The Crimson Binome
Hero
See the earlier example, regarding gym class. Climbing a vertical rope is hard. Most people can't do it. It shouldn't be taken as a given that everyone would automatically succeed.The only reason the rope is free standing in the first place is because of the magic spell. Ropes don't free-stand in real life.
Maybe that gets into your definition of "cliff", but a shallow enough surface that's covered in foot-holds would be trivially climbable by most people. A vertical rope with no adjacent surface would be substantially more difficult.And it's absolutely absurd to compare ANY climbing of a rope to a cliff, regardless of how hard you think it should be to climb a rope.
I'm not talking about how long the rope needs to be, or the duration of a short rest. I'm talking about certainty vs uncertainty, DM adjudication in task resolution, and the difficulty of climbing a rope without support.No, you want to nerf the spell for no reason, eliminate the obvious purpose of the spell and add rules that aren't there.
At your table, your DM may choose to handwave the difficulty of climbing a rope. That doesn't mean any other DM is adjudicating incorrectly by requiring a DC 10 Athletics check to do so.