Door Week: Bars & Doors in DF

If you're muscling through a door in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, you sometimes have to deal with barred or wedged doors.

When this happens, you roll your contest for Forcing (DF2, p. 8) vs. the higher of the HP of the lock/hinge or bar/wedge with a penalty equal to the higher DR of the lock/hinge or bar/wedge. At least the way I do forcing rolls, it's effectively rolling against DR+HP - plus it's an easy way to visualize something like roll at -3 vs. 14 or roll at -24 vs. 46 as one number.

In any case, you only really benefit from a bar or wedge if the door's DR and/or HP is lower than that of the bar/wedge.

I totally wasted a huge amount of time on this, so hopefully it helps someone. I'll probably use this to make some simplified bar bonuses. I didn't really feel like hand-coding such a long table so I let Blogger do it - hopefully it's readable. It's a look at combos of doors and bars, and the total of higher DR + higher HP.

Hinge	Bar	Better DR	Better HP	Total bDR+bHP	No Bar DR+HP
Light	Light	3	14	17	9
Light	Average	3	18	21	9
Light	Heavy	4	23	27	9
Light	X-Heavy	8	30	38	9
Light	Vault	16	37	53	9
Average	Light	6	14	20	18
Average	Average	6	18	24	18
Average	Heavy	6	23	29	18
Average	X-Heavy	8	30	38	18
Average	Vault	16	37	53	18
Heavy	Light	9	18	27	27
Heavy	Average	9	18	27	27
Heavy	Heavy	9	23	32	27
Heavy	X-Heavy	9	30	39	27
Heavy	Vault	16	37	53	27
X-Heavy	Light	12	23	35	35
X-Heavy	Average	12	23	35	35
X-Heavy	Heavy	12	23	35	35
X-Heavy	X-Heavy	12	30	42	35
X-Heavy	Vault	16	37	53	35
Vault	Light	24	46	70	70
Vault	Average	24	46	70	70
Vault	Heavy	24	46	70	70
Vault	X-Heavy	24	46	70	70
Vault	Vault	24	46	70	70

I bolded the ones that make sense as combinations - the weaker bars and wedges just don't help really strong hinges/locks. And vault-grade bars don't help vaults, actually. Only 15 out of the 25 combinations make any sense. Don't stick a rubber door stop into a vault and think it'll make it harder to open.