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Ideasmith asks…

When the rulebook in use does not specify, what should the relative pros and cons of lockpicking and doorbreaking be?

Fine. We’re doing this.

I know it looks like I’m obsessed with doorbreaking and lockpicking lately. It was a constant throughline in that whole Third Heat thing and, even before that, it was a sort of is this gameplay litmus test. The truth is…

Actually, screw that. Let’s skip the rambling explanation. I am not obsessed with doorbreaking and lockpicking. It’s just a really good, easy-to-grok way to look at a lot of different aspects of tabletop roleplaying game design.

Doorbreaking and lockpicking — let’s save my typing fingers and call it good, ole DNL ­— DNL doesn’t even come up that often at my table. Sometimes my players DNL through a stuck or locked door. Other times, they find a key, solve a puzzle, find a lever, find a different way around, or go home without knowing what was behind that door. Such is adventure; such is life.

Ideasmith’s question, by the way, harkens back to a comment I made about how modern editions of one of the world’s roleplaying games, you know the one, and many other games as well, are kind of thin on mechanical ways to differentiate lockpicking from doorbreaking. They’re both just two different flavors of roll to open door. Just pick the one with the better modifier, roll, and when that fails, try the other.

Thus, he’s asking how I’d differentiate them. But I want to go totally nuts here because I love talking game mechanics. I can’t promise a fully-formed, publishable set of rules by the end, but I want to look at the whole problem. If I was, say, building my own roleplaying game engine or if I did want to write a whole rule hack for Dungeons & Dragons around getting through doors, how would I approach the problem?

And, for bonus points, what about locked containers?

First, let’s establish the role that DNL plays in the game. This is a real barb in my craw. I don’t like that DNL has turned into the standard, default way to get through doors in Dungeons & Dragons. Adventure writers include locked and stuck doors and assume players will DNL through them. Players build parties assuming that, without DNL, they’ll lose access to major parts of the game world and they probably won’t be able to succeed at many adventures.

So DNL’s become like healing; you can’t adventure without them. Someone’s got to bring the rogue.

As I made clear in the final essay in my Third Heat series, I think DNL should be an alternative to whatever method the adventure designer actually created for the players to get through the obstacle. Sometimes, and only sometimes, DNL can be the only way to open the path to an optional something to reward players who brought it.

Thus, DNL shouldn’t be the first or best choice. I mean, it’ll usually be something the party tries first, but it shouldn’t be reliable, and it should have some risk, cost, or inefficiency. That’s the price for a chance at bypass, early access, a shortcut, or an optional reward.

That, by the way, is why I mentioned bumping DCs by adding a naked die roll tax. Naked die rolling can’t be a reliable means of overcoming challenges. It just can’t.

With that established, let’s try to understand the reality of what we’re modeling a little. I know I’ve said before that you can’t let realism write your game or design your mechanics, but roleplaying game mechanics have to work as models of a fictional reality or else the game breaks. So you do have to be aware of the reality, even if you’re going to have to compromise with good mechanical design.

But checking reality can also help you identify something I call the quintessence of the thing. Actually, I never call it that. I don’t have a name for what I’m talking about. It’s just something I know to look for. I started that sentence hoping my brain would spit out a clever term by the time I got near the end of it, and that didn’t happen.

Maybe I’ll come up with a better term when I do the rewrite.

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Dear Angry,

I did not come up with a better term in the rewrite. Sorry.

Hugs and Kisses,
Angry

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So, what’s this quintessential thingy I’m blathering about? It’s something that catches your attention about whatever it is you’re researching that seems to be a really important, defining feature. It’s something you can hang a mechanic off of to capture a feel. It’s usually not a big thing, but it makes a good starting point for design.

For example, let’s talk lockpicking.

I know some asshat is going to scream that they’re already an expert at lockpicking because they watch locksports on YouTube. Yes, I know those are a thing. I watch Lockpicking Lawyer all the time. I also know that egotistical jackass McNally is someone who exists. I don’t need links.

What you don’t realize is that watching a locksports enthusiast who is also trying to sell you his own line of locksporting tools to learn about lockpicking is like watching an Olympic trickshooter to learn about bowhunting or historical military archery. It ain’t the same thing.

Me? I’d much prefer to hear about lockpicking from criminals, law enforcement officers, and locksmiths. You know, actual workaday professionals who use the skill as part of their job the way a journeyman adventurer might. They tell a different story from the locksportists. Probably a more accurate story.

Now, I won’t bore you with all the research, but I will share the highlights.

Criminals don’t like to talk about what they do, but crime statistics and the few criminals who do talk all suggest strongly that criminals consider lockpicking to be a last resort method of gaining entry. They’d rather force their way in or steal a key. That’s because they see lockpicking as slow, unpredictable, and unreliable.

Locksmiths say the same thing. Most locksmiths don’t want to bother picking locks when customers ask them to. They note, on average, it takes at least a few, and usually several minutes to pick open a lock. That’s coming from professionals, by the way, who are familiar with lock manufacture and get to work in reasonably good conditions most of the time. Fantasy adventurers, by contrast, work in terrible conditions where the light comes from a flickering candle, the lock has existed for a century in a moist and mineral-rich environment, and there’s no such thing as standard manufacture to even know. Every lock in the fantasy world is a unique, hand-made piece of craftsmanship.

Not that all this crap ain’t apocryphal anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.

Thus, many locksmiths keep a rule of thumb in their brains, which sounds weird when I read it back, but my philosophy is not to look back at the burning wreckage of a failed turn of phrase. “Keep calm and keep typing” is what I always say. Many locksmiths say, “If I’ve been trying to pick open the lock for more than this many minutes, I quit and drill the bitch.” Based on a quick perusal of some locksmiths’ websites, because customers ask about lockpicking enough that it’s worth answering in advance, that rule of thumb is on the order of five to ten minutes.

So lockpicking is time-consuming. Time-consuming enough to measure in minutes and for locksmiths to give up when those become double-digit minutes. The idea of one quick roll to pop a lock like McJackass Official just ain’t right. Which is good because it’s also a crappy game mechanic. It doesn’t serve the role DNL is supposed to serve.

But another thing that jumps out is that lockpicking isn’t as progressive as it seems. It’s easy to lose all your progress, and it’s hard to know when you’re just one click from success. I know you’ve fallen asleep to Lockpicking Lawyer saying, “Movement on three, three is set, no movement on four, click on five, probably a false set, okay, five is set, back to one,” and can imagine a progress tracker, but reality is uglier, and he’s an Olympic gold medalist. In the field, as a normal professional, you can fail to recognize a false set, you can lose a set, fatigue can cause you to very slightly lose tension so one or more pins drop, you can bind up the whole lock, and often you end up just releasing tension and starting again clean. Thus, you never really know how close the attempt is to succeeding, and practically speaking, many attempts are clean starts that don’t build on progress made in early attempts.

So, mechanically speaking, we have a series of independent trials, we never know how many trials it’ll take to succeed, and even the quickest success is time-consuming unless you get super lucky and the stars align.

That’s something you can build a mechanic around.

Let’s do doorbreaking.

Again, doorbreaking has an image problem. Gamers just don’t get doorbreaking. In fact, somewhere along the way, we forgot that there are actually two different kinds of doorbreaking, both are inefficient, and one is actually really awful. It’s basically a last-resort move.

The two options are forcing the door and destroying the door. Or, at least, breaking the door.

Let’s do doorforcing first.

To force a door, you have to apply a sudden blow to a certain part of the door in the hopes of making whatever is holding the door closed fail. Usually, you’re trying to break, deform, or split the part of the frame where the door’s bolt sits. That doesn’t apply if the door is stuck and there are also other ways for a door to fail, but that’s close enough to build a mechanic around. We don’t have to care why, exactly, the door failed to remain closed, and not caring lets us include things like prying in here. Opening a door with a prybar is basically just trying to deform or damage the part of the frame where the bolt sits so you can get it out of there.

You know who forces doors? Police officers and soldiers. In fact, they’re trained to force doors and even have specialty tools for the job. Single-person rams, bars and hammers, that kind of thing. I found a Federal Law Enforcement quarterly training report that says that, on average, forcing a door can take tens of seconds, or as many as two minutes, and usually requires several blows.

Again, we’re talking about modern doors; many modern residential and commercial doors aren’t nearly as hardy as a solid slab of iron-banded oak planks with iron hinge pins and bolts seated directly into stone, but it’s good enough to give us an idea.

The point is, the idea that Barry the Barbarian throws himself against a door once and it just opens just isn’t how it works most of the time. Sometimes, Barry gets really lucky, but usually he’s throwing himself at the door several times, with the door, frame, and mechanism deforming a little more with each blow until finally, the next blow is enough to open the door. Even with a prybar or ram, the picture is similar. Tens of seconds or minutes of loud, violent work, with the door straining more and more until, WHAM! It’s open.

It’s also worth noting that, while you do need a powerful enough impact, precision also matters. You have to keep applying the same powerful force to the same right spot on the door. The spot that matches the part of the door that you need to fail. So, the idea of even two people working together to bust down a door without some tools that can combine their efforts, yeah, that doesn’t work.

At this point, we’ve already got some nice mechanical difference between lockpicking and doorforcing. Neither is a quick, one-and-done kind of thing, though you can get lucky, but lockpicking is significantly more time-consuming than doorforcing. Moreover, it’s unreliable compared to doorforcing, and it’s nonprogressive.

Let’s also talk about the obvious thing everyone already knows, but which the game’s mechanics no longer give you anything to do with. Doorforcing is loud, and lockpicking is not. You know why law enforcement officers and soldiers care how long it takes to force a door? It’s because whoever is on the other side of the door knows they’re coming the moment they start.

Like, yeah, sure, wandering monsters, but anything in the room you’re forcing your way into, and in the rooms adjoining that, they all know you’re coming in, and you’re probably not friend. When you consider doorforcing can take 20 or 30 seconds on the low end, that’s four to six rounds of setup. That’s a lot of time for a monster, even if a round or two gets eaten up being started and then groping around for weapons.

But you are also alerting a lot of the site to your presence. Solids are great sound conductors. If you start slamming yourself a door connected to walls and resting on a floor in an otherwise quiet environment, your presence is known. The longer you bang, the farther that news spreads. If your system gives you some means of checking for wandering monsters or complications, now’s the time.

Now, on to doorbreaching. That’s when you try to destroy the actual door itself, though it’s more properly called the slab of the door. Of course, the goal isn’t really to destroy the whole door, but rather to make a hole through the door and then widen it enough to squeeze through.

Now, the best folks to ask about doorbreaching are firefighters and emergency response crews, but their answers aren’t very surprising. Doorbreaching is labor-intensive. It’s slow. It’s basically doorforcing, but it takes longer. Which is why it’s a move of last resort.

Mechanically, you get all the problems that come with doorbreaching and the time-wasting inefficiency of picking a lock to boot.

It’s also worth noting that, like lockpicking, doorbreaching requires tools. You can force a door with just your body, though tools help, but you cannot chew your way through a door or rip it apart with your bare hands. Which leads us quite naturally to a discussion about idiot adventurers trying to damage their way through doors with rapiers and knives and why you don’t do this shit with hit points.

Look, weapons seem simple, but they are actually design-optimized to kill fleshy organisms. They cut flush, pierce organs, and break bones. That’s what hit points are. Hit points are meat. You can’t translate damage rules to object destruction and, if you try, you could probably get a job at Wizards of the Coast. They sure tried. Pathfinder still does, I think. I don’t know. I also don’t care.

Can you use a greataxe to fell a tree? Can you smash a lock with a warhammer? Yes. Is it efficient? No. Is it anything like attacking a living thing? Absolutely not. Is it good for the weapon? Often, no.

If your non-siege weapon ain’t classified as heavy or whatever your system’s equivalent descriptor is, you can’t use it to breach a door. If your non-siege weapon only deals piercing damage, you can’t use it to breach a door either. Those two statements are so obviously factual that they deserve no explanation.

If your weapon has any edges or points, if it deals slashing damage or if it also deals piercing damage, it acquires a damage penalty until it gets repaired by an actual blacksmith in an actual workshop. Full stop.

Now, let’s talk about magic vis-à-vis door damage and destruction. Blasting a door with repeated firebolts will not set it ablaze. A lock’s mechanism will not shatter like struck glass after being hit with several rays of frost. You cannot dissolve solid iron with instantaneous magical acid damage. Just no.

No spell that deals only instantaneous damage that a normal adventurer of modest levels could survive exposure to will do anything significant to a door. Can you blast a door open with a fireball? Yes. Will heat metal cause an iron-banded door’s wooden planks to catch fire? Eh… probably not, but maybe. Judgment call.

Part of this is just the basic rules of how things actually work. The rest is down to gameplay: no cheap or free magic can get through a door with zero risk, cost, or resource expenditure. And no, the player is not being clever and creative; the player has a hammer and is trying to make every problem like… one of those things people hit with hammers. What are they called? Walnuts? Puppies? Squishy soft baby skulls? Whatever. You know what I’m saying.

Moving on…

The three basic ways players can cheat their way through doors instead of playing the game are lockpicking, doorforcing, and doorbreaching. I’ve given you a basic mental model for each and some helpful rules of thumb. You should be able to just handle any DNL incidents at your table.

But can we take this further? Can we actually resolve something that looks like real mechanics out of this? Maybe.

First, consider we’ve now built a way to stat up a door and highlighted some particular qualities to consider. For example, doors have locks that can be picked, frames or mechanisms that resist being forced, and slabs whose construction defines how hard it is to breach the door. That also means that basic examination and pattern-learning can help players choose the best approach for a given door. Especially if some of the approaches negate others.

For example, once you start forcing a door, the lock mechanism is likely damaged beyond picking. Basically, the lock fails closed once you start trying to force the door open. Breaching the door can also cause enough collateral damage to wreck the lock, but maybe it doesn’t.

Speaking of locks, is the door actually locked? Some doors aren’t; some doors are just stuck. That’s actually pretty common. At least, it should be. Doors don’t handle exposure to the elements for decades or centuries as well as you think. Stuck doors can’t be picked, and breaching them is likely to just force them open, so it’s all the same. Doors can be locked and stuck. Picking the lock alone won’t open such a door. It’ll need to be picked, then stuck.

Yes, I know D&D rulebooks in the old days used to talk about this stuff. That’s immaterial. Old editions still suck.

You can also bar doors. That means there’s an actual solid hunk of wood or metal running through brackets on the door and the wall beside it. Sometimes several. If a door’s barred, forcing it becomes extremely difficult. It could be a practical impossibility for normal parties in normal situations. Picking a barred door doesn’t get you anywhere, unless it’s both locked and barred, and then you have to get through both the lock and the door. Really, once the door’s barred, breaching it might be the only way, but iron-banded or cross-banded doors can be really hard to breach. Again, for some parties, it might be a practical impossibility. The crossbands prevent you from widening enough of a hole to get through.

That all gives you some good, mechanical ways to define doors with different elements making certain approaches easier, harder, or impossible, and it tells you what DCs to set.

How might you resolve the different approaches? Well, assuming you don’t want to invent a whole bunch of mechanics or roll dice in complicated ways, try this…

Lockpicking is easiest. The sneakthief rolls to pick the lock. If they succeed on the first roll, they get lucky, and the door opens in a trivial amount of time. Minutes. Not seconds. But if they fail, they have to try again, and now, each roll represents a non-trivial amount of time. Of course, this depends on time not being trivial, but that’s always the problem, isn’t it? You have to figure that out. The player can keep rolling as long as they and their allies are willing to dick around on the doorstep, but every attempt after the first eats up real time.

Doorforcing works the same, if you want to keep it easy. One roll to get it open in one blow. After that, the party can keep pounding away. If you want, you can give a progressive +1 to the roll. That’s easy enough. Any reasonable tool adds Advantage, but if the tool is a weapon, it must be heavy, and it must be able to deal something other than piercing damage, even if it also deals piercing damage. If the weapon has an edge or points, it’s damaged, and all its damage dice are reduced by one size until it can be repaired fully in a proper workshop.

Each doorforcing attempt gives anything on the other side and in neighboring rooms one round of knowing something awful is coming. You, as the Game Master, decide what they do. Move the monsters, have them cast spells to prepare, hide, whatever. Moreover, once doorforcing starts, if you do anything at all with random encounters, roll a check and decide how long until it shows up. Start tracking that too.

Doorbreaching requires a tool. Tools don’t grant Advantage. In fact, weapons used as tools, which must qualify as above, give Disadvantage. There is no “open in one” free roll. Instead, the moment the players start breaching a door, everything on the other side gets as many rounds to prepare as you want. The party can keep trying for a success, and you can give a progressive +1 penalty, but here’s where I’d be creative. The first success establishes a breach small enough to reach through. That may allow bars to be lifted or latches to be opened, but it may also allow hands stuck through to be cut off, or faces to be peppered with arrows. The second success widens the breach enough to squeeze through as a standard action. The third success widens the breach enough to move through as if the door were difficult terrain. Also, wandering monsters.

Of course, this highlights just how nice it would be to have some other mechanics to work with. Like, say, some kind of mechanic to do with timekeeping that uses a clock-like pool to differentiate between normal, time-consuming, reckless, and recklessly time-consuming actions. If you did have something like that, you might consider lockpicking a time-consuming task, doorforcing a reckless task, and doorbreaching as recklessly time-consuming.

It would also be nice to have some kind of actual progressively damage an object toward destruction mechanic. One that is conspicuously different from hit points and damage to make the point that objects aren’t creatures. Actually, that’s the sort of thing that would be useful for more than just this DNL crap.

Do I have such a system? Yes. Is it pretty? Not yet. It works, and it gives the results I want in terms of how long it takes to break something, but it has some holes that need to be plugged with judgment, and it’s a little clunky, so it needs an elegance pass. But it’s done the job for a while for me.

I’ll share it, but you can’t give me shit about how incomplete it is.

Assign an object a DC for how hard it is to usefully damage. I usually just use DC 15, but sometimes use DC 10 or DC 20. The standard range. That’s called the Damage DC. Now, set a Destroy DC that is 5, 10, or 15 points higher depending on how much damage it actually takes before an object’s destroyed.

If someone attempts to destroy the object, adjudicate the action, assessing tools, weapons, all that crap, and then have them roll a Strength check. Don’t assess Advantage or Disadvantage for using tools. We’ll handle that below. No, I didn’t say Strength (Athletics). If the result meets or exceeds the Destroy DC, the object is substantially destroyed. That doesn’t mean it’s reduced to rubble. That means it’s no longer fit for purpose. It no longer does what it did. In the case of a door, that means a breach, and I would still advise then using the breach-widening rules I outlined.

If the result doesn’t destroy the object, but does meet or exceed the Damage DC, the object gets damaged. The damage is not enough to make the object fail. It’s still fit for purpose. However, reduce its Destroy by 1d4, 1d6, or 1d8 depending on the source of the damage. A breaching axe does 1d8 damage to a door. A mace does 1d4 damage to the same door. So, as the object takes damage, the chance that the next blow is the one that makes it fail increases.

I’ll leave you to test this for yourself or run your own Monte Carlo simulations, but that set of numbers means that progressively destroying an object requires an average of 2 rolls at the low end to 6 rolls at the high end. Mostly, it’s 2, 3, or 5 rolls if the party’s being smart.

You can use that for both doorforcing and doorbreaching with the added rule that the first breach is just a hole, the second breach is a squeeze-through, and the third breach is a move-through.

Oh, shit, I forgot containers. Locked chests and stuff. Lockpicking is lockpicking, and containerbreaching is just destroying the container, which also destroys anything remotely fragile, intricate, or delicate inside. You don’t even have to do the whole widen the breach thing. The real difference is containerforcing. You just can’t physically force open most containers with your body. You can’t body-check a treasure chest or kick it open in most normal cases. But with tools, like pry bars or a spike and hammer, you can containerforce. Basically, the catch or the lock’s hasp fails just like a door’s bolt or strikeplate or frame might.

And now you have a definitive answer about how I would — and usually do — handle doorbreaking and lockpicking — good ole DNL — at my table. Meanwhile, I already have a title for a future article.

Coming soon: Angry’s Awesome Progressive Destruction System That’s Surprisingly Useful For Things That Don’t Seem At All Like Progressive Destruction Too.