Cutting through a door

[SionEwig]

Got a situation in a game I would like some thoughts on.

The situation - a character is locked in a room. The only door is about 2 inches thick and is made of seasoned oak and has iron reinforcing bands. The door is barred from the other side. The character has an average quality large knife and wants to whittle out an opening (about 2 inches by 1 inch) in the edge of the door to be able to get his hand through to lift the bar (picture the hole a mouse or rat would make). There is about a 1/4-inch gap between the door edge and the stone door frame where he will be working. The character has a ST of 7 if that is a concern.

The question - about how long should this take? Continuous work, I'll figure in rest periods.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

[Dalillama]

Realistically, somewhere between several months and eternity. Using the rules for damaging inanimate objects, you're looking at probably DR 3-5, so about the same probably.

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Realistically, somewhere between several months and eternity. Using the rules for damaging inanimate objects, you're looking at probably DR 3-5, so about the same probably.

Sorry, that's not "realistically." That's "using the statutory game rules for adjudicating such things."

Seasoned oak, after all, is not impervious to knives.

With that, hrm. Hours, honestly. ST 7 is pathetically weak, two inches thick is not slight, a knife isn't an auger, and if you want to put your hand through, that's not a 2"x1" hole, that's more like a 4"x2" one.

It would also be pretty damn noticeable, sound and vision both, so unless "locked in a room" also comes with "no guards are coming by for many hours, including to deliver food, water and/or fresh sanitary buckets," it isn't very feasible. Resharpening the knife will need to happen fairly often, and that'll make noise in of itself.

ST 7 is also not strong enough to control a knife well, so I'd say the character has a good chance of self-injury.

[SionEwig]

For this character, the size is about right (sz-2). And the place has been abandoned, so no guards. I didn't think about sharpening, thanks for that, it will need to be added into the total time. The ST needed for a large knife is 6, but I'll take the possibility of self injury in consideration. Any thoughts on time?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by SionEwig

Got a situation in a game I would like some thoughts on.

The situation - a character is locked in a room. The only door is about 2 inches thick and is made of seasoned oak and has iron reinforcing bands. The door is barred from the other side. The character has an average quality large knife and wants to whittle out an opening (about 2 inches by 1 inch) in the edge of the door to be able to get his hand through to lift the bar (picture the hole a mouse or rat would make). There is about a 1/4-inch gap between the door edge and the stone door frame where he will be working. The character has a ST of 7 if that is a concern.

The question - about how long should this take? Continuous work, I'll figure in rest periods.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

I don't have anything you couldn't have looked up yourself but what i get is:

According to the table in the back of Campaigns 2" of wood is DR2* HP29. The asterisk means that after doing 10 pts the wood will drop to DR 1 but no lower.

The optimum attack available to the character is Thrust of the large knife in an AOA(Strong) for 1D-1.

The IT:Homogenous of the door will halve any damge rolled bt not below 1 pt for anything that penetrates armor. This basically means that any damage roll over 2 (or 1 after the first 10) will do 1 pt of damage.

It's a minor judgment call to describe the door as "crippled" when there's a big enough hole to reach through. The door's crippling threshold would appear to be 16.

So for the first 20 attacks on the door half will do 1 pt of damage and after that the DR is down to 1 in a narrow spot and 2 out of 3 attacks will do a pt.

So the rules seem to say about 30 seconds of frantic activity with the knife probably held in an "ice pick" grip with 2 hands over the head. Add time as needed for panting.

Iron banding could raise DR over 2 but could probably be avoided for an area as small as the point of a knife. You could also get into complications about Armor chinks where the iron met the wood. The same would apply to the banding raising the HP. If you do raise the DR to 5 the time becomes "never".

Anyway, that's what the rules seem to say to me. I'm not in the mood to reality check this. :)

[Celjabba]

Snapping the blade is another risk, if he try to go too fast/too strong.

Out of curiosity, in the situation described, what stop him from lifting the bar with the knife blade since there is already a gap wide enough ?

edit : if you can attack from the edge, you can whittle down the wood more easily (in game term, thrust cutting damage). But working overhead won't help, the initial gap isn't wide enough for a proper angle of cut and seasoned oak is hard.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by SionEwig

The character has a ST of 7 if that is a concern.

This is the big issue.

The door has DR 2*, HP 29 per hex (per HP of DR & Structures, p. B558). Even with a full-strength swing attack, the character has no chance of getting through DR 2. Even AoA (Strong) which gives +2 damage only gives you a 66% chance. Even then, the GM shouldn't allow a swinging knife attack to work against a door.

Since the door is homogeneous, damage is halved.

AoA (Strong) thrusting attack might be allowed. That gives you a 1d-1 base damage (1d-3 for ST 7, +2). That allows you to do 1 HP of damage to the door every 3 seconds assuming that you're attacking at combat speeds, can make repeated rolls to hit, and are willing to expend 1 FP per 2-3 minutes. Once you get through DR, you can then start attacking HP, inflicting 1d-1 HP per attack (with AOA (Strong)), or 2.5 HP of damage per second.

Normally, the door's HP might be reduced since you're just trying to bore a fist-sized hole, rather than destroy the entire door. Since you're trying to completely destroy that area, however, effective HP is multiplied by 5x (the amount of damage required to utterly destroy the object). Let's assume that total HP you need to destroy remains the same as if you were just trying to break the door open, not utterly destroy a part of it.

Per RAW, that means that you might just be able to stab a decent-sized hole pretty quickly. If you inflict 0.33 HP/second (ignoring effects of ablative DR) it takes you about 88 seconds (~1.5 minutes) to gouge your way through 29 HP!

More realistically, assume that you can whittle away ST/20 HP or DR* of wood per square foot per minute if you've got a decent knife. Assume that total HP you need to remove is based on HP + DR* x 5. Assuming 1 lb. of homogeneous material, that means HP 8 (per p. B558) + DR 2*, or base HP 10. That means 50 HP of material you need to remove, so you spend (7/20 / 50 HP) = 143 minutes whittling, or about 2.3 hours. Maybe just a quarter or a half of that time if you just need to bore a fist-sized hole, or ~0.5-1 hour.

[fula farbrorn]

Grabbing my chisel grind knife and trying it for myself it goes suprisingly quickly, i am not working with Oak but with that gap you can start shaving off wood, just from trying i would say 4-6 hours would probably give you a hole with a chisel ground knife.

[SionEwig]

Thanks all, me good points to think on.

[khorboth]

Originally Posted by fula farbrorn

Grabbing my chisel grind knife and trying it for myself it goes suprisingly quickly, i am not working with Oak but with that gap you can start shaving off wood, just from trying i would say 4-6 hours would probably give you a hole with a chisel ground knife.

This seems about right to me. I was small and weak as a boy scout. But even in hard wood, a pocket knife worked just fine. Even at an awkward angle, I'd expect a few passes to take of 1/32 of an inch. Given the awkward angle, I'd say maybe as much as 8 hours.