RPGMemes

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.

They aren't limited by petty things like "societal expectations" or "intended usages"

I mean, a lot of these examples are just reasons to want to disguise yourself!

In PF1e, Alter Self is like Disguise Self, but it actually changes your body to that of another humanoid. If you have a familiar, you can use their "Share Spells" feature to skip the "self" part of Adapt Self, and cast it on them to give yourself a body double that has all of your skill ranks - and hands, and ability to speak.

Naturally, this means maxing out your Use Magic Device skill to give your little frog buddy akimbo wands to raise all sorts of hell

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).

Those all sound like disguises to me. What am I missing?

This is Priestess Guidance, she's wanted in Neverwinter for blowing up Lord Neverember's manor.

This is priestess Miko, she's wanted in Baldur's Gate for the killing an entire squad of Flaming Fist.

Both of them are Konsi disguises (and Konsi didn't do either of those things.)