Ugh...Burrowing through walls...

[Fates]

We've all seen it. We bust our asses building dungeons with for the players, trying desperately to provide them with challenges that will curb their unbelievably short attention spans, and the moment they come across a door they can't open, or a guardian with a riddle, or whenever they just want to make their own shortcut, the little pricks decide to dig through the dungeon walls, and of course they always find a way to do so.

Are there any non-cheesy, non-railroad, and non-player-exploitable ways to prevent players from doing this? It's sort of an ongoing issue in my campaigns, but I don't just want to give an ultimatum to my players or anything like that. I only want them to actually make an attempt to navigate dungeons in a way somewhat resemblant of how I intended. Does anyone have any good ideas for circumventing this?

[Aegis013]

Having Prismatic Wall (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Prismatic_Wall)s hidden inside the walls, floor, and ceiling might give them pause. The first time they have to make the save for every single magic item on their person or have it be destroyed and make one for themselves or be shunted to another plane, they'll reconsider their burrowing attempts.

Depending on the level of play though, it might be hard to explain why those are there.

[Flickerdart]

In modern buildings, breaking through walls can be a bad idea for lots of reasons. Some are load-bearing walls. Others have wiring or piping running through them (or for extra fun, both at once). And finally, the things on the other side of the wall could be walled off for a reason - sometimes, dungeon designers like to be extravagant and put a walkway above a pit of lava or acid. Enter through the door, you're fine. Enter through the wall, you're falling.

In a dungeon that's not constructed but naturally formed (such as a series of tunnels left behind by burrowing creatures and then taken over by mad cultists who weren't too mad to put in doors) there may still be burrowers living in the walls. If it's easy to tunnel through, then something may well have done that before the PCs did. Also, natural deposits could have been left in the stone. Is there dangerous natural gas? Perhaps there's a deposit of gold or jewels, which attracts the unwelcome attention of rust monsters or folugubs?

Ultimately, the best way to deal with this is to remember that tunnelling takes a long time and is noisy (unless the players have burrow, earth glide, dimension door, etc, but you should really be designing your adventure with their capabilities in mind instead of throwing stock scenes and expecting that to work well). A populated dungeon will have someone notice pretty quickly. An unpopulated one would already have been looted if getting through obstacles was that easy.

[XmonkTad]

I don't remember where it is, but there are guides for building 4 dimensional dungeons somewhere. Hard to navigate that via tunneling.

There are printed adventure modules (won't spoil which) where the BBEG is inside a mobile adimantine room.

If tunneling is splitting the party, ambush time. It's awfully hard for the wizard to cast spells when grappled by an earth elemental inside a wall.

If regular traps aren't working, try a spell trap of move earth. That kicks out a burrower and makes anyone with a bad fort save unlikely to try again.

[Incanur]

At higher levels, magical barriers are pretty the only way to prevent walls from becoming meaningless. One dungeon I made for characters maybe 15ish level was all virtually destructible and blocked or mostly blocked ethereal travel, teleportation, etc.

[Emperor Tippy]

Make doors portals and have each room be a different demiplane.

Or teleportation circles (or have the doors be "trap's" of Greater Teleport) with the rooms of the dungeon having no real spatial relationship with one another.

Every room in the dungeon can be on a different planet if you want.

Then there is also making the Dungeon an Ice Assassin of an Aleax Animated Object. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all really part of on single giant creature that is totally immune to harm.

[Swaoeaeieu]

Make doors portals and have each room be a different demiplane.

Or teleportation circles (or have the doors be "trap's" of Greater Teleport) with the rooms of the dungeon having no real spatial relationship with one another.

Every room in the dungeon can be on a different planet if you want.

Then there is also making the Dungeon an Ice Assassin of an Aleax Animated Object. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all really part of on single giant creature that is totally immune to harm.

I am quite sure that that is a everything-proof way to fix the OP's problem. Since Tippy fixes are the best fixes. Maybe it's a bit overkill for a tribe of goblins hideout? But high level dungeons, sure!
So MasterofFates, what is the level for these dungeons?

[Raven777]

And finally, the things on the other side of the wall could be walled off for a reason

Time to fish stuff (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-136) on the scp (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-747) wiki!

[Emperor Tippy]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).

If you really have the resources then back the regular walls with Riverine. It ceases to be so useful once the party gets access to Disintegrate but before that it works pretty well.

[Fates]

In this particular case, the party's 10th-12th level. Everyone's t2>, and the only character with any sort of teleportation is the warlock, who only adventures with the party occasionally. It's a relatively low-magic setting, and so I'm primarily looking for mundane ways of handling this, but of course there are NPC spellcasters around.

I generally try to design dungeons with the PC's abilities in mind, but I can never seem to be able to keep track by higher levels of who can do what. This group in particular is very crafty, which I suppose is preferable to having a totally vanilla party. It doesn't even bug me all that much that the players are undermining my plans- that's a necessity in a healthy D&D group; it's only that they keep falling back on the same uninteresting tactic, and for in-game reasons I don't want to make every dungeon out of adamantine or anything like that.

I guess in large part this thread is more for creative inspiration and less for a fix to a problem.

[Rubik]

You could always give the party situations where it's clear that they need to burrow through walls to get what they want. Plan on them doing so, and design challenges explicitly with that in mind on occasion. Then later on, give them a clear, spelled-out-beforehand deterrent for doing so, such as the aforementioned lava walls and gas pockets. Then once they're used to having both of those be options, have the tunneling itself be a challenge, because they need to tunnel, but the lava and gas pockets are known hazards, and they need to find ways to survive them.

[Incanur]

Making the quest time sensitive is on way to discourage hacking through walls - though hacking through walls can be suprisingly quick with adamantine weapons and power attack! A mere 50-60 damge per round gets through 3ft of stone in about a minute. So, by the rules, walls don't have much of a chance against mid- or high-level characters. (Or really against barbarians of nearly any level.)

So you might want to just consider planning for tunneling.

[Deophaun]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).
As long as they don't dig straight down and have a bucket of water with them, all that does is give them an infinite amount of cobblestone.

[GiantkillerJack]

As long as they don't dig straight down and have a bucket of water with them, all that does is give them an infinite amount of cobblestone.

:smallbiggrin:Thank you for making my day.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I tend to favor the load-bearing wall solution for man-made dungeons. Knock a big chunk out of the wall and a big chunk of the ceiling it was holding up comes crashing down. Works just as well for shallow burrows and soft earth.

Being prone to breaching with explosives, its something that I thought of a while ago.

T2 and better, you have to accept that walls aren't a meaningful barrier after level 7 and do something else. Larger complexes that make magically bypassing or pounding through the wall next to every well made door horridly impractical is always a fun start.

[ArcturusV]

Well.. dealing with more "low magic" load bearing would be where my mind naturally goes to this problem. Because you KNOW that players aren't going to have Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), they didn't bring iron shod bracing beams with them, etc. They dig a hole and, well... chances are it'd fall. If you want a good basis for what a collapse like that would do? I'd rip from the bit off the Earthquake spell on dealing with a collapse for basis of saves, damage, effects.

Of course the other part is, well, it's slow. Even if they try to attack the dungeon/cave walls with their blasts and weapons, between hardness and HP on something like 20 feet of stone it's going to take a long time. And if someone else is there, something they wanted to avoid.... it'll be after them.

Now if I'm being a real ass? I'd point out something like the sword that guy is using, no matter how magical... just isn't meant for mining. It's not a pick axe. The damage it deals with his strikes is also being dealt to his sword, and will eventually get notched and damaged. Some guy basically turns his +3 Frostbrand Holy Silver Greatsword into a +3 Improvised Hunk of Rebar... well... they'll stop doing that.

Course you can't stop them from doing it. but if you make it harder for them to do it by logical consequences. "What... you didn't brace and shore up the hole you're digging? Roll a save against the collapse as you get close to breaking through and the tunnel is weak", "You used your sword as a pick axe? It's a useless twisted hunk of metal, no longer a honed weapon", "Yeah, after 1 hour of hacking at the stone wall and blasting with your power a bunch of fiends are standing behind you, tapping their toes, looking at you like shaved monkeys and going '... are you done?'.".

They want to still do it, but 'logically', having to hire miners, equip them, supply them, guard them when they're working, etc? More power to them. But at some point someone usually realizes, "... you know, this is boring, and about 15 times harder than just dealing with the frontal approach, and we're STILL getting ambushed by everything in the dungeon as they come to ruin our digging..."

[lord_khaine]

People, do notice that the entire party was tier2+, and level 11-12.
I am pretty sure that the burrowing though walls part was at least partly figurative, considering how much travel magic is available.

So if you want your players to stop randomly tunneling around the challenges then i suggest making sure they contain something the players actually need, like a key, or part of a coordinate, a hint for the next riddle, heck, even information about where they need to dig to reach the next room :smalltongue:

[Yuki Akuma]

Honestly, this sort of thing just encourages an unhealthy, combative relationship between the DM and the players.

I honestly think the best idea is to sit down with your players and say "Okay, guys. I know you like finding creative solutions to problems and bypassing encounters, but I spend a lot of time designing these dungeons for you to run through, and if you skip everything I suddenly have nothing left to throw at you. Could we please start going through dungeons normally?"

[ArcturusV]

I took that to be everyone is tier 3 and lower. Less than Tier 2. My bad.

[killem2]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).

If you really have the resources then back the regular walls with Riverine. It ceases to be so useful once the party gets access to Disintegrate but before that it works pretty well.

I would like to add, it doesn't even have to be lava it could be water from local under ground wells :) Having the dungeon suddenly fill up with a few thousand gallons of water will suck. hehe

[Pilo]

For evil cultist zone, there is the Unhallow (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/unhallow.htm) spell (level 5) with dimentionnal anchor tied.

For non cultists, there are some Wall spells, like Wall of Iron (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfIron.htm) to prevent Passwall.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I took that to be everyone is tier 3 and lower. Less than Tier 2. My bad.

Judging by his comment about the party warlock and the fact that it says "less than T2" with a mathematical symbol, that's probably correct. The OP probably isn't the only one with this issue and some of those others may have sorcerers or better to deal with.

[Averis Vol]

Time to fish stuff (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-136) on the scp (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-747) wiki!

Yea, not like I wanted to sleep tonight or anything......:smalltongue:


thanks for that link, might use some of this in one of my one shots.

[Spuddles]

Do your monsters just sit in room in sleep mode until a PC enters the room? Because in the time it takes to punch through a wall, they could have aggro'd the whole dungeon.

Also have them make knowledge architecture rolls or suffer cave ins. Rather, just have most tunnels they try and make, if they're crude and fast (no struts, not careful digging of load bearing arches), collapse on them. Then see if they'll wise up and put ranks on knowledge architecture.

[Vaz]

I am quite sure that that is a everything-proof way to fix the OP's problem. Since Tippy fixes are the best fixes. Maybe it's a bit overkill for a tribe of goblins hideout? But high level dungeons, sure!
So MasterofFates, what is the level for these dungeons?

If you're at a level where a tribe of goblins are still a threat, avoiding them by going through the walls is arguably one of the few ways of surviving the encounter and is deserving of XP.

At levels where Prismatic Walls and the like are in play and useable by BBEG's designed to be fought and killed by the party (or the party themselves are using them), then why shouldn't they be used?

It's like the CIA saying "nope, I can create this custom nigh-undefeatable firewall designed to protect the nations secrets, but instead I'll stick with AVG downloaded off the internet."

[Lord Vukodlak]

in a short lived campaign I had a party tho tried burrowing through walls and doors in an underground cavern.... I repeatedly pointed out that said complex seemed to extended underneath the lake..... you guess what happened from there.

[Story]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).


Won't necessarily work against summoned Thoqquas. The gas pockets might though.



T2 and better, you have to accept that walls aren't a meaningful barrier after level 7 and do something else. Larger complexes that make magically bypassing or pounding through the wall next to every well made door horridly impractical is always a fun start.

Level 5 for Druids.

But by the time the party gets stuff like Persisted Greater Blinking, the challenge is enemy spellcasters. Anything non magical like rocks and walls is just scenery.

[Rubik]

I took that to be everyone is tier 3 and lower. Less than Tier 2. My bad.Since one is a warlock, I think they are T3 and lower.

It would've been nice had the OP NOT tried to confuse everyone with bad mathematical symbolism.

[Deophaun]

Won't necessarily work against summoned Thoqquas. The gas pockets might though.
Thoqquas don't make that big of a hole, though. Unless the characters are kobolds, they aren't going to squeeze through a 1' diameter passage.

That said, in one dungeon delve I did at one point figure out how much movement it required for a thoqqua to corkscrew through a wall to leave a big enough passage (although one which would have a doughnut-hole bolder in the middle), and quickly realized that I'd rather use the spellslot for something else.

[NichG]

The most natural result I think is the 'its loud, get a random encounter' answer. It scales to party CR, since ostensibly they're exploring places that are about the right difficulty for them (and if they aren't, it doesn't really matter if they dig through the walls or go through the doors). To help with this, it can be useful to design 'dungeons' that are actually just safe or rarely traversed paths through hostile areas, so there's a pool of hostile things that could come investigate that the party simply wouldn't encounter at all if they had moved more quickly or remained more quiet.

Another thing to do is design dungeons that aren't very compact. Instead of having a 1ft stone partition between rooms, have snaking corridors that bend and go to another room 30ft or 50ft away. Tunneling can be done, but it becomes harder to know exactly what way you have to dig. If there are features like underground streams, etc, this can basically translate to a different kind of random encounter table for digging - one that includes flooding, breaking into a different cavern system, collapses, etc. Tippy's 'each room is on a separate plane' is the most extreme case of this kind of methodology, but you don't have to go that far - just make them spaced far out and make sure things aren't on nice grid lines, so digging 'straight' will miss the next room, you have to drop 10 feet too.

You could also simply houserule solid stone and metal to have 100x the normal hitpoints if they are thicker than 6 inches. If you need a logical justification, you can base it on the idea that for thin sheets you just have to create a crack and apply pressure at the edge of the crack to make it spread through the sheet, but for a large enough solid 'block' of material its going to be more like chipping away at it, you can't easily get it to fail catastrophically. That means that the 1 minute tunnel from the adamantine dagger wielding barbarian becomes a 100 minute tunnel. This won't do squat against the party summoning a burrower though.

[killem2]

Also, with tippy's idea, they don't have to ported to another plane, they can be ported to just something that is a few miles away connected by portals.

Sure you can dig, but you won't end up anywhere close to what you thought you were going to be. :smallbiggrin:

[Flickerdart]

You start running into the same problem that you would with traps, though - when the amount of effort taken to impede intruders eclipses the value of what's actually stored in the place, it makes absolutely no sense. You wouldn't spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of gp on portals to link your rooms together if the treasure contained within is appropriate for 12th level characters.

[Emperor Tippy]

You start running into the same problem that you would with traps, though - when the amount of effort taken to impede intruders eclipses the value of what's actually stored in the place, it makes absolutely no sense. You wouldn't spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of gp on portals to link your rooms together if the treasure contained within is appropriate for 12th level characters.

True enough, if the individual or organization making use of the dungeon is the one that actually built it.

These kinds of things can last thousands of years (or longer) and the current occupants are just one in a very long stream.

And really, all you actually need is an Ice Assassin of a Solar with Tenacious Magic: Permanency as one of its feats along with an Ice Assassin of a Revered Elder Phaereeim and you could build a whole super dungeon that would last pretty much forever with no real expense.

[NichG]

You start running into the same problem that you would with traps, though - when the amount of effort taken to impede intruders eclipses the value of what's actually stored in the place, it makes absolutely no sense. You wouldn't spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of gp on portals to link your rooms together if the treasure contained within is appropriate for 12th level characters.

This is true for dungeons built by people as e.g. treasure vaults and the like. For dungeons that serve a strategic function then the expense of constructing it can be much greater than the value of what it contains, because most of the 'payout' for that expense is in the function served by the dungeon rather than its contents. It also doesn't apply to 'natural' dungeons such as things formed by artifact-level discharges of wild magic, planar incursions, or even just 'any building in Sigil, by default'.

So it mostly means you just have to be careful to keep things consistent, but you can still do it.

[Zero grim]

I can think of a few solutions:

The Fluff solution: ancient Dwarf crafted walls are much harder to burrow through and resist spells like passwall.

The Real world Solution: the walls have rats in them....lots and lots and lots of rats (or if you want them to never be able to sleep, make it bees)

The Exceptionable losses Solution: the walls are filled with gunpowder/Acid/Lava/Honey and makes getting through the dungeon harder instead of easier.

The Rich Mans solution: put traps inside the walls that are set up to trigger if the walls are broken, like steam traps or inhaled poisons or both.

[Rubik]

Note that multiple layers of various materials can stop a number of effects, from Passwall to Earth Glide to Disintegrate. Layers of different types of stone and metal count as separate objects, and a layer of lead can mess with divination and (as a reasonable houserule) teleportation.

[Sidmen]

You start running into the same problem that you would with traps, though - when the amount of effort taken to impede intruders eclipses the value of what's actually stored in the place, it makes absolutely no sense. You wouldn't spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of gp on portals to link your rooms together if the treasure contained within is appropriate for 12th level characters.

What if you just happened to have a bunch of leftover portals from a previous job, that you could hook your buddy up with when he's building his own dungeon.

[Emperor Tippy]

For extra fun pack the walls full of zombie snakes that were made by someone with all of the Corpsecrafter feat line.

They are creatures which means a whole lot of things won't work, this is quite cheap (at least if you are smart enough to have a Psion doing you zombie creation so that you don't have to pay for material components), and it will make the players lives a living hell (individually the snakes are easy to kill but with each one killed, all of the rest of them in the area are healed and each one does +1d6 cold damage on every attack). Pack the walls with tens of thousands of the things and laugh when the PC's try to move through the walls.

[Necroticplague]

Question: if they have the resources to cut through several feet of stone, wouldn't it be easier to just cut through a few inches of the steel door instead? And also, how exactly are they digging? Through damage to the walls? Beating their break DC? Using earth glide or burrow speeds? Disintegrate-type spells? Are they using things like Dark Speech or Stone to Flesh to make it easier? Taking advantage of spells like Passwall or Move Earth/Shape Stone? I can't tell how to fix it without specifics.

[ericgrau]

I'd say stop making railroad dungeons with a fixed path and no time limit. The natural response to those is to use your unlimited time to go around the super narrow and difficult challenges.

Set up intelligent foes with goals, motivations and methods. Not geniuses, but just like the PCs. And likewise make realistic, not invincible, objects. Now all traps and doors are merely delays to warn foes and give them time to set up or to keep the party from fleeing. Worst case scenario all of them can be hacked to pieces, but this is noisy and time consuming. In such a case tunneling takes way way too long to be practical. The whole dungeon could notice and come down on you. Heck, breaking the doors is a lot easier, but still noisy and time consuming.

As you make foes more intelligent you must also make them weaker to compensate for their planning. You don't want a TPK every time the party fails and attracts one extra group of foes. Bringing out the entire dungeon right at the entrance, while waiting 5-10 minutes for foe to set up and then not running away, ok, TPK them. But not every time they merely alert a 2nd group of foes.

Also worth mentioning is that acid and sonic damage do not bypass hardness. They merely deal damage "normally", the same way a weapon does. The word "normally" makes that rule a bit confusing.

[Shrikethrush]

My answer: stop using doors.

Burrowing is easy, right? Then the monsters should be burrowing. They should be in the ceiling. They should be in the walls. They should be beneath the party.

Burrowing is a 3-dimensional game and you're in the monster's territory.

Look into dungeonscape for templates to make creatures smaller or able to live in lava or acid, as well as interesting traps.

Also, the spell Hardening from Eberron would be useful, to make the walls more resilient.

In general, a more proactive response on the part of the denizens is what is necessary.

Walls of Ironwood are cheap to make, and if the Druid makes less of it per spell, they'll have an enhancement bonus - making them quite a bit more difficult to destroy, especially if compounded with Hardening.

[Fates]

Incidentally, the group is t3-, not t2/t1. (what kind of low-magic setting has those guys?) Sorry for the vagueness there.

[Fates]

I'd say stop making railroad dungeons with a fixed path and no time limit. The natural response to those is to use your unlimited time to go around the super narrow and difficult challenges.

Set up intelligent foes with goals, motivations and methods. Not geniuses, but just like the PCs. And likewise make realistic, not invincible, objects. Now all traps and doors are merely delays to warn foes and give them time to set up or to keep the party from fleeing. Worst case scenario all of them can be hacked to pieces, but this is noisy and time consuming. In such a case tunneling takes way way too long to be practical. The whole dungeon could notice and come down on you. Heck, breaking the doors is a lot easier, but still noisy and time consuming.

As you make foes more intelligent you must also make them weaker to compensate for their planning. You don't want a TPK every time the party fails and attracts one extra group of foes. Bringing out the entire dungeon right at the entrance, while waiting 5-10 minutes for foe to set up and then not running away, ok, TPK them. But not every time they merely alert a 2nd group of foes.

Also worth mentioning is that acid and sonic damage do not bypass hardness. They merely deal damage "normally", the same way a weapon does. The word "normally" makes that rule a bit confusing.

I think you're making some unfair assumptions. Including rooms that are accessed via a door is not necessarily railroading, and in no way did I imply I was playing my villains unintelligently. Most of the dungeons this group traverses are ruins anyway, without a "boss" at the end. Still, the rest of your advice is sound.

[ericgrau]

Fair enough.

[Psyren]

If they have time to tunnel through the walls manually like that then they have way too much time on their hands and you need to add some urgency. If they're using magic to do it, that should have consequences - loud verbal components, structural integrity, detection spells and traps etc.

If they're sending an earth elemental or burrowing creature to scout that is perfectly okay in most instances (after all, the elemental has to report back for the information to be any good, and for animals it's even harder to get useful intel out of them), plus you can easily block their passage with worked stone, metal doors, wooden floors etc.

[Segev]

Ruins without a boss likely are also inhabited only by random unintelligent denizens, and thus are, well, ruined.

The collapsing ceilings when walls are breached seem a good approach.

If you favor undead, having undead that dwell in the walls is not remiss.

Look for monsters called Mimics, Trappers, and Lurkers Above, as well. All of these can disguise as floors, walls, or ceilings as well as various bits of architectural features. The party starts attempting to blast through a wall and makes the wall angry as it envelopes the fighter and starts digesting.

Make a wall out of what looks like interlocked stone statues. Busting through it reveals a severed medusa head; the party may well become part of the wall. Not to mention the potential fridge horror when they realize they've hacked their way through people who might otherwise yet have been saved.

If the purpose of the crawl is to rescue somebody, it's possible that somebody might be one of the statues.

Take a lesson from Zelda dungeons, too. Sure, it often falls back on the "impenetrable wall with a locked door in it" trope, but the rooms themselves are often puzzles of how to get to an area that is inaccessible. Your flyers make this harder. But perhaps it's immersed in lava that needs to be drained out.

Finally, you could try designing your dungeons such that burrowing through the walls is half-way expected. Don't expect the PCs to follow the hallways. Design as if you had put a secret door in every wall, even if you haven't.

[Treme]

I think the tomb of horrors way is to make some random demons appear for messing around with their well kept and joyous dungeon! 2 Vrock's appearing as soon as pick hits wall is a nice way to make them think twice

[Psyren]

That's ignoring the underlying problem though. The "vrocks appear" solution has multiple outcomes, and none of them are particularly good.

- The Vrocks are overpowering: you may as well have made rocks fall, or electrified the walls, or crammed them with lava.
- The Vrocks are challenging, but beatable: now the players can farm XP/loot. Guess what will happen whenever they get bored?
- The Vrocks are pushovers: Now they'll set one person to dig while everyone else brushes the gnats aside.

You can, of course, impose a time limit of some sort so that time spent dealing with the Vrocks increases their chance of failing the mission. But if you do that, why bother with the Vrocks at all? A time limit on its own is enough so that they don't waste time dismantling the dungeon brick by brick without arbitrary dungeon-wall-defenders popping in.

[supermonkeyjoe]

What if an outside wall is built using using Titans (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/titan.htm) as the foundations using a Temporal Stasis (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/temporalStasis.htm) spell or under the effect of Quintessence (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/quintessence.htm) Don't want to risk waking them up!

[Incanur]

If they have time to tunnel through the walls manually like that then they have way too much time on their hands and you need to add some urgency.

With an adamantine weapon, an 11th-level barbarian or whatnot can go through stone walls really fast RAW. 2d6+34 times three equals an average of 123 damage in 6 seconds. That gets through a 5ft of unworked stone in under a minute. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense of course - where does all the stone go? - but that's RAW for you.


If they're sending an earth elemental or burrowing creature to scout that is perfectly okay in most instances (after all, the elemental has to report back for the information to be any good, and for animals it's even harder to get useful intel out of them), plus you can easily block their passage with worked stone, metal doors, wooden floors etc.

Worked stone doesn't stop earth glide. In any sort of caverns or cave, hedging out earth elementals would requires lots of metal, wood, or other such materials.

As far as the cost of traps goes, that's generally a logical problem in 3.5. Various tricks do get around this, of course, but it's still wonky, as 3.5 economics are overall. Contemplating D&D economics is like contemplating the Far Realm - your attempts to apply reason will fail and you'll end up babbling like a derro before long.

[Icewraith]

X > Y "is/are greater than"
X < Y "is/are less than"

Among the ways to remember this, "English is read from left to right and the math symbols translate directly into a statement in english" is the most thorough. The other is that the two things being compared should be on opposite sides of the symbol.

"The sign is an alligator that always wants to eat the larger number/concept" is the easiest.

All the players < T2.

Anyways.

The thing with the walls full of lava bit is that if the dungeon has been around for any length of time, either the lava should have cooled or some other stupid party of adventurers should have tried to break through a wall and flooded the tunnels with lava already. (Or if the dungeon is under a volcano and isn't completely made out of walls of force, it's one earthquake spell from destruction anyways) Since the second case just turns the whole dungeon into a burrowing puzzle, the designers should probably anticipate that and build the dungeon into a burrowing puzzle in the first place. Nobody wants the mystic sigils stopping the elder demon XVII'ITILL'M from devouring the world melting just because some stupid adventuring group flooded the tomb with lava (or acid-spitting undead beetles, or living spells of explosive runes, or whatever).

The other thing is that any dungeon that regularly fills with lava at regular intervals needs to be filled with self-resetting indestructible shaped disintegrate traps with the properties of an immovible rod, which will be their own hazard when navigating the dungeon. Also you get to be lazy and make an entire dungeon out of sequentially placed ten-foot cubes.

[ArcaneGlyph]

Option A

Welcome to the hanging dungeon.

This dungeon is in the heart of an active volcano, each room is suspended above the molten lava below. Each room is a module unto itself connected to the next via a 10 foot hallway. (so there is always 10 feet between each modular room between the walls of one module and the next). In this particular volcano, if you breach the walls of the modules, toxic and caustic gasses start to flow into the room through the breach. You choices are A. Plug the breach or B Leave that room shutting the door behind you and flee to the next room.

Characters moving forth through a breach will be confronted by endless streams of molten and fire elementals, fire imps and other fire nasties who make their home in the belly of the volcano.

The only way to escape is to progress from room to room.



Option B

Portals Portals Everywhere!

No room is connected to any other room in this vast underground madhouse.
The only way to escape is to solve the puzzle of which portal to take to the next area. No matter how much any player digs in any direction, they will never encounter the next room. If they are fortunate they may dig into the underdark or back to the surface, but never into the next room.


Option C

They breach the wall, walk through it and bam, random teleport field back to the start of the dungeon or to a random room on the dungeons monster holding cells.

Option D

The dungeon is contained in another plane of existence, breaching walls at random is not advised unless you want to end up potentially stranded on that plane or worse, in limbo.


I could likely come up with more, but you see where I am going with these ideas I hope :)

[ArcturusV]

With an adamantine weapon, an 11th-level barbarian or whatnot can go through stone walls really fast RAW. 2d6+34 times three equals an average of 123 damage in 6 seconds. That gets through a 5ft of unworked stone in under a minute. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense of course - where does all the stone go? - but that's RAW for you.

... actually I thought somewhere it mentioned that it basically just gets piled on the floor. But I believe they were talking about walls on that... now I want to find that passage. But I could swear they mentioned it. In which case by RAW what would happen is "Your cave wall is now a hole filled to the brim with rubble". Which would take an insane amount of time to clear. Figure your barbarian cracked it into fist sized chunks (3" x 3" x 3"), which would mean that your 5' x 5' x 5' section of wall you cracked up consists of 1600 or so odd chunks of rock...

Which by RAW as the "Pick up an object" is a move action, you could only do 2 of in a round. Plus movement as moving only a 5' step would just plug up the area right outside the hole, being less than useful. So two objects at least ever 3rd round, or 2,400 man/rounds of work, which comes out to 80 minutes and 6 seconds of work to go 5'.

... I'm kind of sleep deprived, so my math may be off. But I thought I had an idea there.

[the_david]

Don't use adamantine... Ever. They'll find a way to take the entire block out, and then they sell everything that wasn't used to make armor and weapons.

[Incanur]

I hope that is mentioned somewhere in the RAW on destroying walls. I suspect that's how it'd play out at most tables.

[Rubik]

I think the tomb of horrors way is to make some random demons appear for messing around with their well kept and joyous dungeon! 2 Vrock's appearing as soon as pick hits wall is a nice way to make them think twice


Now if I'm being a real ass? I'd point out something like the sword that guy is using, no matter how magical... just isn't meant for mining. It's not a pick axe.

...

"You used your sword as a pick axe? It's a useless twisted hunk of metal, no longer a honed weapon"Picks deal piercing damage. They cannot be used to sunder objects.

[ArcturusV]

...

...

I think I just lost SAN there Rubik.

[Rubik]

...

...

I think I just lost SAN there Rubik.Then my work here is done.

[nedz]

That's ignoring the underlying problem though. The "vrocks appear" solution has multiple outcomes, and none of them are particularly good.

- The Vrocks are overpowering: you may as well have made rocks fall, or electrified the walls, or crammed them with lava.
- The Vrocks are challenging, but beatable: now the players can farm XP/loot. Guess what will happen whenever they get bored?
- The Vrocks are pushovers: Now they'll set one person to dig while everyone else brushes the gnats aside.

You can, of course, impose a time limit of some sort so that time spent dealing with the Vrocks increases their chance of failing the mission. But if you do that, why bother with the Vrocks at all? A time limit on its own is enough so that they don't waste time dismantling the dungeon brick by brick without arbitrary dungeon-wall-defenders popping in.

Vrock's Wall, everyone dies.
(Sorry about that)

Seriously: if your players like digging holes I'd let them get on with it.

Just have someone open the door when they're half way through to complain about the noise — Noise should attract attention after all.

[Pickford]

We've all seen it. We bust our asses building dungeons with for the players, trying desperately to provide them with challenges that will curb their unbelievably short attention spans, and the moment they come across a door they can't open, or a guardian with a riddle, or whenever they just want to make their own shortcut, the little pricks decide to dig through the dungeon walls, and of course they always find a way to do so.

Are there any non-cheesy, non-railroad, and non-player-exploitable ways to prevent players from doing this? It's sort of an ongoing issue in my campaigns, but I don't just want to give an ultimatum to my players or anything like that. I only want them to actually make an attempt to navigate dungeons in a way somewhat resemblant of how I intended. Does anyone have any good ideas for circumventing this?

Yes, have chambers be on different levels.

i.e. Just because they decided to break down wall X, doesn't necessarily mean there's anything there worth seeing.

So they disintegrate a wall, and behind that wall they find....dirt.

[NichG]

So we've had lots of ways to punish or defeat the tunneling behavior, but I wonder if we can just 'reward the reverse' - make it so the players want to do the dungeon room by room rather than tunneling.

I want to figure out some IC way to have a dungeon where the treasure pile at the end is proportional to how many rooms the players didn't bypass. I guess maybe something corny like 'every room has a dimensional key hidden somewhere in it, and those keys unlock portals to the various treasure hordes in the ruined interplanar bank vault below'...

[ArcturusV]

Hmm, the thing is, that the nature of doing the dungeon itself already provides those rewards. I mean if you don't bypass a chamber, then you likely fight whatever was in that chamber, +XP. You take whatever was being used by the people you fought +Loot, you get to ransack the room +Treasure. It's already built into the system.

Not to mention the other things like it being faster, stealthier, etc, which has +plot resolution rewards. You get there in time to save the princess rather than just bring her cold, sacrificed to a demon lord corpse back for a state funeral.

[nedz]

So we've had lots of ways to punish or defeat the tunneling behavior, but I wonder if we can just 'reward the reverse' - make it so the players want to do the dungeon room by room rather than tunneling.

I want to figure out some IC way to have a dungeon where the treasure pile at the end is proportional to how many rooms the players didn't bypass. I guess maybe something corny like 'every room has a dimensional key hidden somewhere in it, and those keys unlock portals to the various treasure hordes in the ruined interplanar bank vault below'...

Mithril doors — works every time.

or

There's nothing behind the door but more wall, but opening the door triggers a teleportation spell.

[Psyren]

With an adamantine weapon, an 11th-level barbarian or whatnot can go through stone walls really fast RAW. 2d6+34 times three equals an average of 123 damage in 6 seconds. That gets through a 5ft of unworked stone in under a minute. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense of course - where does all the stone go? - but that's RAW for you.

And if your dungeon is so barren/boring that said barbarian banging away at a stone wall for several rounds on end doesn't attract any sort of notice or reprisal, then that is the underlying problem, as I said. I don't just mean the noise, either - if that wall is sealing off anywhere important, there should be magical surveillance or monsters with supernormal senses (like tremorsense) who should swiftly become aware of the tunnel-barb's destructive exertions. Or even just an environmental hazard on the other side of that wall, like an underground river or a load-bearing pillar as others have said.


Vrock's Wall, everyone dies.
(Sorry about that)

Don't apologize, I liked it :smallbiggrin:

[NichG]

Hmm, the thing is, that the nature of doing the dungeon itself already provides those rewards. I mean if you don't bypass a chamber, then you likely fight whatever was in that chamber, +XP. You take whatever was being used by the people you fought +Loot, you get to ransack the room +Treasure. It's already built into the system.

Not to mention the other things like it being faster, stealthier, etc, which has +plot resolution rewards. You get there in time to save the princess rather than just bring her cold, sacrificed to a demon lord corpse back for a state funeral.

Well the rewards are clearly not good enough because players are doing this kind of thing, right?

I would argue that XP isn't really a reward, because of various factors:

1. CR vs ECL balance means that gaining XP just means the enemies get harder too.
2. The DMG (rightly) suggests that XP should be gained for anything that resolves the challenge, be it fighting the enemies or bypassing them by digging around them. This is to avoid things like the party 'farming' Vrocks from the previous example - those summoned Vrocks should give no additional XP because they are part of the XP associated with the overall challenge of the dungeon.
3. Many DMs use flat XP rewards or 'level up in sync every few sessions' anyhow, so it won't work for them.

So that leaves the loot, which should be a big motivating factor, but for those DMs finding players are digging through the walls with adamantine daggers, it seems to not actually be enough of a factor.

If I wanted to purely do it as a metagame thing, I could say something like 'each room cleared gets an extra roll on the treasure charts for the final room, and also adds +5 to the d100 rolls used - if you get above 100 on a magic item chart, you get an artifact'. I think that would directly make players want to clear rooms above and beyond considerations of 'those kobolds might have a 250gp gem or a +1 dagger!', but its far too metagame for most people's taste.

[ArcturusV]

Well, if I think about it, in terms of what would happen on a table...

... you kind of have to go with the Sticking. Whatever it is. Random encounters, etc. Because they need a way to find out what they're missing. Which I mean I could be a **** OOC and tell them after the session is over "Oh yea, because you tunneled, you lost out on sweet loot in that chamber". But unless they go into the chamber they don't really know what they're missing otherwise. Which means if they got a mindset to tunnel/teleport/etc, you have to get them to stop that first. THEN you carrot in the chamber to inspire them to keep going.

Granted it's not something I've had too much of a problem with. Last time I ran into something like that? Combine Morale with Random encounter, I was good to go. Their mining drew the attention of a patrol which fought them. Two from the patrol ran away. One got arrowed down as he ran. And the party went "OMG, we can't let him tell people where we were!" and chased after the other... right into the chamber they were trying to bypass. And it's that simple. At least it is that simple in my experience. Particularly because adventurers get really paranoid about things like scouts and enemies who run away.

[Incanur]

Psyren, reprisals have exactly the problems you listed some posts ago. I think it's reasonable for noise to evoke a response in many dungeons, but if the players can handle the response that won't necessarily deter them.

[Psyren]

Psyren, reprisals have exactly the problems you listed some posts ago. I think it's reasonable for noise to evoke a response in many dungeons, but if the players can handle the response that won't necessarily deter them.

A response doesn't have to be "angry XP- and loot-laden monster stomps in to see what the ruckus is." It can mean the contents of the next room being altered (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0024.html), or a disadvantageous trap/ambush being laid right at their projected point of exit, or just failing their mission if the subtle approach was required. And yeah, the barbarian is probably going to want to smash through the wall if he is capable of doing so - that doesn't mean the rest of the party has to shove their thumbs in their posteriors and let him.

[Incanur]

Stealth is often underrated, I think in part cause many groups have at least one character who either by choice or necessity inevitably attracts attention. :smallsmile:

[ArcturusV]

Well that and stealth is so skill intensive and feat intensive pretty much no one but specialists can really use it.

Need: Hide, Move Silently, Spot, Listen, plus feats you may need like Dark Stalker, bonuses like Nystul's Magic Aura so you don't shine like a sun under Arcane Sight, etc.

[Psyren]

You don't necessarily need everyone to be good at stealth. If your sneaky characters scout the area and determine there's nothing in the immediate vicinity, then the less stealthy members of the party can probably follow safely - provided they don't do anything unduly overt like chanting a verbal component or battering down a stone wall.

You can even reward the players for "sticking to the path" by letting them get the drop on some foes, or pick up valuable intel/hints in a precursor room that will come in handy when heading into the main encounter. For instance, one room can be piled to the rafters with disgusting garbage and refuse, a dead giveaway of "otyughs!" that simply battering down the adjoining wall might not have provided. Or one room might have runes/hieroglyphics on the wall of the white dragon being worshiped in the depths of the warren by the kobolds that live there.

[Incanur]

It's not a binary problem but rather a spectrum. On one end you have stealth optimizers like you describe. On the other, you've got the cleric with 8 or lower Dex and heavy armor who likes casting sound lance. Folks in the middle won't be able to sneak by experienced sentry, but they will be able to avoid lots of unwanted attention the said cleric would attract.

Attacking a stone wall strikes me as worse than speaking a verbal component. Of course, given the way listen works, the difference only 100 ft - but that's still significant.

P.S. It's hilarious that the average person has zero chance chance of hearing a battle more than 300ft (100 yards) away.

[Psyren]

There are ways around that for the clever and prepared party, but those ways start to vanish when they begin sundering the masonry.

[TuggyNE]

X > Y "is/are greater than"
X < Y "is/are less than"

Among the ways to remember this, "English is read from left to right and the math symbols translate directly into a statement in english" is the most thorough. The other is that the two things being compared should be on opposite sides of the symbol.

"The sign is an alligator that always wants to eat the larger number/concept" is the easiest.

All the players < T2.

Only problem here is that the larger number and the larger concept are opposed: does the inequality refer to the number, or the concept? It's completely ambiguous as written, so using "< T2" is terrible notation.

[lord_khaine]

Actually yeah, if digging though walls means the opponent on the other side will get both a surprise action and 5+ min of buffing time, then it should encurage people to do it a little less?

[Deophaun]

If you've got players digging through walls, I think the best scenario is to go with it.

Let them make Knowledge (Architecture/Engineering) or Profession (Mining) checks to determine what's load bearing, what looks like a facade, etc., and basically build a network of build-it-yourself doors to connect the dungeon together in a different way.

[Cirrylius]

Maintenance constructs devoted to protecting/repairing the building? At least that would force them to rely on teleports, passwalls, dimension doors, and the like.

Have a villain who was defeated by their gauche thinking-outside-the-box-ery once already, and who sets up a carefully planned second encounter anticipating their attempt to game the dungeon.

A glass-walled underwater dungeon. Think Bioshock, but instead of indestructible walls, you get consequences.

Set an encounter in an asbestos mine or something, where actively damaging the dungeon's structure releases harmful dust or spores or something.

A dungeon where the walls and ceiling are extremely valuable culturally or monetarily (cave paintings, written archive, etc), and the characters are strongly encouraged by their hirer not to screw it all up.

Fill it with creatures who can burrow and (ideally) have tremorsense.

The dungeon is a kind of stasis zoo or magical barracks, with primed glyphs on every surface that summon outsiders when broken.

Plan an open-air dungeon made of adamantine wire in a dark, empty, open space. Fill the dark with shrieking Nightwalkers.