Would someone please explain the ever-present joke about this thing to me? It seems to pop up everywhere but I just don't understand what's so funny about it (if anything at all).
Sorry for asking stupid questions, maybe this is a well known joke in the US and I don't get it cause I'm from Europe?
10 foot poles where considered more or less standard equipment, and appeared on the lists of equipment that you could buy all over the place in OD&D and 1st edition books. So did iron spikes and caltrops, and chalk . . .
The point was that many early players had ideas for exploring the dungeon that involved this equipment, thus this equipment became standard. 10' poles, for example, could be used to measure out how deep a pit was, or to touch a door that might be trapped.
In 2nd and especially in 3rd edition, there is a ton of equipment all over the place, and less of it is considered "standard." Heck, some characters don't mind just plowing through traps and taking the damage, and some rogues would rather spend the extra gold on a masterwork set of theives tools to give them a bonus to find traps and disarm them.
3rd edition, with all of its various skills and feats, has diversified how things are done, so there are fewer standard pieces of equipment.
But old timers remember fondly how many times the 10 foot pole saved their lives.
Oh, by the way, the iron spikes were used to spike a door open so it couldn't close behind you and trap you in a room . . .
Oh, by the way, the iron spikes were used to spike a door open so it couldn't close behind you and trap you in a room . . .
I have never seen Iron spikes used that way (not saying they have never been used like that though) - but spiking a door closed has been very populer at my table over the years.
I started playing along with 3.0, but I still loves me the 10-foot pole. Sure, they might be slightly silly and cumbersome, but they're damn useful. See how deep the trap is! Push open unlocked doors from a distance! Have a light-spell-on-a-stick! The last pure dungeon crawl I played in, a ten-foot pole saved my life at least three times (although it started as a longspear, then a ten foot pole, then a five foot pole, then finally kindling).
Lol, I remember the days when 10ft poles and iron spikes and flasks of oil and 50' rope were indeed standard equipment; you didnt leave to adventure without them. Nobody now adays carrys them; we used them mostly for tapping along on the floor for traps if we didnt have a theif or a cleric for checking traps. They can be good for testing some illusions and crossing pits, good for emergency litters and ladders if you have rope or blankets. I have heard more than a few semi sexual jokes about pc's and their 10ft poles; maybe this is the humor the original poster was wondering about. We used to all carry iron spikes too; now most pcs carry one or two out of habit as they can be useful; but mostly they get sacrificed to the ocassional rust monster to make it pause while the mage kills it or they party runs; after all, almost no one can outrun a rust monster; iron spike is like throwing a dog a bone. Throw your spikes; drop your copper and run like mad. We usually use wedges on doors now adays or the door just gets destroyed. Most pcs like to creep quietly through a dungeon and use of spikes was a very noisy option. In every game I played with us old timers we all carried about 5 flasks of oil or so; a barrel if we had a wagon or a bag of holding. Oil has so many dungeon crawl uses, it is the only thing besides rope that we all still carry around. hehe it seems you never have enough rope. I think the joke is mostly that we all carried them.
The other joke is that a pole costs 2sp, while a ladder costs 5cp, one-fourth as much. We could make a killing breaking ladders into poles.
or you could just to outside and strip a young tree :)
The joke for my old groups (in the 80s and 90s) was, "Where are you keeping those 10ft. poles?"
I and a comrade of mine figured out a real good way to use a 10ft. pole one night at an SCA event. We were fighters so by night time, had been drinking a tad. The land the SCA event was on was very spread out as were the camps. It was night and there was a bunch of trees. It was hard to see the rode, especially the part that turned left and lead to our own campsight. We got lost. We could see our fellow Company and our camp fire across an open field though so we decided to cross the field (which we knew was there because we saw it in the day time) and skip the rode.
WHOOPS! Forgot about the dry pond/rock pit. We fell in... no one getting injured. Between complete darkness, loose stones, laughing and the beer and scotch we had (on us) we could not get out of the rock pit. My comrade yells out, after 10 minutes of being stuck in the pit, "I wish I had a 10ft. pole!" We laughed somemore.
We were saved by a Duchess and her candle lantern. She remembered who we were for the next 10 years.
I am playing in a group now that are all adventuring guild members going through Rapan Athuck. We cary lots of chalk and write everything we find on the walls.
While the ten foot pole surely has a rich history in the world of roleplaying, the use of the term "wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole" began long before Gygax & Co. birthed D&D. I found this on answers.com:
"ten-foot pole
Origin: 1738
William Byrd, perhaps the wealthiest man in the American colonies as well as one of the best American writers of his time, joined an expedition in 1728 to survey the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia. In his History of the Dividing Line, published in 1738, we find our earliest reference to a ten-foot pole: "We found the ground moist...insomuch that it was an easy matter to run a ten-foot pole up to the head in it."
A century later, the ten-foot pole was less of a surveying instrument than a metaphorical measure of social, political, or legal distance. "Can't touch him with a ten-foot pole" was in an 1848 list of "Nantucketisms." Though few people ever handle an actual ten-foot pole, such expressions have gone the distance in our language through the present day."
Why pay 2sp when The Koga can use a quarterstaff as a 10ft pole for zero?
Is there any problem the staff can't solve..
I was just wondering that myself today as I was making up an NPC rogue/4.
Let me just add one of our group's favorite uses for the 10-foot-pole...
Halfling-on-a-stick.
Nuff said.
--Fang
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
|
Would someone please explain the ever-present joke about this thing to me? It seems to pop up everywhere but I just don't understand what's so funny about it (if anything at all).
Sorry for asking stupid questions, maybe this is a well known joke in the US and I don't get it cause I'm from Europe?
My group still occassionally carries a 10-foot pole or two around with them if someone has a mount to load it up on or a large enough bag of holding to carry it in. Our group's running gag is the 'rudimentary lathe.' It started with a bard named Seamus who was known for his outside-the-box thinking. He and the rest of the party were trapped in the saw room of a lumber mill that had been possessed by evil spirits. They were surrounded by various pieces of dilapidated equipment and many huge logs. There was a switch for the saw that was slowly coming down on them right next to the actual saw itself, but it was too high to reach and there was no way that Spider Climb could get someone close enough to it without serious risk of losing a hand to the saw. Finally, the bard noticed that the logs looked like they were long enough to reach it. When someone made the observation that the logs were too big, the bard recommended that they use the parts of equipment around them to make a rudimentary lathe to whittle the logs down to manageable size. The idea was impossible, but amusing. Eventually, the ranger just shot arrows at the switch until she hit it and that turned the saw off, allowing them to escape. Ever since then, though, when our group runs into a situation with no clear solution, we always say "If only we had a rudimentary lathe..."