Steve Jackson Games Forums - Lock your knots

The Rope and Giant Rope spells, obviously.

For talents, a "bondage rigger" Mundane Talent to be good at tying people up, with certain other talents providing small benefits or abilities in using rope and tying knots. (Climbing, Seaman, maybe Horsemanship).

There was a bit in one of the old modules where an NPC used the Rope spell to tie herself up with a mundane length of cord (and then pretend to be a prisoner). My house rule, or ruling, is that this was a quirk in the Rope spell: A Rope spell can be cast on a rope or sufficiently rope-like to animate it and cause it to tie up a victim. HOWEVER: The casting wizard must touch or hold the rope, without anyone else doing so, and so the casting wizard automatically becomes the victim.

For GMing a character tying someone else up with mundane rope, I'd improvise a roll vs Dx or possibly a contest of Dx or a series of Dx rolls to see how much Dx the victim loses.

(Hmm: Maybe 3d vs Dx, -2 Dx base, +1 Dx for each tangential Talent, +2 Dx for each level of the "bondage rigger" Mundane Talent (bonuses cumulative with the base -2 penalty). Roll each turn, with each success reducing the victim's adjDx by 1. If the victim cooperates at least passively, then failures have no effect; if the victim actively resists, then a failure means having to start over.)

To escape, a 3 dice roll vs adjDx, with no auto-success. (But then I don't use auto success anyway. "It's against my religion.") I would allow a bonus to Dx (or a reduced penalty) with time. Maybe +1 Dx for every five minutes spent trying to get free.