Use Rope - Feasible as a weapon skill?

[Moonshadow]

It's probably been done before, but has anyone ever considered having a character use a ordinary house-rope as a weapon?

I mean, you can do a crapload of things with enough ranks in Use Rope, but would it be of any use as a weapon? Could you also apply Use Rope to to say, a standard length of chain as well?

It sounds sorta crazy, but I like the idea of a character who can use a length of rope not only to trip or restrain their enemy, but to also use it as a bludgeoning weapon.

[Vknight]

Lasso, or Whip. There are rules for them an plenty of Dm's would alow you to use the rope as one or the other.

[Moonshadow]

I don't want a Lasso or Whip though, I wish to be able to utilise ranks in Use Rope in order to beat the stuffing out of my opponents.

I'm talking about using say, a ships mooring rope as a bludgeoning weapon. I figured that it would come under improvised weapons, but surely having ranks in Use Rope should negate that.

[GoatBoy]

I don't know about beating them up, but in the ELH, they say that a Use Rope check of something like 50 or 100 effectively imitates the control rope spell. I guess that using it otherwise would be about the same as a club.

[Vknight]

Exatcly its a 50 or 60 actually for the Control Rope but the purpose remains that you could use it as a bludgeoning weapon otherwise its generally going to be used to start grappels of trip attempts

[dariathalon]

I doubt you're going to find anything official on this, and for the same reason think that anything homebrewed you find is very suspect. D&D doesn't treat weapon use as a "skill" because skills are much easier to get to higher levels.

Your attack bonus is generally BAB (fixed number set by level) + ability mod + magic weapon + other bonuses (usually from a feat or two, very few things give this, and when you find it it is usually very small). So for a 3rd level character that could be something like 3 (BAB) + 4 (Str) + 1 (Magic Wpn) + 1 (weapon focus or the like) = 9. (I'm sure it could be higher than that, but I'm just using it as a baseline number.)

A skill bonus can be much higher. You get up to level + 3 ranks, ability modifier, often some sort of masterwork tools, magic items (which tend to give higher skill bonuses for cheaper than magic weapons), feats (again tend to give higher bonuses). So for a baseline number on a 3rd level character with similar levels of investment. 7 (ranks) + 4 (ability mod) + 2 (masterwork item) + 3 (skill focus) = 16 Even at this low level, skill bonus outweighs the attack bonus by quite a bit. Even more than the penalty for improvised weapon that you had suggested earlier. As you go higher in levels and continue to specialize in Use Rope this discrepency will be even higher.

I'm not saying don't do it, because it does sound like kind of a cool idea and if you can get it past a DM more power to you. But by the numbers, it doesn't balance well with traditional weapon use at all.

[Tyndmyr]

I doubt you're going to find anything official on this, and for the same reason think that anything homebrewed you find is very suspect. D&D doesn't treat weapon use as a "skill" because skills are much easier to get to higher levels.

Yup. I've seen homebrew used for this exact purpose in game. It was fairly broken. You can make a pretty ridiculous tripper without needing to even bother with a full BaB class.

There's really no good way to base attacks off skills, since the pumpability of skills is pretty high, and mostly a factor of the players optimization skill. So, there's no good way to scale the DCs consistently at all.

[Quietus]

Alternatively, if someone just wants to simply, say, grab a ship's mooring rope and beat someone with it, I'd be perfectly fine with saying "Okay, use the stats for a sap in melee range, or as a whip at -4 for the weight". No skill use needed there. I'm not sure what the point of adding to a skill would be in terms of hitting people with it.

[Xiander]

Sure you can beat people up with at heavy rope. Use rope has nothing to do with that though. The skill covers tying knots, splicing robes and that sort of stuff. If you want to negate the penalty, ask your gm if he will allow weapon proficiency: rope, as a feat.

[The Big Dice]

It sounds to me like you're looking to do the Rope Dart (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrI6OuzVlUY) thing. Which is an awesome weapon in the right hands. I'm not so sure about the practicality of it, but for style it gets 10 out of 10.

[OracleofWuffing]

So, like... What I see is just, keep the rope as an improvised weapon, but you can Use Rope to knot up the end to increase its damage. The catch is, you pick the "kind" of knot you use (that is, the DC for determining your damage), and failure to hit that means you have an unknotted rope still. Then, like, the higher the DC of the knot, the more rope you need to use, so your range effectively shrinks if you don't have enough rope.

Sounds like a fun thing to figure out.:smallyuk:

[Person_Man]

Justicar can Use Rope in place of Grapple checks and Hogtie their target. Very effective, but it doesn't really kick in until late in your progression and you're essentially a one trick pony.

Exemplar can Use Rope (or any Skill) in place of Diplomacy, which can essentially be used as mind control.

The Lasso (BoED) is an exotic weapon that works very much like a net, except it has a better range increment. Oddly doesn't require any Use Rope to use properly. Similarly, harpoons, nets, razor nets, and a few other weapons have trailing ropes that can be used to prevent your enemy from moving away from you.

If you don't mind homebrew, my Magitech Templar (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=176276) has a webbing Upgrade which can be used to entangle or as a whip.

[IthroZada]

The impression I got from this was a cowboy lassoing enemies and hog tying them to take them out of the fight.

[Greenish]

Alternatively, if someone just wants to simply, say, grab a ship's mooring rope and beat someone with it, I'd be perfectly fine with saying "Okay, use the stats for a sap in melee range, or as a whip at -4 for the weight". No skill use needed there. I'm not sure what the point of adding to a skill would be in terms of hitting people with it.Isn't that sort of… flimsy? I mean, a ship's mooring rope would be, I imagine, closer to 20-40 cm in diameter. That's hardly a sap or a whip.


I could see a knotted rope used as a bludgeoning version of spiked chain, though it'd probably take a feat to pick up the proficiency.