D&D 5E Secret Doors

[akr71]

I agree that the Passive Perception autopass/autofail may tend toward monotonous or trivial when there are frequent secret doors. I would handle it by treating secret doors as puzzles. The party knows the door in there, but how does this one open? Now the players can roll (active) Perception and/or Investigation checks.

Think of the stereotypical secret door bookcase. Which book triggers the door to open? Have there been any clues that might lead one to the correct title? Maybe its not a book at all but pulling on the torch sconce this time. This will lead to a lot of work on the DM's part to make each door interesting and challenging and if the players don't like puzzles, they may get frustrated. I don't expect my players to necessarily solve the puzzle themselves - a decent Investigation will lead them toward the solution.

 

[Quartz]

Have the secret doors roll (1d20+DC-11) against the player's passive perceptions,

Having a pre-printed list of d20 rolls helps here.

 

[iserith]

I agree that the Passive Perception autopass/autofail may tend toward monotonous or trivial when there are frequent secret doors. I would handle it by treating secret doors as puzzles. The party knows the door in there, but how does this one open?

This is generally how I handle it. It's usually 10 minutes to find it and 10 minutes to figure out how to open it if they are successful on both tasks. That's either 2 wandering monster checks (if on 10 min increments) or 1/3 the way to a wandering monster check (if hourly) and/or +20 minutes to the countdown to doom (e.g. prince is sacrificed, dungeon collapses or sinks beneath the waves, etc.).

Also, almost all of my secret doors lead to treasure, a shortcut around a dangerous area, or a safe place to short rest. So players know that a secret door is generally of great benefit which makes them more willing to risk being surprised by wandering monsters to look for them.

 

[77IM]

I don't want to slow down the game while the players go over every inch of wall

Is it in-genre/expected/reasonable for the PCs to go over every inch of wall?

• If it is, then what you need is a mechanic to speed up the game play, and Passive Perception fits the bill nicely. It means they're guaranteed to find most secret doors, but that's why the PCs are doing it. If it's in-genre to do a slow, thorough search, then it's in-genre to find the doors.
• If it's not, then you need some consequence for doing it. The classic method is they take too long searching and get hit with random encounters; or, there's some sort of time pressure in the adventure. But there are also lots of "soft" consequences you can apply too. Google "angry gm tension pool" for one abstract mechanism. You could require thorough searches to use up some cheap-but-finite resource like chalk powder or torches. I've also considered rules for boredom and fatigue to represent super tedious things that the players think their characters should be able to just do. Weigh this sort of stuff against your genre expectations to figure out why the characters aren't doing an inch-by-inch search.

 

[Stormonu]

I’d like to know more about what the purpose of the secret doors are for in the adventure.

If they are concealing the “true path” to an important area of the dungeon, I’d suggest replacing them with some sort of puzzle block to get past than a perception gate.

If they are “side areas” that lead to extra-credit area with loot or extra encounters, it’s fine to leave them as is - perhaps with some sort of clue to their presence (a certain discolored brick, a small rune, scratch marks on the ground, etc.) where players can ask direct questions about their presence (or lack) to not have to rely on purely random perception checks to locate.

If they are “alternate/secret paths” that bypass/end around important areas, consider changing them to one-way doors or simply leave them as bonuses for observant players.

 

[delericho]

Some thoughts.

Firstly, don't gate any must-find areas behind secret doors. Everything that follows rather depends on that...

The key, I think, is to put in place a tension behind risk and reward - the PCs naturally want to find all the treasures in the place, but they should also be wary of the various dangers and want to avoid those. So set up a system where to spending lots of time searching also increases the danger...

One of the things I do is have a fairly aggressive clock for random encounters. Additionally, random encounters never carry treasure, and don't grant XP. So they're very strictly a bad thing to be avoided where possible. Simply having that in place discourages the "go over every inch" problem.

Additionally, I set the DCs for finding secret doors simply for being in the area, extremely high (traps too, BTW). So to find them, you're going to have to be more specific - being in the room won't do it, but checking out the bookcase, or statue, or whatever might.

On the flip side, I make sure to seed the area with clues for the locations and types of secret doors. For instance, I theme my dungeons - a lost dwarven mine will have secret doors of this type, while a goblin city will have secret doors of that type (and not the other). So clever players can figure out what to look for.

Additionally, I try always to place a 'broken' secret door early in the dungeon to deliberately give away some of these clues.

The upshot of all of this is that secret doors become nice-to-have/Easter Eggs for the players to find (if they're interested), but there're never necessary to finish the adventure. They're findable, but savvy players will have a much easier time of it. And exhaustive searches, while effective, quickly become discouraged, because they just take up too much time (and soak resources for no reward).

 

[jayoungr]

Is it in-genre/expected/reasonable for the PCs to go over every inch of wall?

• If it is, then what you need is a mechanic to speed up the game play, and Passive Perception fits the bill nicely. It means they're guaranteed to find most secret doors, but that's why the PCs are doing it. If it's in-genre to do a slow, thorough search, then it's in-genre to find the doors.

It's a dungeon crawl, so yeah, I'd say that searching is in-genre. But the problem is that there seem to be two standard ways of handling it, and neither one is satisfying:

• Option 1: "We check the east wall. Any secret doors?" (Optional: "Roll Perception." "12.") "No, you don't find any." "We check the west wall." "No doors." "Okay, we move 10 feet south. Any doors on the east wall?" This is excruciatingly tedious, and you can sense that everybody at the table is bored, but they don't want to miss a door.
• Option 2: "You see a 30-foot hallway leading south. Player A with the high passive perception score, you notice a secret door in the east wall." This completely negates the point of having a secret door in the first place, because it's not actually secret.

Making it so that some of the doors are findable with passive perception and some are not just seems likely to lead back to Option 1, except with even fewer successes to break the monotony.

It seems like there's got to be a sweet spot somewhere, where the players can drive the search and finding the doors is still a product of their own initiative, but where they don't get bored spending a large proportion of the time on unsuccessful searches.

Maybe dividing up the dungeon into segments larger than one room (or length of corridor) at a time might work? Have them explore a portion of the dungeon first and then either make a roll at the end to see if anyone noticed anything along the way or tell the character with the highest passive perception, "You remember noticing a crack in the wall three rooms back."

There's also the wand of secrets, but it only has a range of 30 feet and it has a limited number of charges.

 

[Stalker0]

In my game whenever the party or rogue gets within 30 ft of a secret door or trap, they get an auto investigaton or perception check (whichever is appropriate). If they succeed they find the thing.

but if they fail there’s nothing to see, and the players don’t “search inch by inch”. It’s worked well in my group

 

[jayoungr]

In my game whenever the party or rogue gets within 30 ft of a secret door or trap, they get an auto investigaton or perception check (whichever is appropriate). If they succeed they find the thing.

Doesn't that just lead to "Option 2" above?

And what do you do if the players suspect there's a secret door but the PCs' auto check isn't high enough to find it automatically?

 

[77IM]

This completely negates the point of having a secret door in the first place, because it's not actually secret.

Welllll, kind of. It negates ONE point of having a secret door, which is, making the players decide when to search for secret doors. However, there are several other points that it upholds.

A) Dungeon design -- The door may be better hidden from one side than the other! Maybe the PCs see it but the troglodytes on the other side don't.
B) Dungeon ecology -- The fact that the troglodytes don't see the door might be why they've never come through it and gotten eaten by all the gelatinous cubes on this side.
C) Role-Playing -- It's MORE FUN to find a secret door than to just see a plain old obvious door, even when you don't have to do anything. In fact, the player DID have to do something -- they had to spec out their character to have a high Perception. Probably because they enjoy finding all the secret doors! It is an expression of their character concept and reinforces their value to the party.