What are the consequences of putting an inside-out bag of holding inside a bag of holding?

Question

Disclaimer: I'm new to D&D 5e and am currently playing my first campaign.

Recently we had a situation where another player had acquired a large number of bags of holding. Initially he was going to store the extras inside a single bag of holding, but the rest of the party quickly objected to this citing the well-known consequences of putting extradimensional objects inside other extradimensional objects.

However, I also know that the rules state that inverting a bag of holding causes all held items to spill out. This doesn't cause a rift to the Astral plane to open, and you don't consider the rest of the universe to be inside the bag of holding.

I assume this means that inverting a bag of holding must somehow collapse its pocket dimension temporarily until the bag is returned to a non-inverted state. If this is the case, it's effectively a normal bag until righted.

What are the consequences of putting an inside-out bag of holding inside a bag of holding? As far as I'm aware, there's nothing in the rules about this (not that I know the rules very well). Is this a valid way to store many bags of holding?

Answer 1

Welcome to the Astral Plane.

The bag of holding doesn't care if it's inside-out or not:

Placing a bag of holding inside an extradimensional space created by a handy haversack, portable hole, or similar item instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane.

No exception is made for inside-out bags, neither in this magic item description, nor anywhere else in the 5th Edition corpus.

Answer 2

The Rules As Written don't have an exception for being inside-out.

The rule is pretty simple:

Placing a bag of holding inside an extradimensional space [...] instantly destroys both items and opens a gate to the Astral Plane.

There's no exceptions for if the bag is currently inverted or whatever. In an technical, official sense, this idea does not work, the bags will explode, and you'd be better off spreading out the bags among the whole party or selling off any extras that you really don't want to have around.

But the DM could allow it...

The original reason for restricting the bag-in-a-bag thing is to prevent bags of holding from becoming an infinitely expandable inventory. If you could store a full bag inside another bag, you could effectively hold an unlimited amount of gear, the only limitation being how long it takes to locate and dig out any given item.

Since an inverted bag can't hold anything, there's no chance of the infinite-inventory exploit, and no real mechanical problem with this. So as a DM, you could certainly rule that it's a valid way to store the bags. If you decide to do so, you should make it clear to the players that this is you making a ruling and it won't necessarily be true at other tables, though.

(And realistically, having an infinite inventory matters a lot less today than it did in 1st Edition, where how much gold you could carry out with you had a direct impact on character XP gains!)