Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cleon" data-source="post: 8164434" data-attributes="member: 57383">That's an interesting reference, thanks to pointing it out.Heavens, it must be pushing 30 years since the last time I cracked open my collection's Wilderness Survival Guide. I tend to only look up 1E sourcebooks with monsters or monster conversion-related content in them these days.  Let's see, the WSG came out in 1986 so it might have been over thirty years. (Insert "get off my lawn" reference here!)Anyhow, comparing those figures to my 3E based musings, they're a decent match to my estimates for a silk rope, "somewhat smaller than 1/2 inch" and "up to 1,500 pounds" being fairly close to my silken rope (9/16 inch and 1,300 lbs) and spider's silk rope (1/2 inch and 1,800 lbs).A 1E AD&D standard rope has an encumbrance of 75 coins, although that's does not necessarily translate directly to a weight of 7.5 pounds, since 1E the encumbrance of bulky or cumbersome items (like rope or pillows) is higher than the 10 coins per pound.The WSG's rope is certainly too thin to be regular hemp - a rope weighing 7.5 pounds that was a shade under half an inch thick would have to be made of something twice as dense as hemp. It ought to be roughly 7/10th of an inch rather than the 13/16th inch of the 10-pound 3E hempen rope.The simplest explanation is that it's a silk rope, and the "climbing rope" is just a slightly thicker silk rope (4/3rd the heaviness to account for its breaking load being 2,000 pounds rather than 1,500).  Since it's also 3 or 4 times longer than the standard 50 foot rope at 150-200 ft., it should weigh roughly 4 times as much.Contrariwise, the 1E Player's Handbook spell entry for minor creation mentions "a bit of twisted hemp to create rope" and presumably the standard rope in that book's equipment list is hempen (as many ropes in Ye Good Olde Days were). The 1,500 pound safe load could just be because the author used a 1:4 safe ratio rather than the 1:6 one I did.Hold on, consider that the WSG rope has a 20% chance of breaking. In 3E that would occur in an SRD breakage roll when a Strength modifier equals the Break DC minus 17 (i.e. the rope breaks on a roll of 17-20, so for a Break DC 23 hempen rope the breaking force must equate to a +6 Strength mod, or have a Strength of 22-23).In 3E objects risk of breaking starts with a 5% chance since it's rolled on d20s.We know there's a 20% chance of "fraying and breaking" at over 1,500 pounds, if it followed the 3E Carrying Capacity scaling it'd have a 5% chance of breaking under a load that's equivalent to a Strength modifier three points lower. A –3 modifier would require a –6 (or maybe –5?) reduction in the Strength score, A +/– 5 or 6 point change in Strength modifies a creature's carrying capacity by 200% or 230%. Which'd mean a rope that has a 20% chance of failing to an load over 1,500 pounds (according to 3E RAW) have a 5% chance of breaking at a load over 650 or 750 pounds.That 750 pounds is 75% of the 1,000 pounds of my hemp rope guesstimate, which perfectly matches an encumbrance that's 75% that of a 3E hemp rope, so maybe these numbers match up to the AD&D rope being a three-quarter strength version of the SRD hempen rope (that is mysteriously extra-dense to make it thinner).Of course the above few paragraphs is trying to bend the 3E rules to fit real-world physics.I think it's more reasonable to say the rope in the Wilderness Survival Guide is some kind of silk rope, as that's a better match to the weight and safe load.  There's also a chance that the author might have looked up the figures for modern climbing ropes (which is roughly equal to a silk rope in strength and density since they tend to be made of nylon or a similar material).I'll just pretend not to notice that silk rope appears in the 1E Oriental Adventures for the equivalent of 25 gp (and hemp rope for the equivalent of 10 cp - a mere quarter of the 4 sp it costs in the 1E PHB!).That would ruin a beautiful theory!</blockquote>

Verification