CARRY LOTS OF ROPE

 

I feel bad for opening old wounds, but this probably matters. You should, as a guy, be able to carry a lot of rope (basically like a spelunky guy).

four ropes? preposterous

There's a lot of contention in the rpg community about how big is a 50 foot rope. It is contended that a 50 foot rope is a huge and bulky item, larger than a man can easily carry. I've hear tales of 50 foot ropes so large that two men could not carry one between them, so large that they blot out the sun and corrupt the minds of men.

Here's a 50 foot rope:

I bought it at the cheap stuff store near my house. it's actually a 15 meter rope so like 49-and-a-half feet. That shouldn't be a trouble, you can usually freefall half a foot without losing a hit point. In any case we shouldn't measure the length of rope in feet or even meters, we should measure it like this:

A small rope (ie 50 feet) is long enough to descend one STORY of STANDARD DUNGEON, and it'll be about as big as any other small item in your inventory, like a lantern or a dagger or whatever.
A long rope (taking up twice as much space in your inventory, like a shortsword) or two ropes haphazardly tied together, is long enough to descend one STORY of BASTARD DUNGEON, (ie when the descent is too deep for a standard rope).
Then on top of that you have different BASTARD descents determined by how many standard ropes you need.
Then you have BOTTOMLESS PITS, where rope isn't going to help at all.

The rope I have is cotton (ie not hemp or silk but i hope similar enough to not care about this), it came coiled like this and it's very light and compact. I could carry a bunch of them. It's cheap rope (i paid about 2 dollars, you could probably get something similar at a 2 dollar store near your house, i am kind of a poor person and this is not a luxurious purchase) so probably not the good stuff you want for rock climbing or sailing but it'll do in a pinch. Let's say for the sake of argument that it would fail one time in twenty. I dont know how it was made, I assume either extruded on some industrial rope loom or handwoven by some impoverished person in Bangeladesh, or both; but in a pre-industrial setting you should still probably be able to get a rope like this. It's the kind of thing a peasant could easily get access to.