Kicking down doors in a d20 system

[OgreBattle]

So what's a way to pull off a satisfactory implementation of door kicking in a d20 RPG that doesn't run into the problem of "The tarrasque has a 30% change of failing to kick down a door"?


Maybe something tied to 'taking 10' or 'taking 15'?

[nockermensch]

So what's a way to pull off a satisfactory implementation of door kicking in a d20 RPG that doesn't run into the problem of "The tarrasque has a 30% change of failing to kick down a door"?


Maybe something tied to 'taking 10' or 'taking 15'?

The damage generated by a very large and strong creatures hitting something should be in the 60s range, enough to imediately destroy the door or the stone walls around it.

The actual difficulty is having this and still allowing these creatures to be defeated in fights by human sized heroes.

[ACOS]

If there's nothing at stake other than the simple need to open the door, then implementing Take 10/20 seems perfectly reasonable.

If there's an urgent need to get through right f'n now, then dice need to be rolled.
Otherwise ... :
* if they would succeed on a die roll of 10, then they just do it;
* if they have all the time in the world (or at least 2 minutes), then screw it, let them Take 20 ... unless failing would actually cause something else to happen.
** these are applicable for monster and PC alike.

But before any of that happens, you need to ask yourself "why am I putting this door here?". Let the answer, as well as the surrounding context, inform the decision on how to handle it.
And of course, don't forget that kicking down a door is going to make some noise, which may or may not mean anything to the specific situation at hand.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Maybe a stunt system that requires the action described to meet a challenge threshold.

"I kick it down" would be a 1, and an unbarred wooden door would be a threshold of 1. You do not win points for prose if the action described is still "I kick it down" when deconstructed. You DO win points for applying your phlebotinum, invoking things you possess like a girdle of giant strength, and describing how you teleported yourself into the sky so you could drop-kick the door at terminal velocity DOES win you points.

So something like Exalted stunting, without the pointless prose and mugging.

While "an unbarred wooden door" is a 1, you can expect "a titanium gateway built by Heimdall himself to withstand Jotun besiegers" could be, say, 100, else you'd have grognards who insist their fighter be able to kick it down due to "good roleplaying".

[ACOS]

... just thought of something else:
If what I described above still doesn't do it, you could always give a further nod to the cubed-squared law and give some nominal bonuses based on size.

2 people may be able to benchpress the same weight; but in activities that allow/require you to "put some ass in to it", the larger/heavier person is going to be able to generate more power.

[deaddmwalking]

Alternatively, a sufficiently large creature may have trouble applying the pressure directly to the door rather than the surrounding surface. Ie, Tarrasques don't kick down doors - they kick down the entire wall. Now, that really shouldn't come up for anything capable of passing through said door.

Ultimately, sufficiently powerful creatures are going to be able to break down any normal door through damage without requiring a strength check.

Take a look at the Strong Wooden Door:
Strong wooden 2 in.
Hardness 5; 20 hp
DC (Stuck) 23
DC (Locked) 25

The Tarrasque has a +17 on Strength checks (I think) so it would fail the check roughly 40% of the time... On the other hand, it's bite damage is 4d8+17, so it has a 99% chance of exceeding the damage threshhold.

Take a Frost Giant. Str mod +9, but Greataxe with full Power Attack is 3d6+33 = it absolutely can't fail to break through the door with a single attack. Even naked, if you allow a 'two-handed blow' with power-attack he's going to walk right through those doors like they were made of paper.

[Eikre]

I don't really understand the conceptual problem.

D20 doors have hitpoints and take damage. Some people deal more damage and some doors have more hitpoints.

If you have a 30% chance of knocking down a door this round then you're talking enough damage in one blow to buckle the timbers and make everyone behind the door spin around in terror, and almost certainly enough to knock it down the very next round no problem.

That's just enough time for the defenders to get into position and for Sean Bean's character to comment that they brought a cave troll. A third of the time, not even that will happen; the aggressor will just barrel straight through the door and into reach of somebody's sleeping bag.

Sounds like fine odds to me.

[Eikre]

Oh, you're talking about strength checks to knock shit down.

Just discard that horseshit out of hand, maybe?

[fectin]

@ddm,

You slightly misstated the result: the Tarrasque has a 40% chance of having to push on the door for more than one round. So, a strong wooden door may delay him for several seconds, which seems reasonable.

[Ice9]

I don't think it's particularly reasonable for pseudo-Godzilla to be slowed down by a wooden door, no. In fact, I don't even think it should require a separate action by the Tarrasque to break it down.

Perhaps something like HERO's "casual strength" rule. If you can break down a barrier with half the damage from an ordinary attack, then you can simply do that as a free action while moving through it.

[Blicero]

You can also ditch ability checks in general, scale trained skills with level, and make knocking down doors an Athletics check or whatever.

[Seerow]

Perhaps something like HERO's "casual strength" rule. If you can break down a barrier with half the damage from an ordinary attack, then you can simply do that as a free action while moving through it.

I like this.

[ACOS]

* if they would succeed on a die roll of 10, then they just do it;

Take a Frost Giant. Str mod +9, but Greataxe with full Power Attack is 3d6+33 = it absolutely can't fail to break through the door with a single attack. Even naked, if you allow a 'two-handed blow' with power-attack he's going to walk right through those doors like they were made of paper.

If your goal is to stay within the already-existing design space of d20, then either of these 2 will cover it. No need to tack on more stuff if you don't have to.
I can't think of any situation where it wouldn't work as intended.

[virgil]

The Tarrasque has a +17 on Strength checks (I think) so it would fail the check roughly 40% of the time... On the other hand, it's bite damage is 4d8+17, so it has a 99% chance of exceeding the damage threshhold.

To my knowledge, size bonuses should apply here, which gives him another +16; meaning he's sneezing through any of the listed doors, and 3" iron walls. With Take 10, he can get through superior masonry 1' thick.

[ACOS]

The Tarrasque has a +17 on Strength checks (I think) so it would fail the check roughly 40% of the time... On the other hand, it's bite damage is 4d8+17, so it has a 99% chance of exceeding the damage threshhold.

To my knowledge, size bonuses should apply here, which gives him another +16; meaning he's sneezing through any of the listed doors, and 3" iron walls. With Take 10, he can get through superior masonry 1' thick.

I'm not sure if size bonuses actually do apply or not; but either way, that's very well something that he SHOULD be able to do.

[Dean]

To my knowledge, size bonuses should apply here, which gives him another +16

No part of the size rules or strength check rules say that you apply your size modifier to strength checks. You apply your size when figuring out encumbrance but not when making strength checks. The Tarrasque really does fail to get through doors almost half the time.

D20 games have always sorely needed a default rule that could allow you to move and make attacks or strength checks in a line. Even someone with 1 Billion Strength needs to take a standard action to kick through a door. The Juggernaut, as a concept, doesn't work in any set of d20 rules ever written. A cousin of this problem also comes up whenever you put something behind a sheet of glass or paper. A vase inside a glass case is invulnerable to missile fire because the glass stops line of effect and is a separate object that must be attacked. No edition of D&D has had satisfying rules for attacking multiple things in a line. Create that rule, let every character and relevant attack use it, and the Tarrasque door problem becomes less dramatic.

[TiaC]

What about the issue where opening a door takes a move action? A pair of doors, like you might see in a cold climate, will take Heracles a full round to bypass. (more like 2 rounds if there is more than a 5' distance between them.)

[radthemad4]

Perhaps something like HERO's "casual strength" rule. If you can break down a barrier with half the damage from an ordinary attack, then you can simply do that as a free action while moving through it.

I like this.

Thirded. Breaking doors, walls, etc. should not take any actions whatsover for something that big.

To my knowledge, size bonuses should apply here, which gives him another +16

No part of the size rules or strength check rules say that you apply your size modifier to strength checks. You apply your size when figuring out encumbrance but not when making strength checks. The Tarrasque really does fail to get through doors almost half the time.

D20 games have always sorely needed a default rule that could allow you to move and make attacks or strength checks in a line. Even someone with 1 Billion Strength needs to take a standard action to kick through a door. The Juggernaut, as a concept, doesn't work in any set of d20 rules ever written. A cousin of this problem also comes up whenever you put something behind a sheet of glass or paper. A vase inside a glass case is invulnerable to missile fire because the glass stops line of effect and is a separate object that must be attacked. No edition of D&D has had satisfying rules for attacking multiple things in a line. Create that rule, let every character and relevant attack use it, and the Tarrasque door problem becomes less dramatic.

There's Trample, but I don't think you can use that on walls (and the Tarrasque doesn't have it). As for ranged attacks, how about, if you reduce (a portion of the area of) the blocking object to 0 HP, the projectile continues, but with less damage (the HP loss of the covering object) onto the next target.

What if Trample was a maneuver instead of an ex ability?

[Eikre]

The ranged attack thing sounds good, aside from inviting scrutiny of how armor works.

The system would be more consistent if armor gave DR (defensible), or if you were just allowed to substitute a normal attack against AC for a weird sundering kind of thing that only targeted touch AC but lost damage proportional to however hard or HP-ish their armor was... Which is basically the same thing, actually.

[OgreBattle]

Perhaps something like HERO's "casual strength" rule. If you can break down a barrier with half the damage from an ordinary attack, then you can simply do that as a free action while moving through it.

I like this.

Thirded. Breaking doors, walls, etc. should not take any actions whatsover for something that big.

I like that, also means the barbarian with a maul will be moving through doors at a brisk pace.

Though are there any outliers or oddities that crop up with this rule?

[Dean]

So many, so so many.

My understanding is that the rule is "Make an attack on an object, if the attack deals double the damage required to destroy the object the attack counts as having only taken a free action to perform. You may perform this attack while moving and if it is successful you may continue with your move action"

What happens if you use it on constructs, animated objects, held objects, alchemists fire, acid flasks, thunderstones, or beads of force?

[Antariuk]

As much as I like the idea of taking 10/20 on Strength checks to kick down a door, it poses a question: what about other abilities? Do you create an exception for Strength alone, or do you allow for example taking 10 on Intelligence or Constitution checks as well?
The benefit I see from taking the latter approach is that you could substitute a DC 10 Int check for a Knowledge check and get rid of those pesky DC 10 Knowledge checks ("you know about the King's bastard son"), for example.

[ACOS]

As much as I like the idea of taking 10/20 on Strength checks to kick down a door, it poses a question: what about other abilities? Do you create an exception for Strength alone, or do you allow for example taking 10 on Intelligence or Constitution checks as well?

I've been doing this all the way down the line for quite some time. I haven't run in to any problems yet, and it makes things run a bit smoother.
The exception I make if for drowning rules; because fuck you, drowning is serious shit (but this goes back to the parameters I put forth earlier).

The thing is, you (as the MC) always need to be asking yourself "what is the goal here?", and "what is gained by taking this to the dice?".

[radthemad4]

Kirth Girsen made a whole bunch of houserules for Pathfinder. Kirthfinder can be found here

I'm not qualified to comment on balance and stuff, but I found this idea kind of interesting:

Fast Skill Checks: There are times when you can’t afford to spend the full listed time on a task, such as when it will take 2d4 rounds to disarm the trap that will kill you in 1 round. In these cases, you can attempt to speed up the skill check by increasing the DC, as follows (you do not automatically succeed on a natural 20, nor can you tale 10 or take 20)

Another column could be added to make something a free action.

[Antariuk]

So +20 DC for reducing a task from 1 minute to 1 standard action... how is that even useful? At levels where you care about stuff like this there is no way to beat thise DCs, even with pumping your bonuses like crazy.

Also, using this table would only increase the problems with the above example of kicking in a door since we already have to deal with a DC that, as of now, even a character with 20+ Strength will fail at quite often.