or your players
I have a somewhat bad memory of playing DND as like a 13 year old. We were a mess. There was a cliff, a waterfall, and rope. Someone tied rope around himself and wanted to go down. There was a lot of cross talk and the guy with the rope around said he was going down.
The DM was like “no one is holding the other end of the rope”
“What?”
One by one they went through what everyone else had said they were doing. Searching the cave rocks for secrets. Keeping watch at entrance. Fighting over who got the magic stick. Etc.
Player went over the cliff.
It was decided that the character would wash up downstream with 0 HP and would live, so long as we could get to him in a reasonable time. Lessons were learned, sort of.
I was playing D&D (for the first time) and my party were a group of exterminators killing giant spiders on city rooftops. The first thing I did when we got up there was tie myself off to a chimney. Later, we were fighting a really big spider that was right at the edge of the roof:
Me: “I hurl myself at the spider.”
DM: “You mean you try to hit the spider, or try to grapple the spider…?”
Me: “IDK, I just throw all my body weight at it.”
The spider ended up splatted dead on the ground (traumatizing some unfortunate passerby), I ended up dangling off the side of the building, and one of my party members had to make a saving throw to dodge the rope as it swung through his square, LOL!
The mental image of someone securing a rope around their waist, tying it to nothing, and descending down a cliff is hilarious to me.
I try to avoid “gotcha” DMing. It’s frustrating for players to focus on what feels like an unimportant detail. If the players are wrong about what’s unimportant, then give their characters a wisdom save to notice.
I can easily imagine what a stronger person would be able to lift. But I can’t easily imagine what a wiser person would remember to check.
Yeah, if you were actually in this situation, that isn’t something you’d just forget, unless your intelligence is extremely low (low enough that you probably wouldn’t have the idea to use the rope in the first place). This is bad DMing. They should have said something like: “You’re aware no one is holding the rope. Are you sure?” If that’s actually what they wanted to do, they can do it. If not, they are now aware.
