Y’all mind if I rant about doors?

I don’t know why I asked you that because I don’t care what your answer is. I’m going to rant about doors. I did rant about doors, actually. Or I will have did by the time I’m rewriting and revising this paragraph for publication. So, settle in for my door rant. I think you’ll be surprised by just how much I have to rant about doors. Doors and locks and players and Game Masters and crappy action declarations and shitty dungeon design.

And it all starts with the pettiest peeve I ever peeved.

You know what I hate? I hate when a player says, “I break down the door.” Seriously. “No, you absolutely fucking don’t break down the door, you complete waste of a perfectly good dice set. Go sit your ass in the corner and watch; you don’t get to play anymore.”

You do not break down the door. Not without a battering ram, a buddy, minutes of effort, and at least one wandering monster showing up to find out what the hell is making all that noise. Or, alternatively, an ax. Not a handaxe, though. Not a battleaxe or a greataxe. Not even an axe. Get the hell back on your gray, rainy little island, you tea-swilling limey loser. It’s ax. It’s battle ax.

If the door is closed and you want it not closed and neither pushing nor pulling gets you there, you force the door. You apply force of strength to the door, hoping the thing keeping it closed will fail. That thing, by the way, is usually a bolt, or the hole in the frame the bolt sits in.

For example, you might direct a couple of booted kicks to the door right where the bolt is. Kicks are great here because human legs can put out a lot of force, and human feet can direct that force onto a very small, precise area. Like the failure point of a door. Kicking is great for targeting a failure point.

You might also charge the door. You know, ram it with your body. That’s also great because you can put the full weight of your entire body plus the momentum gained from a run-up, into the door. It ain’t directed force, like a kick, but it is a hell of a lot of force.

Now, I know you’re gonna tell me to chill the hell out because that’s just what players mean when they say, “I break down the door.” They’re just abbreviating. Well, you know what? I don’t actually think they are. But even if they are, that’s still a problem.

Let’s be totally honest here: when a player says, “I break down the door,” what they’re really saying is “I Strength check the door.” That’s the beginning and the end of the entire thought process. This is push-button play at its ugliest. The player isn’t even seeing a door and thinking of a way to get through it. The player is responding to the word “door” with the phrase “Strength check,” the way a dog responds to the word “walkies” with running headfirst into the door in unbridled excitement. Because dogs, like players, are really freaking stupid.

I can’t blame the players, though. I mean, when’s the last time any of you Game Masters out there actually described a door? Have you ever described a door? Not a special door. Not a vault door or a magical door or an engraved door. Have you ever described a totally normal door? Do you regularly describe totally normal doors? Do you even know what a normal Dungeons & Dragons door looks like? Do you know how they’re constructed? Or do you just draw rectangles on the battlemap and say, “… and there’s a door here and one here and one over here.” Do you even bother saying that? Do you just figure the players will see the door symbol on that map you stole — without removing the watermark — and loaded in Roll20? Do you differentiate between forcing doors and destroying them? Or is it just this…

You: “The door is locked.”
Player: “I break it.”
You: “Strength check. DC 15.”
Player: “Success.”
You: “The door breaks under your massive muscly awesomeness. Moving on.”

That’s you, isn’t it? You’re the reason dumbass players keep showing up at my table and saying, “I Strength the door. I rolled a 19. Did it work?”

I hate you.

You know what else pisses me off? All the random bullshit players spout out when doors don’t just break down. “Can I cut through the door with my sword? I attack it.” “Can I burn down the door?” “I cast firebolt the door.”

To which the answers are, of course, “No,” “Yes, but you really don’t want to,” and, “Go home.”

Taking a weapon to a door is just stupid, and only certain weapons can actually get through a door. In theory, a sword can get you through a door, but only if it’s a big honkin’ buster sword and you’ve got a long, frustrating, exhausting hour to kill and no plans to use that weapon again before it gets a few days of tender loving care from the local weaponsmith. Not to mention the fact that you’re likely to bend or break the blade trying to unwedge it from between the planks for the ten-thousandth time.

Axes fare better, but weapon axes aren’t tool axes. With minutes of work, you can breach a door with an ax of either variety and enlarge the hole into something you can get through, but the weapon ax is going to take a lot longer because they’re generally shorter and provide less leverage than tool axes, and the edge is going to be a dull, chipped mess when you’re done.

Maces and heavy bludgeons will also breach a door with a lot of minutes of sustained pounding, but war hammers don’t count. I bet none of you have ever looked at an actual war hammer, have you? It is war hammer, by the way, and not warhammer and certainly not warehammer. Fun fact, though, if you pound something rhythmically for long minutes with a wood-hafted weapon, the handle starts to split. It’s the vibration.

You know why firefighters use long-handled tool axes to get through doors and not maces or dwarven wareaxes? Or else they use battering rams. Almost any heavy thing can be a battering ram if it’s big and heavy enough, and the advantage of using random objects like pedestals or small statues as battering rams is that, if they don’t survive the attempt, you don’t care.

As for burning down a door, the problem is that solid masses of wood just aren’t that flammable. Wood chars before it burns. That’s why you have to cut firewood and use kindling. You can’t just hold a match to a log and watch it burst into flames. If you want to burn down a door, you need to put a sustained flame against it for a bunch of minutes. Of course, you could pile up some kindling or use some of that lamp oil that you forgot came in your Starter Adventurer Kit, but you can’t just blast it with firebolt. Why? Duration instantaneous, dumbass. That’s why. Yes, I know it lights flammable objects. When you’ve got some kindling or an accelerant, we’ll talk. Or else burn a spell slot and cast something with a duration. Flaming sphere, or heat metal if the door’s iron-bound.

But, really, I’m doing you a favor by making it hard to set that door on fire because burning through a door is a terrible solution. Not only is it time-consuming, but it also fills the air with smoke and soot. I don’t know if you know this, but most characters have to breathe to live, even if it’s not explicitly stated in the rules. The last place you want a fire is an enclosed, underground area built before the invention of HVAC. Also, once you get that door burning, you’re stuck waiting for it to burn itself out. The Starter Adventurer Kit doesn’t include fire extinguishers, you know. But assuming you wait it out and don’t asphyxiate, you can force your way through the debris-filled gap. Hope there’s not a smoldering hot spot in the debris waiting to flare up when you expose it to whatever air is left in the room.

Now, you might think I’m being needlessly nitpicky. Or, worse, you might think I’m letting my old-school grognard player-skills-over-stats rules-over-rulings show. You might think it’s okay to ignore this crap in the name of fun. Me? I think that if you go too far down the road of not treating the world like a real world that works like a real world, you stop running a roleplaying game. So, of course, the players just end up saying, “I Strength check the door.” You stopped presenting doors as doors; you can’t blame the players for not treating them as such.

Thanks to that, I’ve now drawn hundreds of diagrams of plain doors as they would exist in a medieval European-inspired fantasy world with a reasonable level of allowable anachronism. Well, partly thanks to that. It’s also because my young American players think doors are light, flimsy, hollow things made of wafer-thin wood panels and a tacit agreement of respect for privacy since that’s all that’s keeping their parents out of their bedrooms. I’ve also given the No You Do Not Break Down the Door speech thousands of times and, if I have to explain one more time why a door cannot be “broken down” with a spear or a dagger, I will likely kill a player. Not a character, a player.

I’ll spare you repeating the same rant about locks and the breaking thereof because, again, I’d have to blame you for not putting any thought into your locks in the first place. The door is locked, is it? How is it locked? How is the chest locked? Is it padlocked with a hasp? Does it have an internal warded lock mounted behind an iron plate or a lock box mounted on the inside? You know what? That’s expecting too much from you. Let’s keep it simple. Is there an external padlock or an internal locking mechanism behind a keyhole? That’s an acceptable level of detail.

Actually, wait, how do I even know the door is locked? All I know is that pulling the ring or rope or handle doesn’t open it. It’s not like doorknobs are a thing. Is there a lever or a thumb latch?

This ain’t me complaining that you don’t know enough about the construction of doors in the Middle to Late Medieval period and the early Renaissance period. I genuinely don’t care what level of door technology you feel fits your world; I just want to know that you know what it looks like and basically how it works. I’m not even asking you to know how locks work. I’m just asking you what the door looks like and what steps opening the door normally requires. Do I put a key in a hole and turn it, and then pull a ring to open it? Great. Now tell your players that.

While we’re on the subject of doors and why I hate you, when’s the last time you used a stuck door? When’s the last time your players tried to open a door that wasn’t locked or warded or even latched, but it just didn’t open? It was just swollen with absorbed moisture or warped by age or else the frame had shifted and sagged or else the hinges and latches and locks were frozen with rust or the whole thing was just calcified because someone stupidly installed a door in a cave. Doors used to get stuck all the time in Dungeons & Dragons. You basically had to force them open or destroy them. There was no other way.

Here, readers, is where the rant turns from irrational fury over nothing to a serious discussion about how your sucky dungeon design is ruining gaming for me. Because everything above is just symptomatic of a terrible, stupid mindset about doors.

You see, this rant’s been waiting in the wings for a while. It started with a single line I wrote in my secret notebook months ago. That line was this…

The problem with lockpicking is that there are never any keys.

Deep, right? Or maybe you think it’s nonsense. But, think about it: when’s the last time you saw a dungeon with a locked door and the key to that door available somewhere in the adventure? A literal door with a literal key; none of this abstract gating nonsense. When’s the last time you put a locked door in the party’s way and left a key somewhere for them to find?

Yeah. I thought so. People don’t use doors right anymore.

Game Masters don’t put doors in dungeons — locked, stuck, or otherwise — expecting those doors to be potentially impassable obstacles. Most Game Masters see doors as speed bumps. If a door is any kind of obstacle at all, the Game Master who built it assumes the players will get through it by succeeding in the right kind of check. This is what leads some Game Masters to spew dumbass drivel like, “What even is the point of locked doors?” That said, I do appreciate the opportunity to then write whole articles analyzing the concept of gameplay challenge through the lens of a single locked door. But that’s not what I’m talking about today.

You see, no modern Game Master is willing to put a door in the game that the party might reasonably never open. That’s a terrifying idea. You can’t make content that the players are likely not to see. You can’t let the players fail to find all the rooms. You can’t let them fail the adventure. Especially not because of a locked door. That’s just bad design.

Except that’s horseshit. It’s a terrible mindset. The possibility that the players might not see all the content always exists. The possibility that they might fail the adventure always exists. If those possibilities don’t exist, the players have no agency. They have no say in the outcome.

Meanwhile, however many paths to victory you provide, there is always a single moment or action or die roll that closes the last path. When an adventure fails, there’s always the one last bad outcome that was the point of no return. That’s how it be.

But I’ve done this speech before. Several times. I don’t need to repeat it.

My point today is that most Game Masters don’t see doors as significant and potentially game-ending obstacles. They’re tissue-paper-thin obstructions you can always count on players to punch through. When you put a locked door on the map, you’re basically just thinking, “At this point, the players will choose between breaking the door or picking the lock, roll a check, and then continue the game.”

Back in my grognard days, locked and stuck doors were serious obstacles. They were problems. To have even odds — a 50-50 chance — of forcing a basic stuck door by muscle alone, you needed a Strength score of 18, and this is back in the day when we randomly rolled our ability scores. No one had a Strength score of 18. Well, except the one guy who never generated his characters where anyone could watch. Most characters had average Strength scores and thus could force basic doors open about 20% of the time. Seriously. It was the same for thieves. The baseline chance for even a mid-level thief to open a normal lock was around 20%.

Run the numbers today based on average starting scores, proficiencies, and suggested DCs from the DMG, and you’ll find even low-level player-characters can expect to force stuck doors and pick locks successfully about 65% of the time. Roughly. Quibble over the math details if you want, but the important point is that roll to bypass door obstacle used to be a rare thing. It was a long shot. It was a crap shoot. Which is good because roll to bypass isn’t really gameplay. It’s the sort of thing players should be able to get lucky at sometimes, but it shouldn’t be the reliable, default approach.

A locked door should mean a search for a key or an alternate route. It’s fine if, once in a while, your thief gets you through a locked door without the detour, but that should be a delightful little surprise for a really good day of adventuring. Likewise with a stuck door. It shouldn’t yield to force easily. Once in a while, the barbarian can force it open with a shoulder check, but when that fails — which should be often — the party should have to look for another around or improvise a battering ram or settle in for a half-hour of loud, exhausting work with the tools they were smart enough to bring.

Or the party might have to accept never knowing what’s behind that door. Hopefully, it ain’t the raison d’quêst or else that’s gonna hurt their stats. Such is the life of an adventurer, though.

Let me infuriate you by taking this further. I don’t think we should stop at making lock-picking and door-forcing unreliable. I think they should be risky and costly. Picking a lock is time-consuming, and it requires special tools and training. It’s quiet and generally a safe option, but it chews up time, and time is a resource. Forcing a door is quicker, but it might take a couple of shots. Only the wimpiest of doors yield to a single kick. Each blow is loud, though. It alerts everything in the dungeon’s ZIP code that someone violent is smashing around. That includes whatever is on the other side of the door. Forcing doors also risks injury. You can really hurt yourself trying to force a door, even when you know what you’re doing. Remember, too, that you can’t actually be sure why the door isn’t opening. It might be stuck, it might be locked, it might be impossibly and unmovably frozen, it might be barred from the other side, and it might be painted on the wall by a particular wily werecoyote. How many times are you willing to throw yourself against it before you decide it ain’t gonna give? How many times are you willing to risk that your bones will break before the lock does?

Forcing doors and picking locks should always feel like the worst options. Costly, risky, and unlikely to work. Why? Because doors are actually important if you give any kind of a shit about actual, good game design. Remember the speech I gave about how good game design is about the balance between letting the players explore freely and ferrying them through things in the best possible order? Remember when I said that good game design means the path of least resistance should lead to the best gameplay experience?

Do you really want the path of least resistance to be, “Can you roll better than a five on a twenty-sided plastic math rock?” Because I sure as hell don’t.

When a locked door sends the players down to the basement to find a key before they can climb the tower, then they’re forced to fight the tutorial zombies before they fight the serious zombies one floor up. When the players can only open a barred door from the other side, it’s now a shortcut that lets them leave the dungeon after five encounters for a rest and then resume exploring where they left off.

Do you get what I’m saying?

But even if you’re an actual grognard who rejects the idea of game design on principle, there’s still the point that not letting the players roll a check to bypass a door means they have to do some actual fucking gameplay to keep exploring. Me? I prefer actual fucking gameplay to tossing plastic math rocks at door-shaped abstractions. I don’t mind the rare possibility that a player will sometimes roll to invalidate a challenge. It’s good for the game that the possibility exists. As long as it’s rare. Like, say, maybe it only happens 20% of the time, just to pull a totally random number completely out of my ass.

Do you get what I’m saying? I need doors to represent actual, significant, possibly insurmountable barriers. It’s good for game design, it’s good for gameplay, and it makes good, realistic sense. It’s why fire axes and battering rams still exist today and, last time I checked, there were very few spiked, iron-banded doors made of solid oak planks floating around the real, modern world.

Doors are supposed to prevent access. That’s what door means. It’s supposed to be hard to get through a door you’re not authorized to get through. That’s how it works. And that’s what makes them valuable to me as the only living soul in the entirety of roleplaying gamedom who gives an actual crap about good game design.

When Game Masters convince themselves that doors are just roll-check-to-proceed speedbumps that players can’t ever get stuck behind, the players internalize that shit. When the players internalize that shit, expectations change. When expectations change, dumbass system designers change the games to meet those expectations. When dumbass system designers change the games to meet those expectations, my ability to run actual, good, satisfying, engaging, fun fantasy adventures is ruined.

And then I start punching.

So, for the love of all that is good and right in the roleplaying game world, please, please, please, at least learn how to actually describe a door. And the next time one of your players tries to break one down, maybe shatter their clavicle for me.

No, I don’t mean their character’s clavicle.