Doors

Structure doors might be locked, trapped, reinforced, barred, artificially sealed, or sometimes just stuck. All but the weakest characters can eventually break through a door with a large weapon such as an assault hammer or other heavy tool.

Attempts to chop down a door with a slashing or bludgeoning weapon use the hardness and Hit Points given in Table 11–10: Doors. When assigning a DC to an attempt to knock a door down, use the following as guidelines.

• DC 10 or Lower: A door just about anyone can break open.
• DC 11–15: A door that a strong person could break with one try and that would take an average person one or two tries.
• DC 16–20: A door that almost anyone could break, given enough time.
• DC 21–25: A door that only a very strong person has any hope of breaking, and probably not on the first try.
• DC 26 or Higher: A door that only an exceptionally strong person has any hope of breaking.

Structure doors are often locked and thus require the Engineering skill (or other means) to bypass. Locks are usually built into the door, either on the edge opposite the hinges or right in the middle. Built-in locks (which are usually electronic) either control an iron bar that juts out of the door and into the wall of its frame or else a sliding iron or heavy wooden bar that rests behind the entire door. By contrast, padlocks are not built in but usually run through two rings: one on the door and the other on the wall. More complex locks, such as combination locks and puzzle locks, are usually built into the door itself. A special door might have a lock needing a biometric signature or requiring that the right symbols be pressed on a keypad in the correct sequence to open the door. Because such keyless locks are larger and more complex, they are typically found only in sturdy doors (strong wooden, stone, or steel doors).

The DC of the Computers check to hack an electronic system that controls a door or the Engineering check to pick a lock (whether it is mechanical or electronic) often ranges from 20 to 40, although locks with lower or higher DCs can exist. A door can have more than one lock, each of which must be unlocked separately.

Breaking a lock is sometimes quicker than breaking the whole door. If a PC wants to strike a lock with a weapon, treat the typical lock as having a hardness of 20 and 30 Hit Points. A lock can be broken only if it can be attacked separately from the door, which means that a built-in lock is immune to this sort of treatment. In an occupied structure, every locked door should have a key somewhere.