Just break the door down!

[Belbarrus]

Picture this scenario: The adventurers had gone through a small dungeon and at the end is a huge stone door, leading to a treasure vault. The DM has created a long scenario as to what the party will need to go through to open this door. First, the door is locked, but with no visible keyhole, except a groove that a small sphere will fit into. The door is too large for any of the Arcane casters to Knock open.

The adventures is supposed to continue thusly:
The party, finding no way to open the door, head back to town and gather information on said vault. Research leads them to a sage that will tell them what he knows of the key, if they perform a service. The service is a simple 'retrieve an item' quest that takes the party on a minor adventure. Then the sage will tell the party about a special orb secreted away in castle ruins that will open the treasure vault. The party is supposed to venture to the ruins, brave the dangers and retrieve the orb, while dodging an enemy party also seeking the orb, which leads to background story about someone trying to overthrow the kindly king of the land. With the orb in hand, the party returns to the vault and uses the orb to magically unseal the dor and opens it, gaining the treasure.



Or, when they first encounter the door, they could just batter it down with battering rams and sledghammers and break their way into the vault. Or, the Wizard polymorphs into an Umber Hulk and burrows through the door in 1 second. Thereby negating the need for the 'extra' adventures that the DM had planned.

I needs tips on how to fortify areas, or at least discourage a party from merely battering their way through everything. Even if they take damage and are destroyed over time, sledgehammers and battering rams are cheap and if the party has the time, whats to prevent them from busting through areas? I know, in modules, the normal tactic is that the 'noise gets the attention of wandering monsters'. But, monsters are merely more Experience Points for the group.

Any ideas on this?

 

[geezerjoe]

The area beyond the doors could actually be a gate keyed to function only when the doors are properly opened (with the orb/key).

If the characters try to batter down the doors, they actually cause the gate to become inoperable unless they jump through more of your carefully designed hoops.

But then again I'm mean.



Joe2Old

 

[Bauglir]

Doors reinforced with Walls of Force?

Or for something a little more exotic you could use a variation of the Living Vault from the ELH.

 

[AuraSeer]

The easiest way to foil sledgehammers is to make the door really tough. Plate it in adamantine, or apply magical or alchemical treatments to increase its hardness. Applying rule 0, you can say that sledgehammers and crowbars don't do any hit point damage to the door at all. (Make sure you do the same to all sides of the vault, so they don't just go through a wall instead.)

Don't make the door totally invulnerable, though. You don't want to force the PCs to follow your script; that's called railroading, and it's not fun for the players. Just make the other options more expensive and less convenient than your preferred way.

If one of the PCs has skill in stonecarving or engineering, you could give them an actual estimate for busting through. Say something like, "You could probably break in, but it would require a lot of work. A dozen dwarven engineers could tunnel through in six months or so, if they had adamantine tools and some heavy drilling equipment." The players probably won't spend that much time and money, but the option is there if they're really determined. (Note that finding skilled engineers, and equipping them appropriately, could be a couple of interesting quests.)

Similarly, they could go and try to hire a powerful spellcaster to disintegrate a passageway into the vault. High-level characters don't work cheap, though. The PCs might need to do a few fetch-the-McGuffin quests in order to get the mage's help.

If your plans absolutely require the PCs to get the key before they open this door, turn it into something other than a door. Magic teleporters and gateways come to mind. Maybe it could be a permanent, immobile variant of Leomund's secret chest; the contents are stored somewhere inaccessible on another plane, and cannot be retrieved without the key.

 

[Caliban]

You can use magically hardened walls/doors. A hardness of 15 or 20 will stop low level parties cold, but will barely slow down high level parties.

At higher levels you need to use things like dimensional gates, or set it up so that the amount of force required to break through will destroy whatever is on the other side.

I'm sure other people have more clever ideas.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

I'd simply throw the vault into a pocket plane, with the proper key activating a portal to the vault. The best way to foil battering doors is not to use a door.

 

[Deset Gled]

The adventurers had gone through a small dungeon and at the end is a huge stone door

Similarly, they could go and try to hire a powerful spellcaster to disintegrate a passageway into the vault.

Or they could hire a lower level Druid. As many have stated, I would start by rethinking the material you make the doors out of. If you describe the door as being extremely foreboding, the characters will be more likely to take the hint that they're supposed to go on the quest to open the doors.

Some nice slimes, fungi, oozes, and other nasty things that dissolve weapons would also be a good way to discourage forced entry. If they are thick enough, they will abzorb all the damage from the weapon. For more fun, a strong hit on some substances can have a nice splashing effect. An antimagic field would put a stop to a lot of spell tactics.

I can also imagine a trigger on the door so that when it experiences any type of damage, another stronger, even more foreboding door drops down in front of it.

 

[Darklone]

Another idea would be a pretty obvious but real deadly magical ward that kills anyone who comes close without a key.

 

[Zhure]

The key phrase is "if the party has the time." The problem then is time. As the GM you control the flow of time and events and in a lot of cases, presenting scenarios with implied event-driven constraints will discourage the use of brute force. If knocking the wall down will take a day, and they PCs have to get through the wall in six hours to save the blahblah from the blah, then they have to find a faster method.

I tend to run time-intensive segments or story arcs, followed by extended downtime. And I do without announcing ahead of time which is which, thus putting pressure on the preparation-casters to withhold some spells in reserve for later combats and encounters, yet still allowing them to get long term goals accomplished, like making magic items, using craft and professional skills, or socially interacting with NPCs.

I also use a partial time-intensive plots. Using tonight's game as an example, the PCs had some choices to make about how to deal with a besieged city. Going one way, or partaking in one adventure would have precipitated other events, changing the flow of the story. They chose to sneak out via the catacombs (which I hadn't really expected) even though it'd been presented as an option. Because of leaving the city and avoiding my planned encounters, it changed the flow of events and isolated them outside the city (the sally port hidden in the catacombs was compromised by them leaving and the priests who controlled the burial chambers sealed off the secret exit from the city.) Now they're outside the city, low on spells and could take the time to crack through via the way they came out, but it would attract the besieging army's full attention.

Greg

 

[Rel]

If it were me, I'd piece together a few of the ideas in this thread.

I'd make it such that the treasure itself was stored in an extra-dimensional space. The doors are the "magic item" that opens the way into this space. The party is free to bash them down if they like, but doing so destroys their ability to open the way into the space beyond.

From there, you could go two ways if they choose to batter down the doors: (1) You could say, "Well that's too bad. I guess you just learned that brute force and ignorance isn't the way to solve every problem. No treasure for you!" or (2) You could say, "The doors were the easy way into the extra-dimensional treasure room. But perhaps the powerful wizard who devised this place left some sort of back door in case the doors were somehow destroyed. Maybe the Sage in town would know more about this..."

I would steer away from having the doors made of adamantine or something like that. Next thing you know the party will be looking to sell the doors on the open market. "How big did you say the door was? And how much is adamantine per pound?"