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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vegepygmy" data-source="post: 4735549" data-attributes="member: 40109">A player of mine has raised a valid question, IMO. First, the pertinent rules: USE ROPE (Dex) With this skill, you can make firm knots, undo tricky knots, and bind prisoners with ropes. (PHB page 86.) Grasses, weeds, bushes, and even trees wrap, twist, and entwine about creatures in the area or those that enter the area, holding them fast and causing them to become entangled. The creature can break free and move half its normal speed by using a full-round action to make a DC 20 Strength check or a DC 20 Escape Artist check. (Entangle spell description, PHB page 277.) An entangled creature moves at half speed, cannot run or charge, and takes a –2 penalty on attack rolls and a –4 penalty to its effective Dexterity score. (PHB page 308.) helpless: Paralyzed, held, bound, sleeping, unconscious, or otherwise completely at an opponent’s mercy. A helpless target is treated as having a Dexterity of 0 (–5 modifier). (PHB page 309.)Now the set-up:The PCs got into a fight with a druid, who cast entangle on them. After failing his save and becoming entangled, one PC tried to break free by making an Escape Artist check. I reminded him that his effective Dexterity score was 4 less, so his Escape Artist check modifier (normally +4) should be 2 lower (+2).A different player questioned whether that made sense. By RAW, I have no doubt that it is correct, but I began to question the RAI. The player pointed out that a helpless creature has an effective Dexterity of 0, and that a bound creature is considered helpless. Thus, a bound creature would suffer a severe penalty to his Escape Artist check...but the whole point of Escape Artist is to do things like escape from being tied up.Remembering that Use Rope is opposed by Escape Artist when tying someone up, at first I thought maybe that was the intent; after all, you can't take 20 on Use Rope to tie someone up, but they can take 20 to Escape Artist out of it, so Use Rope needs some kind of advantage or else it would be pretty much impossible for an ordinary person to effectively tie up another ordinary person. But then I checked the rules and found that they already account for this by giving the binder a +10 bonus simply for being the binder.Now let's take the example of my player's PC with 14 Dex and 2 ranks of Escape Artist. He normally has a +4 check modifier, but if he's entangled it drops to +2, and if someone ties him up, it drops to -3. Let's assume that the binder is a totally ordinary person with 10 Dex and no ranks in Use Rope. That person can take 10 on his Use Rope check, and with the +10 bonus for being a binder, set the Escape Artist DC at 20. Even my player's trained, agile PC can't escape by taking 20, since the highest check result he can obtain is 17. In fact, even with a +2 circumstance modifier, he still fails (19).And don't even think about escaping from manacles (Escape Artist DC 30)!So, the question: What do you think? Is that the intent? It seems to make Escape Artist (a skill that not many people spend points on anyway) even less useful than I thought. Or do the Escape Artist DCs already reflect the fact that the character is restrained in some fashion? (It seems kind of odd that they wouldn't.)</blockquote>

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