Bag of Holding Clarification

[VikingIrishman]

My players never cease to challenge my knowledge of the rules. Bags of Holding, for example.

Pathfinder Reference Document wrote:

If a bag of holding is placed within a portable hole, a rift to the Astral Plane is torn in the space: bag and hole alike are sucked into the void and forever lost. If a portable hole is placed within a bag of holding, it opens a gate to the Astral Plane: the hole, the bag, and any creatures within a 10-foot radius are drawn there, destroying the portable hole and bag of holding in the process.

We all know these rules. But what's to stop one from putting a Bag of Holding inside a Bag of Holding? A Type I weighs 15 pounds and can hold up to 250 pounds. That means you could stuff 16 Type I Bags of Holding into a Type I Bag of Holding (with an extra 10 pounds of room for snacks), meaning that one 15 pound bag could be holding up to 4010 pounds.

Has this been addressed or answered already? Is this actually legal?

EDIT: Actually, that Type I could hold seven Type IIIs, for a total of 7005 pounds.

[PirateDevon]

I'm under the impression that there is no hard rule for bags in bags and that it is left up to DM Fiat/Campaign Setting...

If your group is spending the resources equivalent to a market value of over 50,000 gp to carry 7000lbs at a total weight of 15lbs encumbrance, as a DM I would say "more power to you".

I would doubt with a capital "D" that you will ever get anything resembling an official "answer" on this one. My 2 CP.

[Maldollen]

SRD wrote:

Extradimensional Spaces

A number of spells and magic items utilize extradimensional spaces, such as rope trick, a bag of holding, a handy haversack, and a portable hole. These spells and magic items create a tiny pocket space that does not exist in any dimension. Such items do not function, however, inside another extradimensional space. If placed inside such a space, they cease to function until removed from the extradimensional space. For example, if a bag of holding is brought into a rope trick, the contents of the bag of holding become inaccessible until the bag of holding is taken outside the rope trick. The only exception to this is when a bag of holding and a portable hole interact, forming a rift to the Astral Plane, as noted in their descriptions.

The bolded text is probably the closest we'll find to an official answer.

I've been contemplating packing my handy haversack full of bags of holding, myself. Or portable holes, for that matter, since a handy haversack is not a bag of holding, and does not trigger the "only exception" mentioned above.

Or not. GM discretion and player common sense should come into play here: don't take (too much) advantage of loopholes, or suffer the wrath of the GM. That, and I like to be able to find what I need in my bags without taking multiple minutes to do so.

[VikingIrishman]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Having an obscure bit of rules text to point to will help solidify things for my rules lawyer. ^_^

[PirateDevon]

Maldollen wrote:

Quotes the SRD

Well I'll be...

I tried to find something like that before but I couldn't...

No bags in bags for you!

[King of Vrock]

I'm not a huge fan of the BoH Nesting doll theory. According to RAW mixing a BoH and a Portable Hole or vice-versa has the listed effects and bringing an XD item into a XD space (created by spells) suppresses the magic item while its in the space.

I feel there should be some kind of drawback though. I like the UMD activate blindly magical mishap rule.

UMD:

Activate Blindly: Some magic items are activated by special words, thoughts, or actions. You can activate such an item as if you were using the activation word, thought, or action, even when you're not and even if you don't know it. You do have to perform some equivalent activity in order to make the check. That is, you must speak, wave the item around, or otherwise attempt to get it to activate. You get a +2 bonus on your Use Magic Device check if you've activated the item in question at least once before. If you fail by 9 or less, you can't activate the device. If you fail by 10 or more, you suffer a mishap. A mishap means that magical energy gets released but doesn't do what you wanted it to do. The default mishaps are that the item affects the wrong target or that uncontrolled magical energy is released, dealing 2d6 points of damage to you. This mishap is in addition to the chance for a mishap that you normally risk when you cast a spell from a scroll that you could not otherwise cast yourself.

--DeepVrockets (LOL, anyone remember THAT spell?)

[StabbittyDoom]

The ruling that's been done in my games is that the portal closes while a BoH is inside another BoH. This means you need to completely remove the inner bag as one action, then remove the item from the inner bag as another. Also, if you have 7 bags of holding inside the main one, you better hope you're labeling the inner bags and locking it down the main bag at night in some manner. (When a 6 year-old asthmatic princess can steal your entire castle-filling horde in one go, you have issues with loot safety.)

[FarmerBob]

Another thing you could do is rule that this "Such items do not function, however, inside another extradimensional space", means that in addition to items no longer being accessible, a nested bag's weight returns to be the sum of all items that it contains. By doing that, if you choose to nest bags of holding, you get no capacity benefit, and in fact it is worse since the bag itself has weight.

Really up to the DM if they want to discourage the nesting of the bags or not.

[StabbittyDoom]

I usually encourage players to make a second "bag" effect on the same bag that switches which extradimensional space it opens to with a command word. This is costlier, but is very convenient. I even allow this command word to be a free action as part of the action to remove an item.
You can also mess with people by having the "default" bag open up to some horrible undead/construct creature (or make it a bag of devouring), and having the real loot in all the other spaces.