when you buy caltrops is the price based on only one caltrop or many?
a bag of 'em.
enough to fill a 5' square.
when you buy caltrops is the price based on only one caltrop or many?
You buy them in bags of 2-pound caltrops.
One 2-pound bag of caltrops covers an area 5 feet square.
thanks for the response
I love caltrops and use them often.
From the SRD..
A caltrop is a four-pronged metal spike crafted so that one prong faces up no matter how the caltrop comes to rest. You scatter caltrops on the ground in the hope that your enemies step on them or are at least forced to slow down to avoid them. One 2-pound bag of caltrops covers an area 5 feet square.
Each time a creature moves into an area covered by caltrops (or spends a round fighting while standing in such an area), it runs the risk of stepping on one. Make an attack roll for the caltrops (base attack bonus +0) against the creature. For this attack, the creature's shield, armor, and deflection bonuses do not count. If the creature is wearing shoes or other footwear, it gets a +2 armor bonus to AC. If the attack succeeds, the creature has stepped on a caltrop. The caltrop deals 1 point of damage, and the creature's speed is reduced by half because its foot is wounded. This movement penalty lasts for 24 hours, until the creature is successfully treated with a DC 15 Heal check, or until it receives at least 1 point of magical healing. A charging or running creature must immediately stop if it steps on a caltrop. Any creature moving at half speed or slower can pick its way through a bed of caltrops with no trouble.
Caltrops may not work against unusual opponents.
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when you buy caltrops is the price based on only one caltrop or many?
Can caltrops be reused? It seems reasonable to treat them as ammunition (50% chance to be recovered if they "miss", destroyed if they "hit") but I have not seen anything in the rules about it.
The Pathfinder ammunition rules are heavy-handed and somewhat silly. Yes, it's true, arrows often break on impact with hard surfaces. If you target-shoot at trees, you will ruin many arrow shafts. If you target shoot at hay bales, you hardly ever damage your shafts, but you can sometimes strip the feathers, requiring you to refletch.
But 100%? I suppose, if we're assuming that everything you shoot at is heavily armored. But what about when you shoot a ghost? Miss him by an inch, or hit him by just that inch, and both arrows will fly past the battlefield and hit whatever is out there. Pretty equal. Shouldn't those two arrows have the same chance to break?
Etc.
Basically, they took one rule that might make sense in some corner cases and applied it across the board.
Fine, that is somewhat acceptible for arrows. Even moreso for bolts (crossbows are tough on their ammo). But it makes no sense for shuriken. I have thrown shurken into brick walls hard enough I needed pliers to pluck them back out, and they were barely scratched. It's hard to ruin a shuriken. Very hard. Frankly, after having spent countless hours with shurken, throwing the same 5 shuriken that I owned probably way more than a thousand times each, at everything from haystacks to brick walls, and never destroying any of them, I would scoff at a 1% chance to destroy a shuriken.
And though I've never played with caltrops (other than one time I made some paperclip caltrops and boobytrapped my cousin's shag carpet while he slept), I imagine that they are less durable than shuriken, but more durable than arrows. And they come in a bag containing what, 100 caltrops? More? Even if they are fully effective, only a handful (footful?) of them actually come into contact with the enemy; the rest are unscathed and reusable if you collect them. And unless the enemy runs off with that footful of caltrops, you can probably reuse those too.
Which means to me that there is no way I would consider them to be ammunition. Then again, I don't consider shuriken to be ammunition but the RAW says they are. Fortunately, I don't see any RAW for using caltrops as ammunition.
/rant off
Then again, I imagine the Fellowship running through Moria, orcs howling at their heels, and I envision (an alternate story arc) where Aragorn tosses out a bag of caltrops as they run. A dozen goblins go down, screaming, with caltrops imbedded into the bones of their feet, but hundreds more keep up the pursuit, and the Fellowship keeps running.
Yeah, those caltrops are definitely lost.
Even if the goblins broke off pursuit, and the Fellowship stopped running and took their bearings, I have a hard time picturing Arogorn scooping up his caltrops and putting them back in his bag. He might, but it hardly seems the "heroic" thing to do.
Then again, the whole Fellowship, except Frodo, were way, way, way below their Wealth By Level guidelines (I doubt any of the rest even had their starting gp value in gear), and they never got an XP or a GP all trilogy long...
But they got all kinds of magic stuff. A cursed ring of invisibility. A curse crystal ball. Some potions of everything growth. Half dozen cloaks of elvenkind. Elven rope. Elven boats. Waybread.
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The Pathfinder ammunition rules are heavy-handed and somewhat silly. Yes, it's true, arrows often break on impact with hard surfaces. If you target-shoot at trees, you will ruin many arrow shafts. If you target shoot at hay bales, you hardly ever damage your shafts, but you can sometimes strip the feathers, requiring you to refletch.
But 100%? I suppose, if we're assuming that everything you shoot at is heavily armored. But what about when you shoot a ghost? Miss him by an inch, or hit him by just that inch, and both arrows will fly past the battlefield and hit whatever is out there. Pretty equal. Shouldn't those two arrows have the same chance to break?
Etc.
Basically, they took one rule that might make sense in some corner cases and applied it across the board.
Fine, that is somewhat acceptible for arrows. Even moreso for bolts (crossbows are tough on their ammo). But it makes no sense for shuriken. I have thrown shurken into brick walls hard enough I needed pliers to pluck them back out, and they were barely scratched. It's hard to ruin a shuriken. Very hard. Frankly, after having spent countless hours with shurken, throwing the same 5 shuriken that I owned probably way more than a thousand times each, at everything from haystacks to brick walls, and never destroying any of them, I would scoff at a 1% chance to destroy a shuriken.
And though I've never played with caltrops (other than one time I made some paperclip caltrops and boobytrapped my cousin's shag carpet while he slept), I imagine that they are less durable than shuriken, but more durable than arrows. And they come in a bag containing what, 100 caltrops? More? Even if they are fully effective, only a handful (footful?) of them actually come into contact with the enemy; the rest are unscathed and reusable if you collect them. And unless the enemy runs off with that footful of caltrops, you can probably reuse those too.
Which means to me that there is no way I would consider them to be ammunition. Then again, I don't consider...
Phreeow...
I just wondered how they are treated in organized play. I'll ask the GM until I get the answer I want.
Ciao.