I generally don’t like dealing with inventory, and in one goofy game gave my players each one “Backpack of Convenient Stuff”. All that random rope, bandages, torches, flint and steel, and various random things no one cares about all fits. And it fits snugly. The only problem is that it’s not very organized, so the character must spend some time to find it (which isn’t that far a stretch from the imagination anyway).

GM: You have the Dragon Hoarde in front of you, what do you do?

Us: We take it, duh.

GM: How do you carry the mound of gold and all those tapestries?

Us: In the bag of holding.

GM: One item only.

Us: We pile the gold up on a stack of tapestries and roll it all up. We then put the rolled tapestry in the bag of holding.

GM: *sigh*

@Matthew J. Neagley: The burrowed trench idea is very nifty. I’ve never thought of it that way. I have, however, always seen the restrictions on E.S.S. somewhat enforced. Not that it was ever by the numbers so.

One thing that can get in the way of a Bag of Holding’s brokenness is the party’s determination of how it works on the outside. Maybe the bag is always at certain bulkiness, or weight limit with anything in it. Maybe the bag doesn’t admit anything larger than the opening.

Bye bye Barkolounger. Sniff Sniff.

I know I’ve found one or two justifications like that, but generally allowed inventive ideas to go through.

Leaving aside the schenanigans like “Slide a bag of holding halfway under a door and use it like a burrowed trench.”, With a bag of holding, my MO goes something like this:

DM- You enter the next room. It has jade inlay tiles and beautifuly carved furniture.
Me- I put all the furniture in the Bag of holding.
DM- O.K.
Me- Now I pry up that nice tilework and put it in the bag of holding.
DM- What?
Me- Now I search the room for anything else.
DM- aside from the small bronze wall sconce holding a guttering torch, the room is bare you psycho.
Me- I take down the sconce, extinguish the torch and put it in the bag of holding.
DM- Facepalm

In fact, my group got so sick and tired of it that I had to specificly take a break from it in the last few games.

Of course, to my knowledge, most extradimensional spaces actually DO have ratings for weight they hold, opening size, dimensions of the space, etc… so even in the fantasy reality, you can only cram so much in one.

@target: You can totally get into full plate on your own. You can only don it hastily though! You bring up a good point. Extreme realism is, generally, a hindrance to a fun time. The amount of things in any roleplaying session that are borderline for actually being possible could fill a couple of pages.

An equivalent party in the real world would probably be 4x as large not including the pack mule. After all, it’s not like you can get into a suit of full plate by yourself.

The bag of holding thing reminded me of a quote that was always brought up in my old 1st ed group whenever someone wanted to do something impossible. It was from before my time, so I don’t know the context.. and I don’t really want to. The quote is, “I turn the Bag of Holding inside-out, wrap it around myself, and walk through the castle wall.”

I think people tend to be of the opinion that if I’m paying for magical storage, I want as much magical storage as I can have. Kind of like hard drives.

@walt: Wooooow. I had forgotten the levels to which that show just got silly. Trip down memory lane. Definitely quite a few steps from Kurgan unpacking his scew-together sword.

@cole: My gaming group actually did a real like comparison one time and tried to find real equivalents to the stuff that was on our inventory sheet. We got about 3 characters worth of stuff together. 50 onces of liquid, 2 spellbooks, backpacks, clothing the equivalent of what we were carrying (4 layers of it for plate armor, etc.) Yeah. Wow. There is no way our character were carrying all of that. Not to mention the amount of weight that 100 gold coins, then 1000, etc. would realistically come to.

We even whittled down the amount of stuff to see what would be comfortable to carry on those 16 mile a day walks. It only came to a few lines on the sheet. I’m not sure there is ever going to be a “good” compromise between reality and utility of carrying everything around.

At first I tried keeping track of weights, but it became a huge boring task that no one wanted to deal with. Not to mention, I usually had the party go through 8-12 encounters before being able to rest, which meant healing potions and scrolls became a must have.

A bit of advice to adventuring parties: Spend the extra gold and get a Bag of Holding big enough to carry one or two of your corpses. Trust me on this; it beats lugging the Half-Orc around for the next week, or questioning the morality of cutting him into more manageable bits.

Even better, get a Portable Hole. But remember to get some chests and boxes and such; proper organization in such a tight space is critical. (Actually, why hasn’t anyone come up with smaller Portable Holes? I think a 3′ x 3′ ‘personal model’ or a 20′ x 15′ ‘Economy Size’ would be excellent.)