by Robert Plamondon
Originally published in Dragon Magazine #135, July, 1988.
What Can You Do With Fifty Feet of Rope?
My characters have always used a lot of rope. They’ve used it to build bridges, lower people into chasms, climb mountains, hog-tie orcs, tether mules, and create traps. The creative uses of rope are nearly endless, but most game systems barely mention it. How much does it weigh? How much can it lift? Does it come in decorator colors?
Once, in a Chaosium RuneQuest® campaign that involved looking for a lost city in a big swamp, my character wanted to bring lots and lots of rope—about 1,000′ of it, in fact. RuneQuest gives the weight and breaking strength for rope (AD&D gives nothing but a price). According to the third-edition RuneQuest Gamemaster Book, a 30-meter rope that weighs 6 kg has a strength of 366 kg. Converting this to the D&D game’s standard 50′ rope, that would mean that a 50′ rope would weigh 6.7 lb. and be rated at 805 lb.
That sounds good, except that there are lots of different sizes of rope, and adventurers have uses for many of them. In addition, a quick look at a table of rope strengths would seem to contradict RuneQuest’s numbers.… Read more ...