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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 2840691" data-attributes="member: 704">The Tactical considerations of Doors and DoorwaysDM's are already well aware that most partys will regard any doorway with an un-natural level of caution and suspicion.  They will listen, search, scry, and prepare for any number of possibilities to be on the otherside of a door.  They will not enter any doorway until they know it is safe to enter.  Doors essentially exist to provide some measure of privacy and security to a room that needs to be entered and exited.  They create natural choke points, and are excellent places to place traps, guards, and ambushes.  But once combat has started, how does the presence of a doorway affect a battle?  That depends on the nature of the door, and why it is there to begin with.Obviously, a door can provide a way to pick off players who try to enter one at a time.  This is best accomplished by readied actions taken by combatants who cannot be seen or attacked from the other side of the door.  Given a large enough room, you could have 20 or more attackers with ranged weapons with readied actions to shoot the next person who passes through a doorway.  You can also put some heavily armoured, high HP thugs near the door do keep people who enter the door from getting very far inside the room.This tactic is so obvious that it borders on sub-optimal.  As I noted, players are very suspicious of doors.  They probably wont enter until they are sure its safe, and will pile on every buf they can.  They could also just put a fireball in the room ahead of them.The best tactic is to arrange to have as much control as possible over who enters through a door and when.  Rather then use the door as a choke point, you should use it as a tool to isolate and slow down the opponents.  Maintaining control over whether the door is open or closed will allow you to use the door to either divide and conquer the players who try to get through, or to stall for time as you retreat.  You can also use doors to guarantee that the opponents can only be within an area you control.Controling the door is not the easiest thing to arrange in most cases.  If you have a typical door, you need to be on the side of the door that the door opens to, and to have someone behind the door ready to slam and bar it shut.  The person behind the door does have some measure of cover, but probably not enough to guarantee their safety.If you wish to make a door a tactical feature of the battlefield, you want that door to be as durable as possible.  This means heavy and thick doors, possibly metal.  A plain wooden door is not going to standup to a determined group of opponents who want to get to the otherside.  Vertical portculis set into the doorway are ideal for trapping people, but are a pain in the ass to open again.  Barred doors are a two edged sword.  They let you attack outward from the door, but they also let other attack inward.Divide and conquer tactics do not work so well against mid level spell casters.  Lightningbolt will open many doors that Knock cannot, and once you get to spells like dimension door, you cannot really use normal doors to control the movement of spell casters.  Despite this, you can usually isolate the front line melee combatants.  In addition to being able to control the door, you need to be able to guarantee access to either side of the door way.From an architecture point of view, this means that you want to be able to seal a room without having to be in it, and you want to be able to seal a room without it preventing you and / or your forces from entering or leaving the area.  This means you want rooms with multiple doorways combined with alternate routes around that room.  Alternatively, you will want to have doorways that cannot impede you personally.If you have the ability to turn insubstantial, squeeze through narrow gaps, or teleport short distances at will, then doorway control tactics can be devastatingly effective.On a marginally related note, you can probably really mess with a group of players by having a door that looks real but is really part of a wall, keyed with an illusion that allows someone to appear to have entered the door.  The players will spend hours trying to open a door that is not a door, allowing you to gather your forces and smash them.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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