The following rules cover the basic features that can be found in structures.
Doors in structures are much more than mere entrances and exits. They can even be encounters all by themselves. Doors come in several types. Consult Table 11–10: Doors for information on common types of doors.
Breaking 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.
Locks: 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.
|Door Type||Typical Thickness||Hardness||Hit Points||Break DC|
|Airlock door||4 in.||35||160||40||40|
Most fabricated structures have some form of lighting built into the ceilings or walls. This lighting provides enough illumination for the inhabitants to see and is often controlled via a simple switch, touch pad, or vocal device. Lighting can usually be turned on and off on a room-to-room basis, though sometimes a structure’s lighting can be deactivated via a central breaker switch (usually located in some kind of control room or service area). A typical manufactured lighting fixture has a break DC of 18, a hardness of 3, and 10 Hit Points (see Breaking Objects).
Natural caverns and structures built by and for creatures with darkvision often lack manufactured lighting. Characters without darkvision must provide their own source of lighting to be able to navigate these locations.TODO: Table 11-11: Material Hardness and Hit Points
Structure walls vary drastically in makeup, ranging from natural, unworked solid stone to reinforced starship bulkheads (though stranger walls exist). While they are typically incredibly difficult to break down or through, they’re generally easy to climb. Table 11–9: Walls contains information on the most common types of walls found in structures.
- Concrete Walls: These walls are usually at least 1 foot thick. Concrete walls stop all but the loudest noises.
- Starship Walls: Whether the interior walls or the bulkheads that form the outside of the ship, these walls are among the strongest. While they are most commonly used in starship construction, they’re also commonplace in high- end planetary structures, such as research stations and military installations.
- Steel Walls: These walls are commonly used within structures of import, such as vaults or older military headquarters.
- Unworked Stone Walls: Hewn walls usually result when a chamber or passage is tunneled out of solid rock. Unworked stone is uneven and rarely flat. The rough surface of stone walls frequently provides minuscule ledges where fungus grows and fissures where bats, subterranean snakes, and vermin live.
- Wooden Walls: Wooden walls often exist as recent additions to preexisting structures, used to create animal pens, storage bins, and temporary structures, or just to make a number of smaller rooms out of a larger one.
|Wall Type||Typical Thickness||Break DC||Hardness||Hit Points*||Athletics DC (to climb)|
|Starship bulkhead||5 ft.||55||35||2,400||25|
|Starship interior||3 ft.||45||30||1,440||20|
|Unworked stone||5 ft.||65||15||900||15|
|*Per 10-foot-by-10-foot section.|