Frugal GM Review: Doors (Brick by Brick)

Diving back into the group of items I cleared out of my DriveThruRPG Wishlist  I went and took a look at Doors: Brick by Brick from Moebius Adventures.

I remember back to when I had put this product in my wishlist because it was based on the recommendation from the guys over at the Roll For Initiative Podcast, specifically Volume 3 Issue 139.

This product contains 14 random tables for generating, you guessed it, doors. In a couple ways I'm a little disappointed in this product, at least more-so than what a four-star rating would seem to indicate. For generating a one-off fantastical door I think the tables are fine, but for generating a "regular" door.....not so much. The random tables are just too random for most ordinary usage and if I need a "special" door I probably a) would be placing that door deliberately and b) wouldn't want to risk a poor random selection using these tables. As-is I don't like the random tables and think they are near useless, which would result in a much lower rating from me.

While I think this product is largely a big fail on the random tables it still holds a lot of value for a GM. If I was wanting to create a special door I could easily read through the tables to pick & choose options I might not otherwise have considered before. If I wanted to randomly generate doors in a complex I could use the tables provided and just weigh the results heavily. Instead of having a diamond door triangular in shape with a high threshold and that screws its way open (not that I can even picture that right now) as likely as a common wooden door, I could make my own tables that favor a specific style and have a small chance for something fantastic. With a random table generator I could have specific attributes of the doors weigh-in on other attributes. The wooden doors would tend to be younger and simple while the more complex doors would be older...for example.

Essentially this product is a sourcebook for creating my own tables. With a little work this product could be quite useful in generating doors, but as-is is only useful for generating ideas. In this respect I think Doors: Brick by Brick is worth a couple bucks. I personally haven't put much thought behind doors and this PDF gave me some great ideas I might be able to use in the future. Good ideas are sometimes hard to come by and anything that gets my brain kicking in an unexpected direction is usually worth an extra star or two.