The spell effects everything that is susceptible to magic.
If you do not want it to be detectable then put an anti-magic field just to where it covers the door so that the spell doesn't function for it.
You could also just disguise the passage instead of it being a secret door. The extensive root system from the trees above might have the ceiling be covered in vine-like roots, and these roots are concealing a camouflaged ladder that moves around the trap up ahead.
My favorite are pit-traps that are "broken" and have spikes at the bottom. Put a board over the pit-trap so the party walks past it instead of exploring it to realize there is an unlocked and regular door in there! It isn't a "secret" door, but instead it is just a door placed in a concealed location.
Walls, Doors, and Detect Spells
Stone walls, iron walls, and iron doors are usually thick enough to block most detect spells, such as detect thoughts. Wooden walls, wooden doors, and stone doors are usually not thick enough to do so. A secret stone door built into a wall and as thick as the wall itself (at least 1 foot) does block most detect spells.
So, just make your walls thick stone. And make them have a switch/lever necessary to move the thick wall in front of it.
|
Also remember that it can take up to 3 rounds to find a secret door.
You can detect secret doors, compartments, caches, and so forth. Only passages, doors, or openings that have been specifically constructed to escape detection are detected by this spell. The amount of information revealed depends on how long you study a particular area or subject.
1st Round: Presence or absence of secret doors.
2nd Round: Number of secret doors and the location of each. If an aura is outside your line of sight, then you discern its direction but not its exact location.
Each Additional Round: The mechanism or trigger for one particular secret portal closely examined by you.
Each round, you can turn to detect secret doors in a new area. The spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.
It also only lasts 1 minute per level max. Have them be ambushed so the caster loses concentration.
Have so many secret doors that they use up all their prepared castings of the spell early in the dungeon. If they buy a wand, stop using secret doors and let them waste the charges. :D
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
The wording of the spell specifically says it detects doors that are disguised, so you can't disguise the door to defeat the spell. If the door itself is part of the wall and disguised to appear to be part of the wall, then it is exactly the sort of thing that the spell would detect.
I guess my question would be why are you wanting to defeat the spell? It's magic. This, to me, is akin to asking how to defeat magic missile. If your spellcasters are forward thinking enough to prepare it, then let them use it. Why would you want to punish them for using exactly the abilities that they play the game to use?
1 minute per level is not that long.
Make a big dungeon. Have puzzles and traps - remember, Disable Device is not a 1 round action when used against traps, and searching for them might take a lot of time too (Pathfinder doesn't have rules about how long it takes to search an area so presumably a single move action can search an entire football stadium for traps as long as you have line of sight and suffer the -1/10' penalty - however, given distance penalties and the price of failure, many people move around, make multiple searches, and even search the same area more than once to be sure they didn't miss a trap on the first search).
Looting bodies takes time. Looting rooms takes time. Counting coins takes time. If you doubt it, next time you give your players 1,000gp, go to the bank (before hand) and get $10 worth of pennies, then dump that on the table and use a stopwatch to find out just how long it takes them - and don't let any player help count if his character is in the doorway watching for wandering monsters.
Just keep track of what the PCs are doing and how long it really takes. If they have an in-combat discussion, the rules say speaking is a free action (hopefully most GMs don't allow them a 10-minute strategy pow-wow in between two swings of the troll's club), but out of combat, a discussion about what they want to do takes exactly as long as it takes - if the players spend 5 minutes looking at their map and deciding where to go next, then feel free to count those 5 minutes as actually happening to the characters, too.
When you track all the time spent, you might just find out that 1 casting of Detect Secret Doors won't find very many at all, because they'll only use it in a couple rooms before it expires.
And if they want to prepare it a dozen times, instead of other useful spells, then they should be allowed to make that choice and they should be rewarded for making that choice by having it do exactly what it should, find secret doors (after all, they could have put other useful spells in those slots but chose not to, so they should feel like they got good use out of putting Detect Secret Doors there instead).
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
Why have secret doors if not for the characters to find them? If your players DON'T find them, you've wasted drawing them on the map (and badguy escape routes are usually behind the bad guy where the players haven't searched yet, and finding isn't opening).
I think you've trained your players to expect secret doors, so they come prepared. This isn't a problem with Detect Secret Doors; the problem here is one of expectations. Your characters probably expect secret doors to lead to loot, thus finding them is very important. So they'll employ the no-fail option.
Your main options are to use secret doors less, or to employ alternative strategy. Why does a secret door exist? Escape routes don't have to be re-useable. The villain doesn't care if the enemy finds his secret door after he's gone, especially once he activates the 'destroy the secret passage' trap behind him.
Extremely thin walls are an ideal emergency escape route. A thin section of wood easily kicked in is not going to register as a secret door, but it can get you out of a building right quick. And a door doesn't have to be secret to be impassable, and a door like structure that CAN'T BE OPENED is a wonderfully confounding delay (especially when trapped). Mazes are almost as good as secret doors - eventually someone will find their way through but the delay can be enormous.
1 minute per level is not that long.
Which is why my Wizard made a magic device that casts it on command; it's a 1st level spell and pretty cheap, all in all. It also gives him another reason to carry around a magnifying glass.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Good points Helic. Most secret doors should be found or it's a waste of time to put them there.
I like to use secret doors for all of that, and I prefer my players to find them. I want everyone to have fun in the game. Rogues, amongst others, often invest in Perception, partly for the exact reason of finding hidden stuff in dungeons.
I personally dislike investing in a class feature only to have a spellcaster override my investment by tossing around infallible magic.
On the other hand, as a spellcaster, I dislike having to prepare infallible magic in multiple spell slots when there is someone in the group who can do the same job for free (or, at least, for the investment he's already made, or should have already made).
So, in short, if I'm the rogue, I expect to do my job - find hidden stuff. If I'm the mage, I expect the rogue to do his job. If I'm the GM, I expect my players to behave like this (no, I don't demand it, and often they do the unexpected which is totally OK).
So those expectations are why I put secret doors in dungeons and then expect players to actually look for them rather than finding them magically. When they want to use magic instead, more power to them - I'll adjust my expectations to something else, such as, having monsters fight them when their wizard is low on spells because he's been blowing on his spells on doing the rogue's job. :)
And finally, there are other uses for secret doors that actually make the game more interesting when they're NOT found.
Ambush. PCs walk past an undetected door and, later, when it's most inconvenient, they get hit from behind by the monsters lurking on the other side of said door.
Confusion. Sneaky enemies lurk behind an undetected secret door and after the party passes, they sneak out and steal PC gear, lock doors behind the PC's escape route, cast Darkness during a PC fight, whatever else comes to mind.
Shortcut. PC miss an undetected secret door, fight their way through armies of monsters and traps, finally find the mcguffin, only to find a passage from the BBEG's lair up to the entrance that exits through the missed secret door. It's comical in any circumstance, but it can also be punitive if they were racing against time and failed, only to find out they could have beat the clock if they had searched better.
Do this once or twice to a group of players, and they'll forever be more diligent about never missing a secret door, regardless of whether they search or use magic.
Which is why my Wizard made a magic device that casts it on command; it's a 1st level spell and pretty cheap, all in all. It also gives him another reason to carry around a magnifying glass.1 minute per level is not that long.
If you mean wands, well, even that is a consumable resource - sooner or later it runs out of charges. If you mean a more permanent item with a constant ability (no charges), not all GMs allow custom items like that and for those who do, well, you did consume some valuable resource (gold) to make the item so it's still presumbably a fair trade off.
Even at that, such items can be stolen, dispelled, or negated, if you're GM is of such a mind to do so.
As a GM, I would totally allow you to do it and not punish you by stealing it (at least not any more often than I would steal any items from the PCs, usually only a plot device and rarely used at that). But, if your group had a character built around using perception for this stuff, I would advise you against it, for the reasons I gave above, or at least make sure the other player didn't mind having your infallible magic replace his character investment.
What is your goal here? Doors that should have a chance to found or doors that shouldn't be found and only usable by NPCs?
If its the former, and you don't like the infallibleness of detect secret doors, you can always just talk to the players about your concern and see if you can change the detect secret door spell to something like +1 perception/caster level + casting stat.
If its the latter, just fiat it with antimagic instead of playing semantics with the spell.
Back to the idea of fooling the spell.
A "thin sheet" of lead defeats all these cone shaped detect spells (OK, I didn't check all of them so maybe not true for all, but definitely the three I see most, DT Magic, DT Evil, and DT Secret Doors).
Thin is not defined, but clearly less than an inch because 1 inch of other common metals block the spells and lead is called out separately, indicating that "thin" means less than an inch. Sheets are often very thin. Sheets on my bed, a sheet of paper, etc. I take it to mean it still works even if it's as thin as a sheet of aluminum foil, although in this case, it's a sheet of lead foil.
So, the clever dungeon owner, clever enough to make a secret door that requires a DC 40 perception check, is also clever enough to know that magic will ruin his fun. This clever craftsman can carve stone so perfectly that it takes almost mythic levels of perception to find his door, so I bet he can hammer out a foil-thin sheet of lead, glue it over the top of the door, and slap on some paint and mud and dirt to make it look like the wall, still keeping a DC 40 because of his masterful craftsmanship and marvelous ability to hide this door.
And there you have it. A DC 40 secret door that cannot be detected by magical means.
Too much?
Not even close. I imagine that, in a world of magic, where every Tom, Dick, and especially Harry, can cast spells to ruin anyone's day, clever craftsmen find all kinds of mundane ways to cope with magical mayhem. Anyone capable of building a DC 40 secret door knows all this, lives in a world with simple magical means to find his best-hidden doors, and would dearly love to prevent such magic - and the means is well within his hands.
Saying such a craftsman would not think of lead sheets, or saying that this is just a GM device to screw with his players and prevent them from finding the bad guy's door, is like saying that a typical Golarion fighter would not think of wearing armor, or that wearing armor is just a GM device to screw with his players and prevent them from hitting the bad guy.
The other option is to put hidden stuff everywhere for a paranoid BBEG. Every book case has a hidden compartment behind it (mostly with mechanical traps, book cases of tawdry romance novels, restrooms or refuse chutes - maybe a few with zombies for a bit of extra fun), interior doors are all covered by tapestries or curtains, trapdoors under most every rug, etc.
-TimD
Finding secret doors is only one function of Perception, so characters who invest in Perception are still finding benefits that casting Detect Secret Doors does not grant.
Changing the spell to grant a base +10 bonus on Perception checks to find secret doors is reasonable and not broken, but not altogether necessary in my opinion.
In this specific situation, I think the problem is in relying on mere skill challenges to prevent exploration. The magical nature of the game means that at low levels there are temporary but easily accessible magics for thwarting most individual skill challenges. Better than attempting to set what seems to be ridiculous skill check DCs for the party to deal with, a DM who wants to limit access to an area should limit access by a non-DC capability that the party would not have access to until the appropriate level. Hidden passages while present throughout all levels of play are intended to be a low investment challenge in comparison to other aspects of the game.
Understanding all of the easily accessible magics available to a party is one of the great difficulties in DMing 3.x derived material. There is a heavy requirement of either system mastery or adaptability on the part of the DM. Now, it would be reasonable to make it that magic only supplements but does not trump skills at either low or even all levels, but that would take a lot of work to rework such an assumption into the game. Pathfinder included more of this than 3.0 or 3.5 did.
What level was the adventuring party? I am sure we can think of some good alternatives for hiding your BBEG.
tl;dr When it comes to hiding a BBEG in a well traversed location before the PCs are ready for the encounter, try to make accessing that villain be keyed to something the PCs do not access to yet, understanding skill check DCs are easy to boost or outright ignore.
Add lots of secret doors in every single room. Only 1 of them- at most- leads anywhere. The other 3 dozen lead to 2 inches of space and the wall.
Add lots of secret doors in every single room. Only 1 of them- at most- leads anywhere. The other 3 dozen lead to 2 inches of space and the wall.
This works great as a security feature for any door, not just secret ones. Seven doors, six deadly traps. Bonus points if you can switch which door is which periodically.
Spellcasters have the best secret door, of course; Passwall and/or Phase Door. And sometimes Stone Shape (which you can use repeatedly until you get working hinges, then just use Stone Shape to seal the door seamlessly into the wall; just unseal later and leave the working hinges alone).
|
Instead of secret doors, use doors that are hard to open for various reasons.
Stuck doors
Lever in another room
Locked
Doors that only open in specific instances (night, full moon, command word, race, gender specific, only opens if you cast the right spell... ) I've seen this in an AP.
Puzzle doors
Labyrinth (with Minotaur!)
Trapped secret doors
Fake secret doors (boring though)
Animated doors that attack you (buy grab and constrict with your construction points)
Doors with invisibility cast on them (permanency)
Put the secret door in lava! And have a fake aura of illusion over it....muhahahhahahah
Also make them feel some urgency, the demon must be defeated before the spell is completed in 1 hour/sunset/7 sacrifices (not knowing how long each sacrifice takes). Have encounters group together/ monsters run/ spy's in the rooms (imps/invisible familiars) operating trap doors and such.
You could put random kittens in your dungeon that make it so he cannot concentrate due to overwhelming cuteness--baby foxes work, too!
Add lots of secret doors in every single room. Only 1 of them- at most- leads anywhere. The other 3 dozen lead to 2 inches of space and the wall.This works great as a security feature for any door, not just secret ones. Seven doors, six deadly traps. Bonus points if you can switch which door is which periodically.
Spellcasters have the best secret door, of course; Passwall and/or Phase Door. And sometimes Stone Shape (which you can use repeatedly until you get working hinges, then just use Stone Shape to seal the door seamlessly into the wall; just unseal later and leave the working hinges alone).
This kind of stuff sounds great in theory but do it more than once and it will seriously bog down the game. I would suggest the lead foil and a reminder that magic wont always replace a good old search check.
Just because they can detect the door, doesn't mean they can open the door. And the spell just finds the door, not the unlocking mechanism 3 rooms away.
This is fun sometimes, but could be a little cheesy if done too often.
As a player, if I used magic to detect a secret door and my GM said "Well, you found the door but the magic didn't tell you how to open it" that would be very irritating to me. It would irritate me the same way this would: "Well, you cast your fireball but the magic didn't actually burn the orcs".
OK, maybe those orcs had energy resistance cast on them or something. But when it's happened for the 20th time, with different monsters in different adventures, it would be ridiculously tiresome and frustrating.
Magic is supposed to be magical. What kind of wizard would ever research a divination spell that only told him half of what he wanted? If that's how Detect Secret Doors works in Golarion, it finds the door but not how to open it, then that's a very disappointing bit of magic that (way back at the dawn of time) was researched by a very disappointed wizard and nobody in all the history of spellcasting every researched an improvement that would actually be useful.
As for the secret door that can only be opened from afar, well, that's fun too. And useful. Also, one-way secret doors that can only be opened from the non-so-secret other side, with no way to open them from this side.
But again, this frustrates players when it happens all the time, so use with caution. Only put this kind of thing on emergency EXITS that are clearly not meant for two-way traffic. Or maybe on places that have unusually high standards of secrecy, such as an assassins's guild - they use scrying and remote opening triggers exactly the same way that super-secure offices use cameras and mag-locks in today's world - but this is way beyond the usual "I want a secret doorway" level of paranoia that 99% of secret doors satisfy.
Secret doors, despite the name, are generally meant to be found by the players.
Secret doors, despite the name, are generally meant to be found by the players.
An old thread, but I was searching for this since we have a player in our party that has invested in dealing with traps and finding secrets. Then our wizard comes along and casts a 1:st level spell which totally trivializes the first player's focus and investment. Sometimes the wizard let's the trap guy search first, then casts Detect Secret Doors "to make sure".
Having a 1:st level spell that just automatically surpasses a skill is in my opinion bad design. Yes, I know many spells grant lots of possibilities for casters but there is usually a save or some kind of roll involved, and the heavy stuff is normally kept to higher levels.
So I have changed the spell at our table to give a +5 to Perception for the purpose of finding Secret Doors, and a duration of 1/round per level. In my opinion, a secret door should be an obstacle like any other, that there should be a roll to overcome.
I played a Paladin once... there were no evil monsters in the dungeon... and the only zombie... was a yellow musk zombie. That game was short lived. Just something to consider.
You can detect secret doors, compartments, caches, and so forth. Only passages, doors, or openings that have been specifically constructed to escape detection are detected by this spell. The amount of information revealed depends on how long you study a particular area or subject.
1st Round: Presence or absence of secret doors.
2nd Round: Number of secret doors and the location of each. If an aura is outside your line of sight, then you discern its direction but not its exact location.
Each Additional Round: The mechanism or trigger for one particular secret portal closely examined by you. Each round, you can turn to detect secret doors in a new area. The spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.
1) Keep track of time. While they are detecting secret doors other buff spells are ticking down. Having a timed event in the adventure is also a consideration.
2) more than 1 secret door in close proximity adds additional rounds where the party is standing still.
3) Locks. Just because it's a secret door doesn't mean it's not locked or trapped.
4) Don't forget to include little caches or compartments. a loose brick that hides a Goblin's supply of pickels is still a secret door. So is the lair of a Trap Door Spider, even if it's so small that it has nothing the PCs can do with it.
5) always remember this part
The spell can penetrate barriers, but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of wood or dirt blocks it.
A secret Door behind the mirror, when the back ofthe mirro is lined with a sheet of lead doesn't get found by the spell.
A Secert Door in the Wine cellar behind a massive rack of ale kegs (say about 3 feet of wood) doesn't get found by the spell.A Secret door behind a large boulder (at least 1 foot of stone) doesn't get found by the spell.
|
Detect Secret Doors really doesn't need to be foiled.
The low duration and requirement for concentration mean that it's primarily useful in a "we know there has to be a secret door around here but we can't find it" type situation. In most dungeon crawl situations, the party will either be exploring cautiously and making multiple search rolls every ten feet they travel or will be conducting a fighting exploration. There's not a lot of middle ground. In the first scenario, you will need a new casting nearly every time your PCs enter a new corridor. That's a lot of money to blow on what is a usually a pointless exercise. In the second scenario, the wizard almost always has something better to do than cast and concentrate on detect secret doors.
But if it's really essential that there be a passage that the PCs don't find, there are a few options.
Non-detection will be a rather effective countermeasure because the best way to spam detect secret doors (if you really want to do that) would be a wand. Low caster level=effective non-detection.
Another way to do "secret" doors would be to use a lot of false doors in combination with a few real ones. If the PCs are confronted by seven doors in a room and the first three of them open up onto blank walls (once they have been searched and de-trapped and unlocked), when the PCs find that door 4 is a real door and door 5 is also a fake, they may assume that doors 6 and 7 are fakes too. Door 7 is real too. It's not really secret but the PCs could miss it.
One last thing to consider would be using "secret doors" that are not really doors but just bricked off corridors. The bad guys use a strength check to break down the wall when and if they want to open it and then they have to rebuild it if they ever want to close it. Obviously that won't work for all styles of secret door, but it is ideal for a few things:
1. Ambush points that are only meant to be used once.
2. Escape routes
3. Hiding places for treasures/tools that won't be needed for a while and which you won't be putting back in the same location.
For ambushes planned from secret doors:
Place a secret door on the floor with the opening mechanism only available from the monsters' under-floor side.
Place the door on the ceiling and equip it as above.
Place a lot of secret doors with complex and SLOW opening processes (hand cranking up a 1500 pound hidden portcullis is going to use up at least one casting by anyone under level 6 and a slow opening hydraulic door is quiet and may not even go anywhere but to a 10x10 room with a gelatinous cube the residents let out once a week for tunnel cleaning.)
Miscellaneous secret door things:
Per the spell, "Only passages, doors, or openings that have been specifically constructed to escape detection are detected", so if you want secret doors that aren't detected, just hide the door / passage / opening AFTER it is constructed. Examples: Put a large bockcase in front of an open passageway that requires dragging out of the way (perception will notice the drag marks, detect secret doors won't find anything). Hang a tapestry in front of a doorway that can be swung aside and pulled back from within (Perception or Knowledge Engineering to note the odd mountings supporting the tapestry). Re-route the river to put a bloody waterfall in front of the portcullis (not only do they have to find it, they have to crank it open while taking 1d4 non-lethal damage AND making Fortitude saves vs hypothermia from the barely above freezing mountain waters).
Put the passage underwater. It isn't detectable by the spell because it's just in an odd and out of sight location (it's not a secret, merely a hassle to notice or navigate).
ALL OF THE ABOVE SHOULD BE USED SPARINGLY!
The objective is to have occassional but significant occurrences of hidden passages that the spell fails against. When the villain escapes via the tapestry in the example above, it adds time for them to get farther away while the players check out the various sections of the throne room (LOTS of time if they rely only on the spell because it worked everywhere else but here it's Different).
The minute per level duration is offset by the fact if that the spellcaster is going to keep concentration up on the spell, the party isn't going to be moving very fast, as they reducing their movement to tatical scale. Also, I'd also make the character pretty much autofail surprise round perception checks.