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If you cast Mage Hand on a 1 lb non-magical saucer, you can float it around, right? What if there is a 1 lb teacup on the saucer? Can you still move the saucer around, with the teacup? What if a 2 lb kitten is on the saucer? What if the kitten is wearing a magic item?
Say you're an average female halfling, which by Core RAW means you are 2 ft 11 in tall and you weigh 30 lbs. You cast Reduce Person on yourself, so that you are now 1 ft 5.5 in tall and you weigh 3 lb 10 oz (Tiny size). If you sit on the saucer, can you Mage Hand it around, in essence riding your flying saucer as if it were a flying carpet with a move of 15 and requiring concetration?
Could you cast Unseen Servant and have your Servant carry you around? How high off the ground can it lift you?
What if, while you are reduced, you use Disguise Self to make yourself appear one foot shorter? Now you appear to be 5.5 inches tall -- Diminutive size, or maybe even Fine. Can you accrue any of the modifiers for being Diminutive or Fine? A Tiny creature has a +8 on Stealth checks, and a Diminutive one has a +12 … would you grant a bonus to Stealth to the 5.5-inch-seeming reduced halfling? How about if you are also floating around with a Mage Hand? That's gotta be pretty quiet.
Say you make or buy a Mithril or Darkwood box with airholes on all sides that weighs 10 lbs. Say you are a reduced female halfling weighing 3 lb 10 oz. Your Unseen Servant can carry 20 lbs. Can you hop in the box, gaining the benefit of improved cover, and let your Servant carry you around? While you cast spells and fire teensy crossbow bolts from inside through the airholes? Since you have improved cover in your box, you are immune to AoOs and can make Stealth checks in there, right? You can even snipe from in there, right?
Thanks in advance for the comments!
I love this!
You just better watch out for the +5 gnome-bane flyswatter.
This is the kind of stuff I want to do just to watch my GM's eye twitch as my rogue halfling sneak attacks dragons to death from within my mighty box fortress.
This is hilarious. But is it legal? Can you lift yourself with your mage hand? The Unseen Servant, that appears a given. And safer.
...my mage hand is strong.
Even better, the distance restriction on mage hand is between you and the object, not the object and the ground. The designers probably assumed you'd be on the ground, but if you are in the object, you can fly as high as you want! (albeit very slowly)
The problem with riding a mage hand is directing it to move anywhere; the somatic component - pointing - is going to wind up flipping the hand over as soon as you try to point to where you want it to go!
Mage-Hand-Flying-Saucer problems:
While the movement of the object being moved isn't specified, one could reasonably ask whether it is violent motion or not.
Anyway you are pretty much a sitting duck in your saucer, spending a standard action to concentrate and a move action to direct it. As soon as you try any other action, you fall to the ground.
Unseen-Servant-Action-Box:
This seems totally doable! AoOs can be nasty, since the servant dies pretty much automatically, and you got to hope that the servant doesn't fall into the water somewhere. Otherwise the fortress is an excellent idea.
Mage Hand is very limited ... a friend pointed out to me that it can only lift "one nonmagical, unattended object weighing up to 5 lbs." And arguably, a saucer with a kitten on it or a fortress box with a reduced halfling in it is attended (by the klitten or the halfling). So Mage Hand seems out.
At low levels especially, the Unseen Servant is a goodie -- it has no AC and cannot be attacked, and it provokes no AoOs. As soon as you take area / energy damage, however, bye bye. But at higher levels you can get an Improved Familiar to carry your fortress box around for you. A Small Air Elemental would likely serve just fine! Just have feather fall prepped for when you are dropped.
Edit: Oh, and Unseen Servants can walk on water ... and wooden fortress boxes can float!
I used to have a character sort of like this, it was a Gnome Sorcerer with a Permanent Reduce Person. She had fantastic Stealth, with the Go Unnoticed feat and she specialized in the Cloak of Dreams spell... basically running around everywhere unseen, making everyone fall asleep.
I like the idea of a familiar carrying it around...
Fun fact: You can do this even if you are much bigger if you have an Improved Familiar: Air Mephit and give it appropriately sized Muleback Cords and that magic belt that gives you a permanent Ant Haul effect *(can't remember the name off-hand). Between the Mephits comparatively high Str (13 I think) with the two magic effects it ends up with a light carrying capacity of something like 450lbs or so...
Add its 60ft fly speed and you have an effective flying transport!
This deserves a dot, because a dot is small.
Regardless of how you want to rule characters 'seeing' you, or believing how you look,
Disguise Self never gives you a different Size Category or the modifiers for that.
I believe that the 1' should be scaled to your existing height, otherwise existing 1' tall casters would appear to have no height.
(while still being Perceivable and with their normal Size modifiers, since the spell doesn't change those)
Yes, a strict reading of the RAW would allow an 11-inch caster to appear 0 inches tall, but not invisible. Kind of like a shadow, say, or a pancake, IMSNHO.
A DM could certainly house rule an applied scaling or proportionality for Disguise Self, instead, but that would be a house rule.
Edit: Of course, following a strict RAW approach, there is also zero reason to argue that the spell can ever give a numeric bonus to anything beyond disguise checks, regardless of apparent size. Thus making yourself seem super small (or two-dimensional) is a strictly RP application, or maybe useful if you are using disguise to appear as an inhabitant of a Flatland-like plane. :-) Or if you seek a disguise as an ink blot, say, or a work of abstract art. :-)
yeah, the RAW is just kind of dumb :-)
that said, the power level of the spell isn't meant to apply size modifiers, or make you disappear, so scaling seems the best bet,
and paizo has said that many rules are written assuming 'standard pc race' sizes as the baseline.
i would just say it makes you appear smaller within the same size category and/or plausible variance for your species.
...Or if you seek a disguise as an ink blot, say, or a work of abstract art. :-)
Oooh! That's actually a really cool idea; there's this scene in the movie Wild Wild West where a bunch of guards hide by posing in front of paintings. You could take it one step further and really become as flat as the painting.
That begs the question: is pretending to be an inanimate object a disguise check or a stealth check?
is pretending to be an inanimate object a disguise check or a stealth check?
Disguise if you're pretending to be a specific object, Stealth if you try to remain unnoticed amongst objects.
So: it's a Disguise check.