Last session we had a major melee PC get hit by a dominate person from the BBEG and turn on the other PCs and their allies. One of said NPC allies (Player-controlled) threw out a kelpstrand (Spell Compendium) at CL 12 that hit the 3 nearby foes as well as the PC.
The question then arose, "Can you cut your way out of a grapple with a strand of kelp, an animated rope or similar item?" We were in the middle of a major fight and couldn't devote ourselves to scouring rule books or making things up on the fly, but were unable to quickly find anything definitive.
Would appreciate hearing from others what your call would be in this situation.
Thanks,
Rez
P.S. Ultimately, the BBEG was killed while grappled and the dominate person became irrelevant, then the PC shouted to be released. We discovered that kelpstrand doesn't list "(D)" in the Duration entry, so I ruled that it was a typo, misprint or oversight in the spell description and let the NPC drop the grapples on a strand-by-strand basis (he wasn't doing much else at the time but being on stand-by to heal).
