No, I’m not talking about the landlord from Three’s Company who thought Jack was gay. I’m talking about that classic beastie who first graced the pages of the Monster Manual.
In my current 1st ed. Night Below campaign, I am getting a lot of use out of monsters I never used, or rarely used in the past. The Roper is one of those ones I probably have not used since the 80’s. Just wasn’t one of my favorite monsters. Well, the party explored an area of NB with ropers in it, so it was time to buck up and refresh myself on these weirdo underworld horrors.
As you probably know, ropers resemble stalagmites and stalactites, and are otherwise all mouth and ropey tentacles. In the MM, the ropers can reach out and grab a victim from 50 feet away, and drag them 10’ per turn towards the mouth, which does a nice 5D4 in damage (yeah, it’s a pain to roll all those D4’s, cause I only have around two of them). If you come in contact with a rope, you will lose half your strength inside 1-3 turns. That is pretty good, and the monster manual entry mentions no saving throw agaist this. I gave my players a break by allowing a save, but this was probably the closest the party has come to losing a member or two anyway. Even though I allowed the save vs. the tentacles, I did rule that anybody caught by a rope was helpless and could not attack or cast spells. All you could do was attempt your “open doors” roll to break free.
With a great magic resistance, and natural resistance to lightning (which the party MU found out about the hard way), they are pretty much only affected by blows and fire.
I used two of these monsters in the same room, and if you are going to use ropers I would suggest you go carefully with having more than one. The party averages around 8th level now, and two ropers were challenging for them. The rewards for the party a great though, as each roper is worth 10,000 experience points and usually has a belly full of gems or coins. The party for sure earned those treats!
