You can dip Unarmed Fighter to get proficiency with it w/o a feat. It's a monk weapon from UC and Unarmed Fighter is proficient with monk weapons (monks are NOT proficient with monk weapons from UC...go figure...).
1) One hand
2) It's not defined well. I understood it to work like a whip, sort of an in-between ranged and melee weapon. It can hit out to 20 ft away (cord + dart itself + your natural reach, basically) but you don't threaten with it and using it provokes AoOs from anyone threatening you. So, 20 ft isn't a range increment, that' how far away you can actually strike with it.
I had a monk/duelist build in mind that used Snake Style for piercing unarmed strikes and rope dart in hand to finish out iterative attacks at long reach if needed. It's also a blocking weapon, which is helpful with crane style.
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A rope dart is not retained. You do need quickdraw to make iteratives with them. The rope is about half the length of a sling. Essentially you're using a dart with a disposable sling built in.
No sling I've ever seen has anything approaching a 24-foot cord.
Rope Dart - This guy is doing a reach attack a couple times a round, and he's a doofus. Granted it only looks like a 10-foot reach, but he's not exactly a Pathfinder Monk either...
If one of my players wanted to use this, I'd let them do iterative attacks with a 10 foot reach, but anything longer than that and they'd have to retrieve with a swift action. They could combine the two, so that if they had, say, three attacks they could do two at 10 feet, one at 20, then retrieve.
Anything longer than 20 they'd have to release the rope.
Since it explicitly says you can just tug the cord to get it back, the intent doesn't seem to be that you throw it as a one-off item... I think they made a mistake in how they classified the weapon. It should be a melee finessable weapon with similar rules to that of a whip. 1-handed, can attack anywhere within the (20 ft) reach but does not threaten any of that space and using it provokes AoOs. I'm pretty sure that's how it was intended to work...
A rope dart is not retained. You do need quickdraw to make iteratives with them. The rope is about half the length of a sling. Essentially you're using a dart with a disposable sling built in.
Atarlost,
I think you are confusing the rope dart with the "dart". The dart on the weapon list is not a tavern dart, nor is it a lawn dart ( which is deadly ). It's a 12 to 18 inch heavy tipped, miniature javelin. It's hurled with a short sling thats affixed into a notch near the fletching.At least that is the weapon that it used to be in earlier versions of the game.
That version was used by Roman Auxiliaries, Greek support troops and later European Armies. It was a fairly common hunting weapon prior to guns and bow weapons. It was fairly easy to make though a little tricky to master.
As to the Rope Dart in game terms; My opinion is that its perhaps the most poorly written weapon on the list. Understandable since it breaks several of the RAW for the game. It's hard to fit into the general weapon rules.
It should NOT be a ranged weapon, the trailing rope makes long ranged attacks very hard to pull off, with the increased drag over distance.
It should be finesable.
It should have a Reach of 20'
It should probably provoke an AoO
It should require 2 hands, but not allow 2handed damage and count as a one handed weapon for style feats and unarmed strikes. ( this would prevent dual wielding, a super difficult thing to pull off)
It should get either Trip or Disarm ( maybe both)
It should get Distracting I'm not to sure about Blocking
It should be a free action to retrieve the dart
It could be a Bludgeoning, Piercing or Slashing weapon, depending on the tip.
It should only do at most 1d4 damage.
It should count as a rope in grappling situations.
That's a lot of goodness. I'll bet it had most of this originally but got nerfed for being to good as even an Exotic. I'm hard pressed to say what was intended rules wise. That it's a Ranged Weapon makes it usuable with several feats that make it more useful in some ways. Deadly Aim, Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot it also means that it skips Weapon Finesse as a feat tax for a Dex Monk. It can use Zen Archery maybe ( whatever that feat is that let's you use WIS for ranged attacks).
Despite my fondness for the weapon personally, I've yet to use the Pathfinder Rules for it. We've been using some old 3PP stats for it for several years, but I don't like them either.
I tried to use this as a weapon for competition forms years ago. With mixed results. It's a cool weapon but hard to get the hang of and not available to advanced students as they were required to use sharp weapons and the judges didn't like to be near the Buisness end of them.
I'd love to see what the Designer/Developers have to say about this weapon.
