how to make locked doors interesting...

[bweenie]

My characters are exploring an abandoned monument. It is trapped and warded, and all doors are Arcane Locked. There are no creatures, but the adventure is time sensitive: they have four hours to loot it and find the artifact before the enemy shows up. In the interest of my own sanity as DM, I keep track of time in ten minute increments. I give rough estimates of each room search, gathering treasure, looking around, etc as taking ten minutes. For example, theres a room with a fountain that Hastes when drunk from, so when they were fooling around, sticking sticks in, sipping, etc I just said it was ten minutes.

So my problem is that I don't know how to make the locked doors aspect of it interesting. I don't feel like I should make it take more time, cuz that means that I would have to either say that it takes ten minutes to unlock a door, or else keep more fine details of time passage. Since there isn't a monster or enemy on the other side of a door, there's no penalty for not kicking it open on the first try. Also, there's no penalty for failing ("uh, you sprained your ankle," "uh, you broke your lock picks")

Ideas...?

 

[sfedi]

What is the effect you want to transmit/evoke?

-Puzzle like doors
-Detailed description/flavor
-Provide clues about it's surroundings/constructors/etc.

I'd also play with hiding things in clever ways:

In one adventure I ran, I'd have a permanent illusionary wall high up a wall.
The only clue as to that wall existence was the marks on the wall and floor of a previous wood stair/ramp that provided access to it.

Furthermore, there are ways in which you can fool a Knock spell, mechanically.

 

[Jesus_marley]

Why is there no penalty for failure?
Why not make it so that, like a modern safe, an attempt to force the door causes a secondary locking mechanism to kick in. This either A) makes the door unopenable or B) doubles or triples the time required to open it.

If this is a time sensitive adventure make the penalties eat up available time. You also said there were traps and wards. Put some on the doors themselves. Or even create false doors or doors witha solid wall behind them. be sure to supply a subtle clue that identifies such doors so that a smart party can learn to simply bypass those that go nowhere.

In essence, reward the party as well for not wasting valuable time. and penalize them for being TOO careful.

 

[sfedi]

Why should there be penalties to make something interesting?

 

[shilsen]

Make locked doors interesting? Have a couple be animated and beat the crap out of the PCs when they get to them. There's nothing more embarrassing than trying to kick in a door and have the door kick you in! And don't forget to allow the doors to dual-wield poisoned shocking +1 doorknobs while you're at it

 

[Shallown]

Warped / stuck doors can eat up some time with DC 20 strength checks and such.

Heavy doors requiring characters to hold it open while dealing witha threat on the other side.

A door that shuts by itself whenever opened. I used leather drapes/flasp to good effect one time as characters had to use a move equivalent to open them before moving through and it blocked line of sight. It was actually a pain to move up open and that was all your actions that round.

The Door attacking back is a good Idea. I once had a wood golumn/door attack a party in another fantasy system and it threw them through a loop.

Making the door a more integeral part of the room makes it interesting. Sort of making the wrapping of a present a preveiw of what's inside. Being descriptive and linking that description to the encounter/obstacles inside is important as the players start paying attention to the doors if they are something more than just a plain wood or stone door. Once they see the door is a clue to the room they start studyin it a lot more extensively. Such as a room filled with hot blowing steam jest being a warm to the touch wood that has slowly warped over time and is now stained black with mold.

just some ideas.

Later.

 

[hong]

The penalty for trying to kick a door in is the time taken. Every attempt is another round used up, and taking 20 is 2 minutes. So if there's a time limit, you have plenty of scope to make things interesting.