What size category is a 50 ft rope?

[SangoProduction]

Relevant for spells and talents that create objects up to a given size category. 50 ft of hempen rope, irl, can be around 10 pounds (which is also around 3-to-10x the weight of real swords). But, poundage, while associated with size categories, are not determinate.

The creation sphere classifies a Two-Handed weapon as the size category of the wielder (which is perhaps being a bit generously large), and says that a 10-by-10 ft, 1-inch thick wall is a small object. That's clearly for gameplay reasons, because a smaller "wall" isn't really much of wall, but let's just assume that we can use that volume, 14,400 cubic inches as our maximum Small-sized rope.

By using that assumption, a one inch-diameter cable could be about 2421.47 feet long, give or take, and still come be within the Small Wall size limit.
....So... yeah. Probably not the appropriate thing to take as our item size category. (Even though you could create a 20-by-20 hempen "covering" as a small sized object, then just fashion that into a roughly 40-foot rope without fancy manipulation beyond rolling it into a cylinder.)

Well, Lassos are a thing. They aren't 50 feet long, but they are 5 pounds, and classified as a thrown weapon...which is not a proper size category. Sodding hell. Well, it's probably "larger" than "ammunition and daggers," which are classed as 3 sizes smaller than the wielder for Creation sphere. The next step is for light weapons... I'd say a lasso probably falls in that category. So, with that taken care of, we can then assume that at twice the weight, it can be roughly equivalent to twice the size (although, again, not with 100% accuracy... but when it comes comparing rope to rope...)
So, we can assume that it is 1 size category smaller than the lasso's wielder, which for the weight given is a medium creature.

So we can come to the safe conclusion that a 50-ft rope is around the category of a Small item.

That was a lot of really unneeded work.

[Beni-Kujaku]

The volume of a human is about 0.08 m3, or 2.8 ft3, or 5000 cubic inches. It's Medium. A typical Small object would be an 8th of that (0.35 cubic feet, 600 cubic inches), and a typical Tiny object would be 0.045 cubic feet and 75 cubic inches. A 50ft long climbing rope has a cross section of about 0.8cm², or 0.125inches square. That is 50ftx 0.125 inch squared=62.5 cubic inches. That is much closer to a Tiny object, and you would require a much sturdier rope (something like a one inch wide one) to count as Small.

Of course, that's in the context of creating it. In the context of hitting it with an arrow or other piercing weapon while it's attached on both ends, it's definitely Fine, and probably Medium or Large if you're hitting with a slashing or bludgeoning weapon.

[Ramza00]

Pathfinder size categories imagine fleshy things (more on this later)

Fine / Diminutive / Tiny / Small / Medium / Large / Huge / Gargantuan


F __0 lb to 1/8 lb
D 1/8 lb to __1 lb
T __1 lb to __8 lb
S __8 lb to _60 lb
M _60 lb to 500 lb
L 500 lb to 2 tons
H 2 to 16 tons
G 16 to 125 tons
C 125 tons or more.

But those things assume fleshy bodies for the size, it does not take in account density where a thing is heavier in a flesh body and thus takes up less space to achieve the same total weight. Thus things like air elementals (which is not flesh but elemental outsider) are 8 lbs of a Huge Size creature (Huge to Elder Elemental) while a huge Giant would be 2 to 16 tons aka weights more by an amount of 500x to 4000x for the same size taking place in the square. By contrast an Earth Elemental which is Huge is 48,000 lbs aka 24 tons and is 1.5x the largest giant in weight for the same size creature.

I always hate to bring up real life stuff like periodic tables in a fantasy game, but a human is about 1.01 gram per cubic centimeter with our weight (humans are mostly water) vs the amount of space we take up, while other things are


water is 1.0 g/cc
aluminum is 2.7 g/cc,
copper is 9.0 g/cc,
lead is 11.4 g/cc,
gold is 19.3 g/cc, tungsten and uranium is also in the 19 ish grams per cc.

now I did not list all the metals but here is a longer list http://www.commercialmetalexchange.com/Metal-Distributor.cfm?pContentName=incCommunityTipsView. cfm&pageName=cws_fCruisingTipsView&pCommunityTipsId=3

Wood is weird for it depends on the type of natural wood (the species) vs artificial wood product, some wood floats some sinks due to density, some wood is 1/9th the density of water like balsa wood and some wood is 33% more dense than water like ebony wood. And like I said earlier treated man made wood products can be more or less dense for sometimes we want to compress it to change the building properties.

Similar logic with earth and various types of stones and rocks.

[Hish]

According to the PHB page 166, a barrel is a medium object, a chair is a small object, and a book is a tiny object. I would say a coil of rope is smaller than a barrel, larger than a book, and about the same size/weight/bulk as a chair. So 50 ft of rope is a small object.

[SimonMoon6]

Unfortunately, there doesn't tend to be a good way to categorize the size of objects in the same way as creatures. This can be really annoying when trying to use the "animate objects" spell.

In 3.0, it was annoying because "animate objects" could animate 1 cubic foot per level but gave no more guidance than that. So, if you took 20 cubic feet of gold and used "fabricate" to turn it into one super thin sheet of gold leaf, you could have an animated object much like a "lurker above" that was colossal in two dimensions but smaller than diminutive in the third dimension. So, what size category is that? Or you could make a thin ribbon that is colossal in one dimension but really small in the other two dimensions. What size category is that? (You might be better off animating an army of diminutive or tiny lead miniatures of course. You can fit a *lot* of them in 20 cubic feet.)

In 3.5, that changed to "one small object per level" with a colossal object counting as 32 small objects. So, a 20th level caster could only animate at most 20 lead miniatures (Boo!), but could they animate the "gold leaf monster"? Is it colossal? Or only Gargantuan (which counts as 16 small creatures)? Or less than that?

And that also means that objects smaller than small can not be animated at all. So, in-game, a character can find out the size of objects by trying to use the "animate objects" spell on them. Unfortunately, we have no such recourse in real-life to figure out the same thing.

[ericgrau]

As a DM I would say a coiled rope is about as big as a dog not a cat, size small, let's move on. Uncoiled I would call it too big.

If we want to get technical hemp is 93 lb. per cubic foot so 0.11 cubic feet

V = 2(π^2)(r^2)R

Assuming roughly R = 10r:

V = 2(π^2)((0.1R)^2)R
V = 0.02(π^2)R^3
0.11 = 0.02(π^2)R^3
0.557=R^3
R=0.557^(1/3)
R = 0.82 ft.
D = 1.64 ft ~=20". And d = 2", so it's actually 22" across.

Ok, I think that's more like a cat. Size tiny.


According to the PHB page 166, a barrel is a medium object, a chair is a small object, and a book is a tiny object. I would say a coil of rope is smaller than a barrel, larger than a book, and about the same size/weight/bulk as a chair. So 50 ft of rope is a small object.
I think it's more like a tome than a pocket book, otherwise that's a bit of a jump from chair. Plus there probably isn't any small print with handwritten documents.

This is also helpful: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/movementPositionAndDistance.htm

It says tiny is 1-2 ft. in height or length. Now consider the height of a chair vs. the width of a rope, not only the width of the chair.