RPGaDay 2019: 15 Door

Erol Otus, ladies and gentlemen. 

 DM:                       There’s a door to your left. It’s about eight feet tall, and about five feet—

PLAYERS:             We go left. Through the door.

DM:                        Don’t you want to listen at the door first?

PLAYERS:             We’ll just kill whatever’s in there.

DM:                        Okay, well, the door is locked.
PLAYERS:             I attack it with Thunder Wave. (rolls dice) 19 points of damage!

DM:                        (sigh)

Few dungeon trappings are more iconic than the door. The alpha and the omega, the apex and the nadir and oh Gods and Monsters can we just get on with it?

The closed and locked door no longer captivates like it once did, back when dungeons were an existential labyrinth. Years ago, I had a player who tapped every door with a ten foot pole, you know, “in case it was trapped.” Every door. When I broke his ten foot pole during a melee encounter, he obligingly started shooting every door with an arrow, you know, “in case it was a mimic.”

These kids today, boy, I tell you what…

Video Games have ruined a generation of gamers for listening at doors and picking locks and all of that cool detail-oriented stuff we did when the world was young. Now it’s just kick and punch. My not-so radical solution is to get rid of the doors completely. That is, only put a door in front of them when they hit something you need to surprise them with, or a cool set piece, or something memorable of that nature. Doors they can’t immediately break through, and doors they certainly don’t want to just barge through. Some examples:

The door is an arch filled with opaque mist.

The door is a thick, heavy curtain that muffles sound.

The door is actually a window made from Wizard Glass, crystal clear and difficult (but not impossible) to break.

The door is a different brick pattern that irises open and closed when a command word is uttered.
The door has an illusion spell on it that makes the interior of the room appear very different from what’s really inside.

There is no door, but all of the openings into every room are centered on the wall so that there is space on either side of the door for, um, furniture, or statues, or anything that might cast a shadow across the floor, or NOT, as the case may be.

I realize that a lot of these things sound like traps, and that’s because they certainly can be. I think it’s fair game to take a weakness in the party and exploit it one time for fun—and to learn, too, of course. I don’t propose you kill anyone with a rigged door, but I think a properly rigged door in the right place—say, a treasure room or private library—would benefit from resisting the standard “we kick it open and rush in.”

I miss the ten-foot pole days. Mostly I just miss ten-foot poles. 

Old school Sutherland art. From B1. As Basic as Basic gets. What's that guy carrying? Ten Foot Pole.