Taking 20 in Use Rope - Bind a Character

[Jon_Dahl]

Yesterday I stumbled into a mindboggling problem (at least IMO).

Person A binds unconscious Person B. Mr. A ties Mr. B's hand behind his back and has all the time in the world to do this.

After this person B tries to escape the bindings.

Person A had no dex bonus, so you roll Use Rope check and get the average result 11. With +10 binding bonus result is 21. Person B has Dex bonus of +2, so he is automatically able to escape the bindings in 2 minutes.

So... even though binder gets +10 bonus to bind someone, there's still a huge advantage for the escapee due to the fact that he can take 20 (as specifically mentioned in the rules).

I talked with my players about this and we agreed that you can take 20 in use rope, because otherwise escaping carefully secured ropes is too easy. It profoundly bothers me if an average person's binding ability is randomly somewhere between 11 to 30 and ability to escape is a fixed number 20 (for an average person), thus in average there's almost a fifty-fifty chance of escaping bindings (with an escape artist modifier +0).

Please give me your input about this and before you answer please take a really close look on how this all works if escape artist is eligible for take 20 but use rope is not. Just think about how this would look like:
20 peasants carefully bind 20 swineherders and tell them to escape. In average almost half of them do escape in 2 minutes.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

Nothing in the Use Rope skill says a character can't Take 20 on it. The only thing that prevents use of Take 20 is the consequences of failure, and since there really are none while tying up an unconscious person, it works perfectly fine. The argument that a character doesn't know how well the bindings will hold until they're tested doesn't hold up because of how much time was spent making sure the bindings were solid.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

Nothing in the Use Rope skill says a character can't Take 20 on it. The only thing that prevents use of Take 20 is the consequences of failure, and since there really are none while tying up an unconscious person, it works perfectly fine. The argument that a character doesn't know how well the bindings will hold until they're tested doesn't hold up because of how much time was spent making sure the bindings were solid.

I understand your point 100% but one important factor here is to prevent silliness from happening in our games. As in the "peasants binding swineherders" -example I gave in OP. If it's fairly is easy for anyone to escape bindings, it gets kind of silly really. I don't want this and neither did my players. I'm just looking a decent way out (if such thing exists in this case).

 

[Jimlock]

As Jackinthegreen said, by RAW, one CAN take 20 on use rope to bind someone.

Therefore, the minimum score for an untrained binder with a Dex of 10 is 30 (take 20 + 10 for being the binder).

Now, to escape such bonds (the bonds of an untrained binder) one needs an escape artist score of 10. By taking 20 he goes up to 30 and he escapes...

I think it works quite fine. Don't forget that a person with an escape artist of 10 is far from being an amateur.

Moreover, in many/most cases there are two people involved in the binding. Thus with two untrained binders (Esc.A. 0, Dex 10) the DC moves up to 32. Now one needs a minimum of 12 in Escape Artist to break free.

Again, I think the system is ok. What i personally find a bit weird is that with the minimum DC of 30, the escape artist with a score of 10 break loose automatically, while the escape artist with a score of 9 does not even have a small chance of escaping.

If you still find that escaping is too easy, you can always disallow the take 20 for the escapee. Bindings with a DC of 30 are still only breakable for an escape artist with a minimum score of 10, but now, he only has a 5% chance of breaking loose ( a natural 20 on the roll).

Another solution (probably one NOT of your liking), would be to disallow both take 20s, thus leaving more room to chance. The binder(s) will always be 10 (12) points ahead, but that way I feel that the chances of an untrained escape are getting too big.

Personally I stick to RAW and allow both take 20s, despite the annoyance i mentioned above.

You either have the skill to break free, or you don't

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Silk rope is 10gp.

Manacles are 15gp, and a very simple lock is 20gp.

If you're not binding a skillmonkey, just use 35gp worth of gear to keep your prisoner bound.

 

[Vegepygmy]

I disagree with those who think RAW allows you to take 20 on Use Rope to bind someone (or any other opposed skill check).

The +10 bonus is there precisely to make up for the fact that you can take 10, but not 20, on your Use Rope check to bind someone, but they can take 20 to escape it. The +10 bonus puts the binder and bindee on otherwise equal footing -- if the binder is better at Use Rope than the bindee is at Escape Artist, the binder wins; if the bindee is better at Escape Artist than the binder is at Use Rope, the bindee wins.

That's as it should be. Furthermore, you can improve your chances of successfully binding someone by using silk rope (+2 on your check), having 5 or more ranks of Escape Artist yourself (+2 "synergy" bonus), or the DM's best friend (+2 bonus for whatever reasons the DM thinks appropriate).

 

[HoboGod]

I tend to solve this problem by making it as difficult to take 20 on escape artist as it is to take 20 on use rope. To take 20 on escape artist, the escaper must be unattended for 200 consecutive rounds (20 minutes). Any guard watching a prisoner loosening her ropes over the course of 20 minutes would surely smack the prisoner and ruin her efforts.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

"This rope has 4 hit points and can be burst with a DC 24 Strength check. It is so supple that it provides a +2 circumstance bonus on Use Rope checks."

Lol @ people so concerned about DC 30+ Escape Artist checks.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

"This rope has 4 hit points and can be burst with a DC 24 Strength check. It is so supple that it provides a +2 circumstance bonus on Use Rope checks."

Lol @ people so concerned about DC 30+ Escape Artist checks.

Streamy, usually your post are filled with wisdom but now I think you're dead-wrong.
Having STR 18 or more and bursting ropes is different. Unusually strong character deserves it. Maybe 1% of the human population of any campaign world can do that (no, I won't argue about that percentage).

However if you really take a good look at the "peasants vs. swineherders" example given in the OP, I wish you'd give something a bit more solid to this thread. I know you have it

[MENTION=40109]Vegepygmy[/MENTION]

I understand your point, but I recommend that you also take a look at the example given in the OP. I simply find that intolerable. Binding someone with a hempen rope is not a joke, anyone should be in serious doo-doo in such situation no matter who has bound you. It's not simply about opposing rolls IMO

 

[Jackinthegreen]

The time taken to bind someone normally is 1 minute. Taking 20 on that would of course take twenty minutes. If I just took 20 minutes to tie someone up, they'd damn well better have a far more difficult time trying to get out. The rules do support it so long as the binder isn't threatened or distracted. If the character he's binding isn't hindering/distracting that for whatever reason, and there's nothing else going on around them, it makes perfect sense.