only happens at all if someone is using an action, which the vast majority of people won't be. In the relatively unusual case where someone does have reason to check, just roll for them.

[Unoriginal]

This isn't a good case for passive checks, because the check only happens at all if someone is using an action, which the vast majority of people won't be. In the relatively unusual case where someone does have reason to check, just roll for them.

I wouldn't call that case "relatively unusual". Someone checking someone else's appearance more intensely to try and learn more about them is a very common occurence.

Someone doesn't have to be thinking "I'll check for disguises" to take the time to investigate, it can be things like a farmer checking how wealthy their interlocutor seems to be or a priest checking if the person they're looking at was ever at one of the religious ceremoniessaid priest officiated.

[Segev]

I wouldn't call that case "relatively unusual". Someone checking someone else's appearance more intensely to try and learn more about them is a very common occurence.

Someone doesn't have to be thinking "I'll check for disguises" to take the time to investigate, it can be things like a farmer checking how wealthy their interlocutor seems to be or a priest checking if the person they're looking at was ever at one of the religious ceremoniessaid priest officiated.

I think the "relatively" qualifier is meant to indicate that, since most people are not passively checking for disguises, the people who are stopping to investigate are unusual relative to the majority, not that it is unusual that there would be people doing so at all.

And since it requires an action to perform the Intelligence (Investigation) check, it should be rolled because it is not something constant and ongoing, but rather each instance is a discrete instance.

[Unoriginal]

I think the "relatively" qualifier is meant to indicate that, since most people are not passively checking for disguises, the people who are stopping to investigate are unusual relative to the majority, not that it is unusual that there would be people doing so at all.

And since it requires an action to perform the Intelligence (Investigation) check, it should be rolled because it is not something constant and ongoing, but rather each instance is a discrete instance.

I agree with this, then.

It's a common occurence, but not a passive one.

[Sorinth]

Even though I agree that it could/should be a regular occurrence for attentive guards to give everyone they meet a quick check I'm not sure rule of fun it makes sense for every guard you come across to make a roll. So I think you want to stick to the general advice of when to call for skill checks which is basically when it's interesting for both success and failure. So for the random guard it's not interesting for both cases so no check needed.

[Segev]

Even though I agree that it could/should be a regular occurrence for attentive guards to give everyone they meet a quick check I'm not sure rule of fun it makes sense for every guard you come across to make a roll. So I think you want to stick to the general advice of when to call for skill checks which is basically when it's interesting for both success and failure. So for the random guard it's not interesting for both cases so no check needed.

Generally agreed. Though if you really feel it improbable they would automatically fail to notice, it probably means the results would be of interest.

[JellyPooga]

This isn't a good case for passive checks, because the check only happens at all if someone is using an action, which the vast majority of people won't be. In the relatively unusual case where someone does have reason to check, just roll for them.

Just because it requires an action doesn't mean it can't use a passive score. A guard (or PC) checking everyone coming through a gate is a text-book "repeated/over time use" passive investigation and a bounty hunter hidden in the alley opposite watching for someone magically disguised qualifies on "unknkown to the players" grounds. As a GM i would use Passive Investigation for NPC's a lot more than as a Player, but the latter is also circumstantially viable/possible.

[Chronos]

My point is, if all fifty people at the village market were going to make a check, then obviously that would be impractical to roll for them, and so you'd need something like passive checks. But it's probably not going to be more than one or two people at the market who are checking, and it's no big deal to roll for those one or two people.

Nor is this one of those cases where the DM would need to keep hidden from the player the fact that they're rolling. If the player is using a disguise, then they know that they might be some people who might see through that disguise, so the one or two rolls wouldn't give anything away.