What can you use the Rope Trick spell for?

[ElyasRavenwood]

This evening while playing Wardens of the Newborn Forge in a home game, my wizard cast Rope trick, and now the party is hiding up in their extra dimensional space. We have of course pulled up the rope to give us a safe and secure hiding spot. It was a fun evening.

Curious I decided to look up the text of the Rope Trick spell. I noticed the line " the rope cannot be removed or hidden".

I looked in the 3.5 description of the spell and it read "creatures in the space can pull the rope up into the space, making the rope "disappear.".

So for our game, I guess this means we can't pull up our rope. Any creature watching by will see the rope hanging from nothing and investigate. This makes the spell seem to be functionally useless, or at least, no longer useful as a safe hiding place.

I wonder 1 ) why did the designers decide to change the spell so you can't pull up the rope into the extra dimensional space.

and 2) what can the spell now be used for.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks

[alexd1976]

Yeah, that's a fun one...

If you hire an NPC to come look at a fixed location at a given time... lets say he's on the edge of a volcano looking down to where you are inside the active caldera...

If you have Rope Trick cast, lava simply isn't allowed to engulf the rope because that would hide it, violating the text of the spell!

Interesting.

[Kayerloth]

Serious but ... protection from Nightmare, particularly when used by a Wendigo.

And there's a thread not long ago on this very topic. Seeing if I can find it.

"Hiding the rope from rope trick" posted by Ravingdork back on May 24, 2015

[Nigrescence]

Pin up other ropes from the ceiling. Hiding in plain sight.
Find a close grouping of trees to cast the spell in. Now the rope is obscured naturally, and less likely to be suspicious or even spotted.
Use a rope that has already had Permanency Invisibility cast upon it. It is neither being removed nor hidden. It just... IS invisible.
Use a rope that is made of a naturally nearly completely transparent material. Now it's not even partially 'magically' hidden. Much less likely to be spotted.
Use a string of thread as the 'rope'. Hard to climb, but hard to see.
I could go on.

[CampinCarl9127]

Put it in a pile of other ropes. Needle in a haystack.

[kinevon]

I think you can pull it most of the way in, just leave the tag end hanging. A lot less obvious, while not hiding the rope, just making it less obvious.

[alexd1976]

I like the idea of having a bunch of other ropes... how weird would THAT look? :D

[Matthew Downie]

Could make an interesting encounter. "At one end of the room, a large number of ropes are tied to a curtain rail." When the party's guard is down, a bunch of enemies suddenly jump down seemingly from nowhere.

Although if someone does identify a rope as being from a rope trick spell, the logistics of running an encounter through a vertical gap leading into a small extradimensional space is going to be a headache for most GMs.

[CampinCarl9127]

"Well the campsite was empty, but we found a small fortune in rope."

"Did you search them?!"

"They're...ropes, chief."

[ErichAD]

you could always use a rope for a fine creature. Normally such a super thin thread would be unable to support you, but now it's both hard to see and resistant to 16k lbs of pull. Lord knows how you climb a thread though, I'm not saying any rules that say you couldn't.

[CampinCarl9127]

Hahahaha, nice one ErichAD!