What skill for barricading a house?

[Deathwindfr]

Dear all,

What skill check would you ask for if characters wanted to barricade a house ?

Like clawing planks to hold doors/windows or use furniture to barricade doors?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers

[Refplace]

Best of whatever appropriate skills they had.
Carpentry, Architecture, Forced Entry, Various engineering skills, Lifting, Scrounging, etc.
Any of those and more could be used in one way or another to help barricade a house, block entrances and windows, etc.

[Anthony]

In general the construction of field fortifications falls under Engineer (Combat), the proper use and emplacement falls under Tactics, and the Soldier skill can probably be used as a partial replacement. A variety of other skills could be situationally applicable.

[Rolando]

Design skills like architecture will be of little use unless they are specific for barricading and fortifying, like combat engineering, and even then they will have a penalty unless you have time and material to make actual fortifications.

For improvised barricading skills like carpentry and welding will work because you are building a barrier, the better built the sturdier it is, you don't need design for it, just block the openings with sturdy materials and affix them well.

Scrounging will be great for fast blocking of openings because that skill probably covers using random stuff in the most effective way possible, you are not just leaning a big cabinet to block the door, you are leaning it in a way that is harder to move.

Forced entry may give you an idea of what is better for blocking an opening but it is not much use by itself, because it is meant to be useful for the opposite job.

Lifting and having high lifting capacity may be a way of giving a bonus to someone rolling a skill to block entry points, but again, by itself is not really good as you don't know really what to do with the things you can lift and will probably use them poorly.

[Icelander]

Forced Entry would let you rip all sorts of interior doors off the hinges and break furniture into pieces that could be used by someone with Carpentry to more efficiently nail an exterior door or window shut. Forced Entry is explicitly what they teach firemen and breachers, so if you need a room with boring functioning furniture, doors and hinges converted into its component parts, someone with an axe or crowbar and the Forced Entry skill is perfect for that job.

Carpentry would be the simplest, most efficient way to close potential entryways, at a solid bonus +4 TDM for a very simple Carpentry task (which you can use to do it faster), but as long as there's someone directing the effort, you could use Soldier or Housekeeping for doing it, inefficiently and with less than perfect placement of nails or screws, but it does get done.

Observation can count the numbers of potential entry points, Tactics identifies which one intelligent opponents would be likely to focus on, and if the kind of unintelligent ones in play are familiar to the character with Tactics, maybe even where they will try. Animal Handling or the appropriate Survival specialty might tell you where a polar bear would try and get through, most likely.

Urban Survival is at minimum a Complementary Skill, but I might allow it to replace almost any of the skills above with it, at a penalty for some uses. Two groups of people routinely learn it. The unhoused and soldiers who've been through urban combat courses. Constructing a shelter is a typical Survival task, so barricading the house you are squatting in seems like a fair enough Urban Survival task.

Engineer (Combat) could replace both Tactics and Observation, and it's also the perfect skill, along with Leadership, to direct a team in turning an abandoned house into a strongpoint that is hard to take. Note that this is not just barricading the entries, exits. You will have a way of escaping, ideally more than one, and you will establish firing posts to interfere with anyone trying to destroy your barricades.

Architecture can replace Observation for determining entry and exit points, number of windows, etc. It can also be the skill directing people with Carpentry, Forced Entry and Scrounging with the actual breaking down stuff or scrounging for materials, as well as the construction. It won't tell you where enemies are most likely to attack, though. Finally, it's a classic Complementary Skill for basically all these tasks.

[The Colonel]

Let the characters suggest a skill and explain how they want to use it - assign bonuses or penalties depending on how feasible you think it sounds. Maybe warn them if you decide to rule that something isn't going to work at all.

[acrosome]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Engineer (Combat) could replace both Tactics and Observation, and it's also the perfect skill, along with Leadership, to direct a team in turning an abandoned house into a strongpoint that is hard to take. Note that this is not just barricading the entries, exits. You will have a way of escaping, ideally more than one, and you will establish firing posts to interfere with anyone trying to destroy your barricades.

And you'll want mouseholes cut in some walls, and nailboards on the stairs to slow attackers from rushing up/down them, and sandbag walls with bracing underneath the floor to support them. And holes in the roof for firing mortars, again, with the floor braced.

Some of Osprey's books on WWII field fortifications cover urban usages wonderfully.

[RGTraynor]

A large factor is the amount of time the defenders have. Sure, Engineer (Combat) or Carpentry ought to work well for "We've got a day to make this joint ready for a siege."

For "Hey guys, the cop with the loudspeaker outside said we got five minutes to surrender or they're coming in hot," I'd rather have Forced Entry; they don't have the time to do it perfectly.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

Let the characters suggest a skill and explain how they want to use it - assign bonuses or penalties depending on how feasible you think it sounds.

This is the best overall advice. Lots of skills could work, depending on where you are, what's available, and what you know. I mean, in a warehouse stacked with shipping crates that weigh 1,000 lbs. full, and outfitted with pallet jacks, cranes, and so on, I'd pick the person with Freight Handling. For that matter, a professional mover with that skill and maybe Lifting could be useful in an ordinary house. If the place is empty, though, yeah . . . ripping things apart with Forced Entry and putting up barricades with Carpentry would be more useful. If all you have is Explosives (Demolition) and some charges, collapsing part of the place might be tempting.

Originally Posted by Anthony

In general the construction of field fortifications falls under Engineer (Combat), the proper use and emplacement falls under Tactics, and the Soldier skill can probably be used as a partial replacement. A variety of other skills could be situationally applicable.

If you have the time, Engineer (Combat) would cover the territory of all other skills for this specific purpose. It'd be the gold standard. It's also a pretty obscure skill for a random PC to happen to have.

Soldier ought to cover enough, though. It's the skill I'd use for this:

Originally Posted by acrosome

And you'll want mouseholes cut in some walls, and nailboards on the stairs to slow attackers from rushing up/down them, and sandbag walls with bracing underneath the floor to support them. And holes in the roof for firing mortars, again, with the floor braced.

Some of Osprey's books on WWII field fortifications cover urban usages wonderfully.

From WWII on, at least, soldiers get some basic training in fighting in built-up areas. They won't know all the tricks, but they ought to be allowed to roll. Perhaps let Soldier replace IQ for defaults to more specialized skills, so that more "elite" soldiers with deeper training know more tricks; e.g., if doing the job right calls for an IQ/A skill that defaults to IQ-5, a soldier with IQ 10 and Soldier-14 rolls at 9, not at 5.

I'd probably also use the best skill in the group and let each assistant make a complementary skill roll to improve it. So if four soldiers with Soldier 12-14 have to do this, use 14, let the other three roll full skill to give up to +3, and then, use effective skill 17 for that default. Teamwork!

Originally Posted by Rolando

Scrounging will be great

It's definitely a complementary skill for just about all the other skills. Having more and better stuff certainly simplifies the task for those doing the work.

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

A large factor is the amount of time the defenders have. Sure, Engineer (Combat) or Carpentry ought to work well for "We've got a day to make this joint ready for a siege."

Fortunately, there are rules for working more quickly. "We'd need an 8-hour workday but we've got minutes? That's a roll at -9 or -10 . . . but at least we can try." As the GM, I might say that if it's a day's work for one person, but there are four PCs, that's 1/4 of a day's work right off the bat. If that were 2 hours instead of 8 hours, I'd then work out haste penalties based on that.

I'd still stack up lots of complementary skill rolls against the haste penalty. I think that having Forced Entry person busting up doors into planks, Scrounging person finding 23 94-lb. bags of cement in the basement, and Artist (Interior Decorating) person realizing that some of the "solid" items in the room are just for looks ought to help.

That last skill suggests a way that those playing characters who have no obviously useful skills could participate and have some spotlight time: Skills to identify what's not useful would prevent a lot of wasted time, if time were of the essence. Maybe Artist (interior Decorating, Scene Design, or Woodworking) couldn't build anything solid, but it sure could help you avoid using something that isn't . . . and I'm sure there are other skills like that.

[Plane]

The base time required to use these skills (modified by time spent multipliers/divisors) would be great to know in situations where you're rushed barricading against zombies and stuff, plus how much situational awareness you'd have when hammering nails in if a zombie were to reach in through a gap in the barricade for your arm.