Tissue-Paper Dungeons?

[WereMike]

Xorn has the right idea.

There is a right time for bashing down doors or through walls (as the Nater also explains well) but usually, making that much noise is going to alert all the bad guys in the dungeon/castle/cavern to the intruders.

If I were DM, not only are enemies lining up behind the door that intruders are trying to break through, but the racket would also cover up the sound of enemies positioning themselves behind the PCs to cut off any line of retreat.

Now, is waiting for the rogue to open locks or the wizard to use Knock a worse alternative than fighting multiple threats on two fronts?

 

[Aria Silverhands]

My fighter had an adamantine glaive +3 and the improved sunder feat with a pretty nice strength and power attack. One hit was all it took for me to break down most doors. It was fun.

 

[Piratecat]

One of the funniest posts on this site involved a relatively new DM whose PCs got ahold of an adamantine spoon... and then proceeded to dig through every single door in every single dungeon with it. The poor DM read "ignored hardness" as "cuts through stone like it was jello," and didn't know to say "no."

 

[DandD]

Other melee-combatants have Ancient Mountain Hammer Strike from Tome of Battle and laugh at the pure-fighters who need feats and adamantime weapons to accomplish something which any Stone Dragon Adept could accomplish with his bare hands, if needed.

 

[Aria Silverhands]

Other melee-combatants have Ancient Mountain Hammer Strike from Tome of Battle and laugh at the pure-fighters who need feats and adamantime weapons to accomplish something which any Stone Dragon Adept could accomplish with his bare hands, if needed.

Hence why crap like the ToB was banned in my games.

 

[Kraydak]

your wizard has no at-wills that could affect a wall, door, or any other object. At heroic levels, he might have one encounter power that targets objects - Force Orb - and could shoot that at the wall once every five minutes.

The wizard won't be much better placed to level the wall at 10th or even 20th level. At 19th level he could have a daily that targets objects - Disintegrate - which would deal with a wall very nicely, just as it should; but does the wizard really want to burn a daily that way?

Wizards aside, I think your point stands. The real problem is not typed damages but weapon damage (which I think is untyped, this time out). A wizard may be a bit stumped, but a ranger can shoot down a wall much too easily for comfort...

Somewhat humorously, *very few* people can attack objects under that reading. PHB page 287 has basic attacks as target: 1 creature. I don't know how many powers explicitly call out objects as legitimate targets (and have no real intention of counting them up), but it isn't very many...


Edit: searchable PDFs FTW: as far as I can tell, the only way for PCs to damage objects in 4e is through Force Orb or Disintegrate (*not* going to search the MM).

 

[Morrus]

I dunno - get five people armed with sledgehammers to attack a five-foot section of the wall of your house and see how long it lasts.

 

[mmu1]

I love how "Real world? What does real world have to do with it? This is a game about FANTASY HEROES!" turns into "What? That's ridiculous, you'll break your weapon / need a mining pick / bring the ceiling down!" for some people the moment players try to get off the rails.

Simple physical obstacles don't keep PCs out - never have, never will... but generally speaking, players don't start doing silly crap like tunneling through walls unless the limited options they're being presented with are either frustrating or boring them.

Also, are there really adamantine doors in the DMG? What's the price of adamantite these days? In 3.5, at least, it really wasn't a good idea to make doors out of something worth tens of times its weight in gold. You'd be hard pressed to come up with anything valuable enough to put behind them...

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Admantite Weapons. That was our preferred way to handle doors and walls that were in our way. Closely followed by a Rogue and Desintegrate, I guess. Wait, okay, sometimes the Rogue might be the first choice, if we have one, that picked Open Lock.

Ah, that reminds me of an al-Qadim game, where we had to break through a bunch of Greater Sign of Sealinged doors, and we had no one with rogue skill sets.

The method we settled on? The barbarian with the adamantite maul would beat the door *almost* down, and then the warmage would toss a Lesser Acid Orb at it from behind cover, since it would explode when it went down.

Brad

 

[Lord Sessadore]

I dunno - get five people armed with sledgehammers to attack a five-foot section of the wall of your house and see how long it lasts.

Your house is made of stone?? My house isn't made of stone

Anyone know of a stone wall we can go take our mauls to for some ... er.... research....