Door Boss
This is not the first time Barbarian has been defeated by doors. I doubt it will be the last. That’s doubly true if the Anti-Party continue to drag their feet hiring Paladin’s replacement. (Seriously, get it together you guys! Coulda had a whole ‘nother character by now….)
Any dang way, when there’s a gaping hole in your party makeup, it can be hard to spot until the critical moment. For example:
- Who needs a divine caster? We’ve got wands and potions! What do you mean someone has been blinded?
- Who needs a rogue? The wizard has knock! What do you mean the door was trapped?
- Who needs a front line fighter? The mage can do double duty with buffs! What do you mean “last Friday’s comic?”
For this reason, I think the only truly indispensable role in the party may be “survivor.” No matter how nasty the dungeon or how gnarly the dragon, if at least one of you can walk away, there’s still hope for resurrection and a retry. Just sweep the remains of your former allies into ye old dust pan and scamper back to town. If you’ve got the bodies and the coin, you can always get the band back together for another try.
But perhaps more germane to today’s comic than raw survival is the notion of “the hired specialist.” If the party comes up against an immovable object, there’s no shame in shelling out for the assist. An expert locksmith is one such example. So is an interpreter who can treat with the locals. So is a learned sage who can make the one lore check that the bard happens to suck at. What I’m saying here is that figuring out how to access those skills may be a challenge, but it shouldn’t be one that keeps you from playing what you want to play. If you’re willing to invest the resources (both in questing time and gp) you’ll find a way to make up for any shortfalls.
Question of the day then! When have you been stymied by an obstacle that a “well rounded party” could have bypassed with ease? Did you get around it, or did you have to admit defeat? Tell us your best tales of impassable narrative barriers down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
We fought a bunch of Shining Child’s in a group with no access to ‘Remove Blindness/Deafness’ on anyone’s spell lists, deep inside enemy territory.
The result was the whole party being permanently blinded and the DM being forced to let us find a wand with the spell charges, as the alternative was blindly stumbling around in a highly hostile area, which was guaranteed death or capture, and in turn a very anticlimactic end to the story.
Oof, that’s rough. Trying to avoid that kind of thing is why I always try and familiarize myself with what my players can and can’t do—one enemy that counters them or that they can’t counter, combined with minions, makes for a tough fight. All the enemies countering them or not able to be countered is just aggravating.
I think this may be why DM screens were invented.
“How do three adventurers in high-level gameplay not have a single thieves’ tools proficiency / disable device rank between them?”
“It’s—the economy is in shambles,”
https://c.tenor.com/D41V-g52DikAAAAC/star-wars-meme.gif
Follow-up to this comic: Anti-Party being so desperate to open the door, they ask Paladin to use their diplomacy to find a rogue-ish replacement, or a locksmith. Because I doubt he’d be better at opening it.
Barbarian should have tried intimidating the door. Sorcerer or Oracle could have tried seducing it. Disbelieving the door is an unlikely strategy if it’s an illusion. Knocking politely may garner a response from the other side. The surrounding walls are likely weaker than the door itself. Oracle could divine a hint from her esoteric deity, or scry for the key.
lol @ asking Paladin to write a Glassdoor review
“If the GM didn’t want cheese, he shouldn’t have thrown this horrifyingly powerful foe at us.”
Sorcerer proceeds to polymorph the party into earth elementals so they can glide through the walls.
Unrealistic, would require Sorcerer to know and willingly use a spell other than Fireball
You’d think so, but it actually complements fireball.
With the ground as 3/4 cover, you can fireball melee with impunity.
Somebody really should have suggested this before he used all his slots on fireball.
So would that be Int or Wis dump stat?
Probably both…
Fun fact: In my group’s Rise of the Runelords campaign, this kind of thing was the hunter’s primary tactic at mid- to high-levels. You’d be amazed how many problems can be solved by a surprise underground tiger (or walking through walls).
Damn you, Crawford!
https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/955947708895739904?lang=en
Those neatly stacked stone blocks count as “unworked,” right?
Maybe that flies in 5e-land, but Pathfinder 1e says “go nuts dudes and dudettes”.
“When the creature burrows, it can pass through stone, dirt, or almost any other nonmetal earth as easily as a fish swims through water.”
I think folks get hung up on the wording in the burrow ability.
> A creature with a burrow speed can tunnel through dirt, but not through rock unless the descriptive text says otherwise.
“It’s a brick wall, not an earthen tunnel!”
“It’s an earth elemental that HAPPENS to be shaped like a honey badger, conferring the ‘don’t care’ ability.”
Oh, goodness… If I had a gold piece for every time we didn’t have some vital party role filled, I could buy myself a magical shield. Back in my 3.5 days, I ended up playing rogues a lot partly because it’s my favourite class and partly because I couldn’t trust anyone else to handle it – either no one would be a rogue or the one person who was forgot to invest in Disable Device. Nowadays, my party’s oversights are more likely to be “Wait, who’s the healer again?” (while our squishiest member is bleeding out on the floor) or “You mean none of you packed a ranged weapon?” (when being harassed by flying enemies using hit-and-run tactics). Depending on how desperate we are, our approach may be to suffer through it, withdraw and come back when we’re better prepared, or improvise like there’s no tomorrow – the last one tends to come up in the “no one has ranged attacks” situation I mentioned, where it turns out a lot of unexpected things can double as thrown weapons.
I always thought grappling hooks were a good solution for “no ranged weapon” situations. Can’t reach the enemy? Yank ’em out of the sky!
How is *Barbarian* of all people defeated by a door? Has she misplaced her axe?
In any party lacking a Rogue, it’s inevitably the Barbarian tasked with defeating such obstacles… the last time I played one, he was renowned for the use of his “+5 adamantine lockpick”…
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Blackscale?file=Blackscale.jpeg
Hello? Exactly!
Everyone knows you don;t need a Rogue and a frontline fighter, just a Barbarian. Barbarian should have “Bend Bars/Lift gated” that door into oblivion.
Brute strength, good Con saves, and lots of hit points… what more do you need for opening doors and detecting traps?
See the “ineffective weapons” rules:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/equipment/damaging-objects/#TOC-Ineffective-Weapons
There’s a raging debate about whether the ubiquitous adamantine dagger functions as a lightsaber in these scenarios:
https://i.makeagif.com/media/7-10-2016/vGoNS8.gif
In any case, that’s an adamantine door. Note the frustrated “punch holes” in the ground in front of it.
Wait. that door is made out of Adamantine?!
forget about opening it, pray it loose (see break walls post above)and take it with you!
that’s the dragon’s hoard right there it is!
@Creed
EXACTLY! Just punchinate the doorframe, it’s good old breakable stone, acid the stone where the hinge bolts are sunk into the stone, carry that treasure home!
I didn’t notice the punch marks, but I did see the scorch mark from (presumably) Sorcerers attemt to fireball his way through. Those end neatly right at the door so I assumed that it was made from something exceptionally durable, adamantium fits.
As a sidenote, no matter ones interpretation of how adamantium knives work, they shouldn’t help (directly) with cutting through an adamantium door.
Adamantium weapons ignore hardness “less than” 20, and adamantium conveniently have a hardness of exactly 20.
Clearly the party forgot the traditional ways to deal with Adamantium doors – break the comparatively fragile stone walls around them, then steal and sell them. Those are worth quite a lot more than their weight in gold and are sometimes worth more than any of the official treasure in the dungeon.
I mean it could be worse.
They could be defeated by an unlocked door
That door is clearly push. So if pushing didn’t work, a strong pounding should do the trick eventually.
Midvale Dungeon for the Gifted
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AZNV9I1nBF4/UB6SvKtIR6I/AAAAAAAAAWY/fk8_oWh9JCI/s1600/midvale+school+for+the+gifted.jpg
Allways look for hinges, if you can’t see them. push. If you do, well that is what the universal keys are for… are you telling me some one doesn’t have crowbar or fireaxe equivalent on their person? Amateurs.
This advice is far from universal. For instance, you should not push sliding doors.
Remember Tyr Thralltaker I’ve used as example. Well I think I mentioned his Charisma 10 made him the most charismatic of the team and one of two with social skills, another one was an alchemist with bluff but with -1 penalty was barely better than rest of the team. Mean while my barbarian only had Intimidate. So you can imagine what pain all the social tasks were to our group. Often having to use alternative means, if possible. Pretty sure we missed out on good rewards and xp because of that.
Even A-Team had Face and we forgot to bring one.
> Pretty sure we missed out on good rewards and xp because of that.
You know, that’s a good point. I wonder if people tend not to build for that because it’s less visible? I mean, you know whether the door opened or not. But it’s hard to tell in most games whether you failed to get +20% gp as a quest reward when you botch that talk-good check.
Between the Artificer and Rogue lockpicking is fairly covered. Between the Cleric and Artificer we can handle most magical threats. If something just needs to be broken, the Paladin has a “Dwarven lock-pick”. (Adamantine war pick)
I like the war pick for that reason. It’s a better fit for the breaking-and-entering job than the “adamantine dagger lightsaber” I referenced up above.
Which is why the “lockpick” I’ve previously referred to was essentially a +5 adamantine greatclub… size large, and wielded by a character with a strength somewhere around 30. Nobody could pick locks like that guy… 😉
As a player, I felt that my halfling rogue was underappreciated.
As a DM, I knew that the upcoming mission had a lot of moving parts, and I didn’t want to manage my own character AND all the minutiae of the mission.
My solution was to have the Noble Quest Giver send the party on a super-secret stealth mission WITHOUT their rogue; the excuse was that the duke approved of everyone in the party except for the chaotic halfling: he was confident the hothead would do something to screw up the mission.
While the rogue was “sent away to cause havoc and draw attention in another city,” the halfling first handed a sack with a skeleton key and a bunch of tanglefoot bags, alchemists fire, and such to the team and said “good luck.”
It made the mission that much more challenging, and no one really complained about the rogue as much after that.
I gather the rogue was a DMPC? This is why I like giving “front line” or “heal bot” duty to DMPCs. If you’re the face, you wind up roleplaying with yourself or overcoming your own challenges.
Oh yeah–If I’m the DM, my rogue “got tired of waiting and left early” to start the mission and the PCs spend the adventure playing catch-up past sprung traps, or my cleric (conveniently) finds something just-his-size to wrestle in the big fight while the PCs fight the (otherwise appropriately scaled) mob and lieutenants, or the illusionist has suggestions on which quest she’d like to try next and enough castings of *colorspray* to (hopefully) turn the tide in a pinch.
I can’t think of anything specific off the top of my head, but if I don’t play a divine caster of some kind, there’s at least a 50/50 chance the party has no healing magic.
My group’s Skull & Shackles campaign has this problem. Our solution has been roughly threefold—an NPC cleric who I think is in the adventure for exactly this purpose, the captain chose Leadership as a feat to pick up a second cleric as a cohort, and my witch has the Healing hex (and reincarnate as a spell). We leave the first two in the ship when we go out adventuring, though. Thankfully, we’re of a level where my witch can dimension door to the ship as long as we’re within a few hundred yards…but if my witch ever gets knocked out and we have an emergency, we’re SOL. My witch nearly died of poison last session trying to get the cohort on deck.
Reminds me of the last book of the Glass Cannon Podcast playthrough of *Giantslayer.* That attitude of “the teleport monkey must survive at all costs” creates a certain amount of tension, but I don’t know how to feel about it. There’s this nagging sense in the back of my head that it diminishes the stakes when the party has such a powerful reset button at their disposal.
Yesterday. It’s a desert setting in a dead/wild magic zone where the dwarves and gnomes and goblins all have advanced technology to exemplary levels, and our group was asked to and agreed to deliver a flying fortress that was attacking our city…we realized, as we got to the core, that no one had knowledge engineering worth a damn. Everyone who’d had it before either died or left the group (IC).
Sooooo we crashed it in the desert as gently as possible and reported its location. At least Geb can’t use it to threaten us again.
lol. Love the shit out of that example.
“Let’s land this thing!”
“They shot the pilot!”
“What about the backup pilot?”
“She moved to Minnesota for her new job, remember?”
in our RotR campaign I play the survivor of the nearly second TPK.
unfortunately I had neither the (way too heavy) bodies, nor the coin.
At least I was able to put a new band together and continue the story.
Huray for „hide in plain sight“ and „expeditious retreat“.
Re: Question of the Day
also Rise of the Runelords
A well rounded party would have a wizard with teleport at our level.
Instead we do all the traveling on non-magical mount.
Well hey, you know my feelings on travel: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/travel-time
yeah, the upside of non magical travel is:
My Shadow Dancers shadow companion had a fatal case of „Barbarian armed with magical weapon“ and takes 30days to replace.
With teleport the campaign would be over by then.
This is true. Downtime activities suddenly become relevant when you don’t skip the cutscenes, as it were.
Naked origami contest 🙂
What, you didn’t put ranks in that?
We got but nsfw origami stuff got insane difficults 😀
My first campaign in Edge of the Empire, the party was originally a slicer, a thief, and an assassin. Unfortunately, this was a standard nerd, someone who wanted to stay out of the spotlight except while bigging up the latest deeds of
Dread Pirate RobertsThe Master Thief, and a gun nut who wasn’t nearly as cool as he thought he was. We had maybe 6 Presence between us, and the plot was revolving around selling a vast pile of guns that we had accidentally stolen before someone killed us for them. After the third round of negotiations went south and we narrowly fought off some goons sent by the local Hutt, the GM gave in and recruited a fourth player to be the Face. Enter Guilbert Niceday, AKA Lipton Twix-Cadbury, AKA Lionel Sight McFakename.Apart from that, the only time we’ve really had any problems with party line-up was when the Cleric went off on a soul-searching sabbatical and we had to subsist on potions and the healing powers of one Aasimar and one trainee Paladin. In the Underdark. For several in-game weeks.
Well, *that’s* not gone well. Only meant to strike through three words.
Fixed if for ya. Also, thanks for showing me how to do the strikethrough! I’ve been going to some derpy generator to do mine:
https://www.piliapp.com/cool-text/strikethrough-text/
“Who needs a divine caster?” Every party! If you don’t, stock up on pots, wands, and //scrolls// and make sure you’re friends with the local Church/Druid Circle. Remember the old adage, “If it’s a spell, it’s scrollable”.
“Who needs a rogue?” Inside a dungeon? No one. A properly kitted out Tank can Barbarian any trap or lock you come across. Outside a dungeon? Every party needs a Rogue to pick pockets, diplomance, set traps, counterfit, etc. Adjust as needed.
“Who needs a front line fighter?” Every party! In fact, unless you’re in one of those pansy diplomacy or slice of games, you can dispense with every class except Tank (and Wizard).
“When have you been stymied by an obstacle that a “well rounded party” could have bypassed with ease?”
Never, because if I’m in the party there is a Rogue or Rogue-like (or a Barbarian) so that niche is well covered. It’s the other roles that tend to go improperly covered, so…
We have faced and run from/lost to foes that wouldn’t have been a challenge if we had a real Tank, Blaster, or Healbot, but because the Cleric decided to be a Bard, the Fighter a Monk, and the Wizard was another Monk, I did have the honor of being the Rogue party leader to the most dysfunctional 3.5e D&D party ever (two Chaotics and a pair of Lawfuls walk into a bar…).
We were very stealthy though. Very sneaksy away from or diplomance everything… in a terrible megadungeon where diplomacy and sneaking was usually not an option.
The “barbarian smash” thing is interesting. Because of the nature of the dungeon I’m running, Monte Cook made sure to write in special “blue steel doors.” Since his old Dungeon a Day site was literally building a dungeon room every day, there was often nothing on the other side of said door. They were magically imbued to be unbreakable until you found their password. But as a game designer, I quite like the idea of taking the easy brute force option away on occasion. It rewards creative play and exploration. Plus I don’t have to find sources for “digging time through solid stone with hand tools” again. You would not believe how many hours that search took!
Adamantine „thieves“ tool may be „interesting“ but is also very noisy.
it can attract all sorts of monsters…
Every Barbarian worth their salt should carry an adamantite pickaxe. And their battle-cry should be “Is the wall made of adamanatite?!?!”
In GURPS this is solved by the party Wizard or Cleric having Shape Earth, which allows them to magically reshape earth and stone. So while it might be slow, it’s quiet…
My Barbarian Ogress has already bludgeoned open a few doors and made holes in the walls and generally not noticed when she “Barbarianed” the traps… but then she is the brute squad!
On the Hover over Text there is a typing Error: “Koan: If Sorcerer is out of Fireballs is her really even Sorcerer anymore?”
“he” instead of her.
Unless of course that’s an intentional hint to the next Storyline.
How did no one notice this before me?
Thanks for the catch. Fixed. 🙂
Isn’t Barbarian a hairdresser in her spare time? She doesn’t have any tweezers or styling tool that can double as a lockpick? It’s just a -4 to the roll.
Fair cop. -4 modifier must make it an impossible DC.
looks like an expensive door with superior lock, DC40.
you‘ll need masterwork thieves tool for the +2 on the take20, rather than -4.
Going off some other peoples’ observations, I like how the fact that the security system itself might be one of the most valuable things in the place typically never crosses most peoples’ brains in some media.
Also, Barb should probably be able to break that door.