The character I played the longest was a Changling Bard named Liam, and I basically built my whole character around this. We also got to start the game with a magic item, so I picked glamoured studded leather armor. Combined with maxed out bluff score, his main thing was talking his way in and out of places, including but not limited to banks in hell, vampire mob weddings, military research facilities, and the most secure prison in the world (basically also a concentration camp for partisan leaders).
He got paid for the same job 4 times, and he cast dispersion on alliances between factions by pretending to attack one while wear another faction leaders face, and he assassinated four prominent gang leaders who were in league with the police (and stole all their drugs and cash in the safe house), while I was wearing one of their members’ face (who I also killed).
I was in a campaign some years back that involved time travel in its later half. Early in the campaign, before time travel became known to us, one of our first big triumphs was to collect a bounty by killing an old war criminal that had escaped justice. He was a guy called the Butcher of Bracken Ridge who had ordered his troops to massacre thousands of prisoners of war rather than let them go.
Much later on in the campaign we discovered time travel and in one of our flubbed attempts at a targeted hop we wound up in the vicinity of Bracken Ridge, the day before the atrocity was supposed to occur. The way time travel worked you could go into the past and participate in the things going on but if you changed history in a way that interfered with your own personal timeline bad things would happen.
So my character used Disguise Self to disguise herself as the Butcher of Bracken Ridge, went to the PoW camp a day early, and ordered half of the PoWs to be massacred. The other half escaped in the confusion. The next day the “real” Butcher of Bracken Ridge arrived to find the camp deserted and that he was now a wanted war criminal.
It was kind of messed up. I was able to save half the PoW’s lives without screwing up the timeline, which was nice, but I also was responsible for massacring half of them. And also, it meant that the old war criminal we’d killed earlier in the campaign was innocent.
I think on the balance it was a good use of disguise self. But really makes you wonder.
We don’t even know if the Butcher even intended to kill any of the prisoners!
It’s a typical sci-fi “pre-crime” morality puzzle. In this case we know that he would have killed those prisoners, if he had been given the opportunity. He probably was going to that PoW camp with the intent to do so, there wasn’t any other reason for him to go there. But as it turns out he never had the opportunity, when he got there the camp was empty. So we’re left consoling ourselves that “attempted mass murder” is probably still worthy of us killing him in the end.
The morality puzzle sort of got eclipsed even later in the campaign when it turned out this was merely a dry run for a bigger version. One of the “big bads” of the campaign was a 1500-year-old immortal naga who had ruled an evil empire that whole time (the Butcher of Bracken Ridge had been in her military). She was an immortal naga because 1500 years ago she’d used a powerful wish-granting artifact to turn herself into one, making herself completely unkillable. The way we ultimately defeated her was to travel 1500 years into the past to right before she made that wish and assassinate her then when she was still a mortal human.
Then my character took the artifact and made the wish instead, becoming the Serpent Queen. The rest of the party time-travelled back to the present, and my character took the “long way around” by living through history and making all the same choices the original Serpent Queen had made. Once she got back to the present and met back up with the rest of the party she rejoined them, bringing the resources of the entire Empire of Endless Flowers along at her command. It was the most efficient way we’ve ever defeated a boss monster - it turned out she’d been secretly a party member the whole time.
But disguise self played a much smaller role in that particular gambit.
we know that he would have killed those prisoners, if he had been given the opportunity
No we don’t, all that we can guess is…
He probably was going to that PoW camp with the intent to do so
Yes, we do. We have time travel and came from a timeline where he had indeed done exactly that, and the point of divergence we introduced came only a very short time before he would have done that.
It’s like if someone has a gun that they think is loaded, and they go put it to someone’s head and pull the trigger. The fact that it was not actually loaded doesn’t absolve him.
I see, didn’t realize you were the original commenter in the campaign, I thought this was someones speculation.
So your character spent 1,500 as an immortal Serpent Queen making all the same decisions (including, I presume, some pretty horrendous ones) and they were just happy to change back to their original form?
Nah, she kept the immortal serpent body. And the Empire. She did what she could throughout history to “tweak” it into a less evil empire without making it seem less evil, and then once she reached the “present” she was fully free to get down to fixing its social ills much more fully. And it was very useful having an empire’s resources to help us deal with the other big bads, especially the omnicidal faction that was trying to destroy reality altogether.
It’s fortunate that throughout the whole campaign my character kept facing challenges to her fanatical devotion to her personal philosophy and coming through them more confident and grounded in it than ever. That preparation allowed her to remain steadfast to her goal throughout those 1500 years.
Oh, she did occasionally use a variant of disguise self to pass as her original pre-Serpent Queen self from time to time after that, to stay on the thread’s topic. But as I recall we had to houserule it a bit because I don’t think disguise self can normally make a size-large serpent look like a size-medium humanoid.
Just go back again as the guards and fake the deaths of half of the POWs you slaughter
Then go back as the Butcher and pretend you’ve been killed by the party! You’re much higher level now, you can take and fake a beating
Wait, I feel like I’ve seen something like this in an anime before
