Ugh...Burrowing through walls...

[Fates]

We've all seen it. We bust our asses building dungeons with for the players, trying desperately to provide them with challenges that will curb their unbelievably short attention spans, and the moment they come across a door they can't open, or a guardian with a riddle, or whenever they just want to make their own shortcut, the little pricks decide to dig through the dungeon walls, and of course they always find a way to do so.

Are there any non-cheesy, non-railroad, and non-player-exploitable ways to prevent players from doing this? It's sort of an ongoing issue in my campaigns, but I don't just want to give an ultimatum to my players or anything like that. I only want them to actually make an attempt to navigate dungeons in a way somewhat resemblant of how I intended. Does anyone have any good ideas for circumventing this?

[Aegis013]

Having Prismatic Walls hidden inside the walls, floor, and ceiling might give them pause. The first time they have to make the save for every single magic item on their person or have it be destroyed and make one for themselves or be shunted to another plane, they'll reconsider their burrowing attempts.

Depending on the level of play though, it might be hard to explain why those are there.

[Flickerdart]

In modern buildings, breaking through walls can be a bad idea for lots of reasons. Some are load-bearing walls. Others have wiring or piping running through them (or for extra fun, both at once). And finally, the things on the other side of the wall could be walled off for a reason - sometimes, dungeon designers like to be extravagant and put a walkway above a pit of lava or acid. Enter through the door, you're fine. Enter through the wall, you're falling.

In a dungeon that's not constructed but naturally formed (such as a series of tunnels left behind by burrowing creatures and then taken over by mad cultists who weren't too mad to put in doors) there may still be burrowers living in the walls. If it's easy to tunnel through, then something may well have done that before the PCs did. Also, natural deposits could have been left in the stone. Is there dangerous natural gas? Perhaps there's a deposit of gold or jewels, which attracts the unwelcome attention of rust monsters or folugubs?

Ultimately, the best way to deal with this is to remember that tunnelling takes a long time and is noisy (unless the players have burrow, earth glide, dimension door, etc, but you should really be designing your adventure with their capabilities in mind instead of throwing stock scenes and expecting that to work well). A populated dungeon will have someone notice pretty quickly. An unpopulated one would already have been looted if getting through obstacles was that easy.

[XmonkTad]

I don't remember where it is, but there are guides for building 4 dimensional dungeons somewhere. Hard to navigate that via tunneling.

There are printed adventure modules (won't spoil which) where the BBEG is inside a mobile adimantine room.

If tunneling is splitting the party, ambush time. It's awfully hard for the wizard to cast spells when grappled by an earth elemental inside a wall.

If regular traps aren't working, try a spell trap of move earth. That kicks out a burrower and makes anyone with a bad fort save unlikely to try again.

[Incanur]

At higher levels, magical barriers are pretty the only way to prevent walls from becoming meaningless. One dungeon I made for characters maybe 15ish level was all virtually destructible and blocked or mostly blocked ethereal travel, teleportation, etc.

[Emperor Tippy]

Make doors portals and have each room be a different demiplane.

Or teleportation circles (or have the doors be "trap's" of Greater Teleport) with the rooms of the dungeon having no real spatial relationship with one another.

Every room in the dungeon can be on a different planet if you want.

Then there is also making the Dungeon an Ice Assassin of an Aleax Animated Object. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all really part of on single giant creature that is totally immune to harm.

[Swaoeaeieu]

Make doors portals and have each room be a different demiplane.

Or teleportation circles (or have the doors be "trap's" of Greater Teleport) with the rooms of the dungeon having no real spatial relationship with one another.

Every room in the dungeon can be on a different planet if you want.

Then there is also making the Dungeon an Ice Assassin of an Aleax Animated Object. The walls, floor, and ceiling are all really part of on single giant creature that is totally immune to harm.

I am quite sure that that is a everything-proof way to fix the OP's problem. Since Tippy fixes are the best fixes. Maybe it's a bit overkill for a tribe of goblins hideout? But high level dungeons, sure!
So MasterofFates, what is the level for these dungeons?

[Raven777]

And finally, the things on the other side of the wall could be walled off for a reason

Time to fish stuff on the scp wiki!

[Emperor Tippy]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).

If you really have the resources then back the regular walls with Riverine. It ceases to be so useful once the party gets access to Disintegrate but before that it works pretty well.

[Fates]

In this particular case, the party's 10th-12th level. Everyone's t2>, and the only character with any sort of teleportation is the warlock, who only adventures with the party occasionally. It's a relatively low-magic setting, and so I'm primarily looking for mundane ways of handling this, but of course there are NPC spellcasters around.

I generally try to design dungeons with the PC's abilities in mind, but I can never seem to be able to keep track by higher levels of who can do what. This group in particular is very crafty, which I suppose is preferable to having a totally vanilla party. It doesn't even bug me all that much that the players are undermining my plans- that's a necessity in a healthy D&D group; it's only that they keep falling back on the same uninteresting tactic, and for in-game reasons I don't want to make every dungeon out of adamantine or anything like that.

I guess in large part this thread is more for creative inspiration and less for a fix to a problem.

[Rubik]

You could always give the party situations where it's clear that they need to burrow through walls to get what they want. Plan on them doing so, and design challenges explicitly with that in mind on occasion. Then later on, give them a clear, spelled-out-beforehand deterrent for doing so, such as the aforementioned lava walls and gas pockets. Then once they're used to having both of those be options, have the tunneling itself be a challenge, because they need to tunnel, but the lava and gas pockets are known hazards, and they need to find ways to survive them.

[Incanur]

Making the quest time sensitive is on way to discourage hacking through walls - though hacking through walls can be suprisingly quick with adamantine weapons and power attack! A mere 50-60 damge per round gets through 3ft of stone in about a minute. So, by the rules, walls don't have much of a chance against mid- or high-level characters. (Or really against barbarians of nearly any level.)

So you might want to just consider planning for tunneling.

[Deophaun]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).

As long as they don't dig straight down and have a bucket of water with them, all that does is give them an infinite amount of cobblestone.

[GiantkillerJack]

As long as they don't dig straight down and have a bucket of water with them, all that does is give them an infinite amount of cobblestone.

Thank you for making my day.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I tend to favor the load-bearing wall solution for man-made dungeons. Knock a big chunk out of the wall and a big chunk of the ceiling it was holding up comes crashing down. Works just as well for shallow burrows and soft earth.

Being prone to breaching with explosives, its something that I thought of a while ago.

T2 and better, you have to accept that walls aren't a meaningful barrier after level 7 and do something else. Larger complexes that make magically bypassing or pounding through the wall next to every well made door horridly impractical is always a fun start.

[ArcturusV]

Well.. dealing with more "low magic" load bearing would be where my mind naturally goes to this problem. Because you KNOW that players aren't going to have Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering), they didn't bring iron shod bracing beams with them, etc. They dig a hole and, well... chances are it'd fall. If you want a good basis for what a collapse like that would do? I'd rip from the bit off the Earthquake spell on dealing with a collapse for basis of saves, damage, effects.

Of course the other part is, well, it's slow. Even if they try to attack the dungeon/cave walls with their blasts and weapons, between hardness and HP on something like 20 feet of stone it's going to take a long time. And if someone else is there, something they wanted to avoid.... it'll be after them.

Now if I'm being a real ass? I'd point out something like the sword that guy is using, no matter how magical... just isn't meant for mining. It's not a pick axe. The damage it deals with his strikes is also being dealt to his sword, and will eventually get notched and damaged. Some guy basically turns his +3 Frostbrand Holy Silver Greatsword into a +3 Improvised Hunk of Rebar... well... they'll stop doing that.

Course you can't stop them from doing it. but if you make it harder for them to do it by logical consequences. "What... you didn't brace and shore up the hole you're digging? Roll a save against the collapse as you get close to breaking through and the tunnel is weak", "You used your sword as a pick axe? It's a useless twisted hunk of metal, no longer a honed weapon", "Yeah, after 1 hour of hacking at the stone wall and blasting with your power a bunch of fiends are standing behind you, tapping their toes, looking at you like shaved monkeys and going '... are you done?'.".

They want to still do it, but 'logically', having to hire miners, equip them, supply them, guard them when they're working, etc? More power to them. But at some point someone usually realizes, "... you know, this is boring, and about 15 times harder than just dealing with the frontal approach, and we're STILL getting ambushed by everything in the dungeon as they come to ruin our digging..."

[lord_khaine]

People, do notice that the entire party was tier2+, and level 11-12.
I am pretty sure that the burrowing though walls part was at least partly figurative, considering how much travel magic is available.

So if you want your players to stop randomly tunneling around the challenges then i suggest making sure they contain something the players actually need, like a key, or part of a coordinate, a hint for the next riddle, heck, even information about where they need to dig to reach the next room

[Yuki Akuma]

Honestly, this sort of thing just encourages an unhealthy, combative relationship between the DM and the players.

I honestly think the best idea is to sit down with your players and say "Okay, guys. I know you like finding creative solutions to problems and bypassing encounters, but I spend a lot of time designing these dungeons for you to run through, and if you skip everything I suddenly have nothing left to throw at you. Could we please start going through dungeons normally?"

[ArcturusV]

I took that to be everyone is tier 3 and lower. Less than Tier 2. My bad.

[killem2]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).

If you really have the resources then back the regular walls with Riverine. It ceases to be so useful once the party gets access to Disintegrate but before that it works pretty well.

I would like to add, it doesn't even have to be lava it could be water from local under ground wells :) Having the dungeon suddenly fill up with a few thousand gallons of water will suck. hehe

[Pilo]

For evil cultist zone, there is the Unhallow spell (level 5) with dimentionnal anchor tied.

For non cultists, there are some Wall spells, like Wall of Iron to prevent Passwall.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I took that to be everyone is tier 3 and lower. Less than Tier 2. My bad.

Judging by his comment about the party warlock and the fact that it says "less than T2" with a mathematical symbol, that's probably correct. The OP probably isn't the only one with this issue and some of those others may have sorcerers or better to deal with.

[Averis Vol]

Time to fish stuff on the scp wiki!

Yea, not like I wanted to sleep tonight or anything......


thanks for that link, might use some of this in one of my one shots.

[Spuddles]

Do your monsters just sit in room in sleep mode until a PC enters the room? Because in the time it takes to punch through a wall, they could have aggro'd the whole dungeon.

Also have them make knowledge architecture rolls or suffer cave ins. Rather, just have most tunnels they try and make, if they're crude and fast (no struts, not careful digging of load bearing arches), collapse on them. Then see if they'll wise up and put ranks on knowledge architecture.

[Vaz]

I am quite sure that that is a everything-proof way to fix the OP's problem. Since Tippy fixes are the best fixes. Maybe it's a bit overkill for a tribe of goblins hideout? But high level dungeons, sure!
So MasterofFates, what is the level for these dungeons?

If you're at a level where a tribe of goblins are still a threat, avoiding them by going through the walls is arguably one of the few ways of surviving the encounter and is deserving of XP.

At levels where Prismatic Walls and the like are in play and useable by BBEG's designed to be fought and killed by the party (or the party themselves are using them), then why shouldn't they be used?

It's like the CIA saying "nope, I can create this custom nigh-undefeatable firewall designed to protect the nations secrets, but instead I'll stick with AVG downloaded off the internet."

[Lord Vukodlak]

in a short lived campaign I had a party tho tried burrowing through walls and doors in an underground cavern.... I repeatedly pointed out that said complex seemed to extended underneath the lake..... you guess what happened from there.

[Story]

The low level way to discourage digging through walls in dungeons is to fill them with lava (Dwarf Fortress is fun for the whole family).

Won't necessarily work against summoned Thoqquas. The gas pockets might though.

T2 and better, you have to accept that walls aren't a meaningful barrier after level 7 and do something else. Larger complexes that make magically bypassing or pounding through the wall next to every well made door horridly impractical is always a fun start.

Level 5 for Druids.

But by the time the party gets stuff like Persisted Greater Blinking, the challenge is enemy spellcasters. Anything non magical like rocks and walls is just scenery.

[Rubik]

I took that to be everyone is tier 3 and lower. Less than Tier 2. My bad.

Since one is a warlock, I think they are T3 and lower.

It would've been nice had the OP NOT tried to confuse everyone with bad mathematical symbolism.

[Deophaun]

Won't necessarily work against summoned Thoqquas. The gas pockets might though.

Thoqquas don't make that big of a hole, though. Unless the characters are kobolds, they aren't going to squeeze through a 1' diameter passage.

That said, in one dungeon delve I did at one point figure out how much movement it required for a thoqqua to corkscrew through a wall to leave a big enough passage (although one which would have a doughnut-hole bolder in the middle), and quickly realized that I'd rather use the spellslot for something else.

[NichG]

The most natural result I think is the 'its loud, get a random encounter' answer. It scales to party CR, since ostensibly they're exploring places that are about the right difficulty for them (and if they aren't, it doesn't really matter if they dig through the walls or go through the doors). To help with this, it can be useful to design 'dungeons' that are actually just safe or rarely traversed paths through hostile areas, so there's a pool of hostile things that could come investigate that the party simply wouldn't encounter at all if they had moved more quickly or remained more quiet.

Another thing to do is design dungeons that aren't very compact. Instead of having a 1ft stone partition between rooms, have snaking corridors that bend and go to another room 30ft or 50ft away. Tunneling can be done, but it becomes harder to know exactly what way you have to dig. If there are features like underground streams, etc, this can basically translate to a different kind of random encounter table for digging - one that includes flooding, breaking into a different cavern system, collapses, etc. Tippy's 'each room is on a separate plane' is the most extreme case of this kind of methodology, but you don't have to go that far - just make them spaced far out and make sure things aren't on nice grid lines, so digging 'straight' will miss the next room, you have to drop 10 feet too.

You could also simply houserule solid stone and metal to have 100x the normal hitpoints if they are thicker than 6 inches. If you need a logical justification, you can base it on the idea that for thin sheets you just have to create a crack and apply pressure at the edge of the crack to make it spread through the sheet, but for a large enough solid 'block' of material its going to be more like chipping away at it, you can't easily get it to fail catastrophically. That means that the 1 minute tunnel from the adamantine dagger wielding barbarian becomes a 100 minute tunnel. This won't do squat against the party summoning a burrower though.