Spell Redesign: Rope Trick
It’s a short rest spell that doesn’t last long enough for a short rest.
Rope trick is intended to give your party a brief reprieve from the dangers of your local dungeon, guard, or whatever other excuse you’d like to hide for an hour. The spell is often interpreted as not lasting long enough for a short rest, which brings into question several potential issues with the spell’s design:
If your referee does determine it lasts long enough for a short rest, the spell ejects you from the space at the short rest’s conclusion.
If the spell is deployed as little as 10 feet up, this process will inflict fall damage.
You can pull the rope back in to keep bad guys from travelling upwards, meaning there’s no protective benefit to using a longer rope (making the safe space higher up).
The rope can still be useful for reaching higher spaces, but I’ll note spider climb and levitation both work better for this purpose. What’s that? spider climb and levitation target one creature? If you need more creatures to go up, cast levitation on a grappling hook (tied to a rope of any length, btw).
So all in all, we have a short rest spell that does not actually provide you with a short rest, has some vague protective function, and regrettably can’t be used for much else (that other spells aren’t significantly better at). So for this redesign, I find myself just increasing the utility of this spell.
Alright, quick review of the changes:
The duration now permits short rests without bean counting minutes or what counts as light activity.
I’ve clarified the surface area available.
I’ve increased the length of rope usable. This is purely to inspire shenanigans, because Dungeon Masters are ultimately terrible people who deserve worse.
Easy changes for common problems. Any company not obsessed with nerfing spellcasters until game masters stop complaining (i.e. never) would have made simple changes similar to these long ago.
Well, the biggest new use for this spell is hauling people. It works like floating disc, but isn’t as susceptible to just swiping people or material right off it. However, moving goods into the extradimensional space is more difficult than just loading people into it, requiring extra spells or items to accomplish this. Finally, the rope is obviously vulnerable while tied to whatever giant, carriage, or airship is hauling the spell.
I feel obligated to leave a small note about why I develop changes like this. I don’t like D&D’s spellcasting race to the bottom! Spells were originally released as solutions to problems. To compensate for the reliable nature of these solutions, you were given limited selections of said solutions, and had to choose them in advance. This risk-reward structure encouraged you to find nails compatible with your hammers, which had a bunch of other positive benefits. Following editions of D&D made these spells less effective, because DMs couldn’t bear to see their precious big bad get ensnared by a spell. The big bad had to get a saving throw vs being ensnared, but this sucked for players who still had to choose their solutions (which were no longer solutions) ahead of time. To compensate, the players got to choose even more solutions, and under less strenuous circumstances. To compensate for GM whining again, big bad guys had to be given Legendary Resistances, which would save a bad guy if he failed his save.
What this means is, we have for 40 years sunk deeper and deeper into appeasing GMs who do not want their bad guy to be defeated for any reason other than losing his very last hitpoint. The game gets less strategic, and broadly less tactical as well as a result, because giving monsters interesting options in combat actually doesn’t affect the game master’s satisfaction at all. What the GM wants is to feel like their bad guy didn’t get taken out too quickly, a wish which only the dumbest imaginable “creatives” would think twice about trying (and ultimately failing) to grant. People who do not understand the game think you can put a single encounter in front of the players and still play D&D. Doubling the hitpoints and damage output doesn’t replace the 5 other encounters your players would normally expend resources on. If you want “boss” encounters in a game like D&D, you don’t just need multiple encounters per night; you need multiple boss encounters per night to run the game as intended. You should expect your players and monsters are going to roll higher or lower in a given encounter, making it swing one direction or another. Your players could feasibly trounce a dragon and struggle against 12 skeletons in the next room. If you want to preserve a specific type of encounter and ensure your players struggle, there is no substitute for multiple encounters.