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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GQuail" data-source="post: 3264887" data-attributes="member: 30709">I believe the OPs problem was that the damage was irresistable without the cloak, though: so rather than have a trap triggered by the absence of the cloaks, it's a trap that hurts anyone regardless of spells, racial resistances etc.  (at least, that's how I understood it)Sometimes these things aren't obvious to players: as you note, a trap which goes off without holding an item could also be a trap that the item provides the power to resist.  But I think that when you explicitly write it in the example given, you run into a problem where it's clearly a "neener neener" ability, as the kids say these days.(See also: John Cooper's review of Cityscape that tears strips out of the metamagic feat that makes something deal "city" damage, which basically amounts to normal, unresistable damage but with a fancy name that might as well be called "zq4qqbatmansymbol" damage .)As my fellow Scot pointed out (and I explicitly called out in my original post, in fact) the difference is one that can come out if the players revisit, or if you roll the adventure up to a higher level.  It's effectively the same thing at the time, of course, but the ethos behind the two is greatly different.  (For one thing, the door may be just about doable with lucky rolls froma  certain spell, inw hich case you make the option available but hard - and players who almost succeed there will likely be happier than those who are told that it doesn't happen because it was decreed impossible to make things harder.)Indeed, as I note above, player observation is sometimes skewed in this regard: sometimes the DM can't explain something that makes sense, but to PCs missing the vital clue it's arbitrary... but then, we aren't talking about that, are we?  We're talking about a door that's being held fast by the power of plot as a Tomb Of Horrors-esque test of the PCs.  Specifically in a game like D&D 3.x which has so many rules for desigining traps, and stats for the comparable hardness of various materials and spells which adjust tht, I don't think it's unfair to brand people who ignore those rules and make up their own as "cheating": at least, within the context of a pre-made adventure that does it purely as a railroading device.  If nothing else, it's certainly rather poor writing, and making excuses for it doesn't change that.That's not unfair: though I would like to add again that declaring people who don't like the example given as people who "get upset becuase they can't bash down the door" is rather coldly brushing off people who don't agree with a certain style of play.There is that: but again, the difference to me is between the quantifiable and the non.  The whole point of the original whinge was in "breaking the rules" to do this rather than operating within the tools given. (Though as the example appears to be a 1E adventure, one could argue that it was a lot more tolerated then than it is now - the 3.x influx of 3rd party adventure design is a different world to the era of waiting for Gygax to write T2.)</blockquote>

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