General Chat

[waysoftheearth]

Another Delving Deeper review popped up a couple of days here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dax33uLOOVo

[ehiker133]

Nice, Simon! There's an amazing number of comments on it for just a week.

[waysoftheearth]

Another interesting number from our indomitable sys admin: the various DD versions have been downloaded around 23,000 times from this site
It's hard to put an exact figure on it cos the different booklets are individually downloaded different numbers of times. I've counted the most downloaded booklet within each DD version (including V5).

Lulu (print on demand) seems to be in the middle of a very painful system upgrade, so I can't see how many hard copies have sold. I'm pretty sure it was over 500 a couple of years back. I'm a bit surprised -- and pleased -- by the sustained level of interest over the years

[eldritch fields]

Pretty minor question, but is there a particular reason for why the standard rope in the equipment list is 100' long? OD&D and AD&D (and most other editions) list a 50' length of rope as the "standard".

At least in v4. A comrade pointed out already that the WIP v5 document lists 50' as the "unit" of rope for sale.

[waysoftheearth]

Apologies eldritch, but I can't recall exactly why I went with 100ft of rope for DD4.

Speculatively, I may have been concerned that 50ft (~16 yards) was scarcely a "useful" length, but of course a player could always pay for two 50ft lengths and claim one 100ft length if they were worried. Rarely have I ever seen a ref claim a player carrying rope didn't have enough length, so it's probably moot in any case

[eldritch fields]

Apologies eldritch, but I can't recall exactly why I went with 100ft of rope for DD4.

Speculatively, I may have been concerned that 50ft (~16 yards) was scarcely a "useful" length, but of course a player could always pay for two 50ft lengths and claim one 100ft length if they were worried. Rarely have I ever seen a ref claim a player carrying rope didn't have enough length, so it's probably moot in any case

This came up in a dungeon I designed, where the party has to descend down a 50' shaft (followed by a 20' drop to the ground below).
During the first playtest (B/X), one character started the descent using the "standard" 50' rope, but realized that that's not enough to safely make it through the shaft and had to climb back for more rope.
In the second playtest (using Delving Deeper), the same situation happened, but this time I was surprised to find that the "standard" rope from the equipment list was more than enough to pass this area at the first try

But yeah, this is a very minute detail, it was just an unexpected diversion from what I'm used to in most other versions.