Thanks for the great feedback, folks!
LoboStele wrote:
I'm not really sure the rules support this at the current time. Really should get NickName to chime in on it. The way I interpret the rules, you would check for adjacency to doors at the end of the turn. Technically, since that's a simultaneous action, you would check doors in whatever order you wanted to.
I see what you're communicating here, but I'm not convinced yet that it wouldn't work the way I theorized. Let me clarify my reasoning, then I leave it to you folks who know the game far better than I to judge the logic:
If a miniature in your squad ends its turn next to the door in my example image in the original post, it isn't adjacent to both doors (as I see it, anyway). Because doors are treated as walls until opened, your miniature isn't adjacent to both sides of the door when you go to check adjacency. It's only adjacent to the closest side, because it has no line of effect through to the other side of the door that wall until it opens the first side.
The simultaneous actions rule you mention above may indeed be a foil to this, but it's interpretive enough for me raise a hand and call a judge to the table to check it out. (That's exactly why I posted this thread.)
If you check doors at the end of your turn, and when you go to check doors you're only adjacent to one door, but opening that door exposes another door, do you get to check again?
To use another example, lets say you have doors set up like this:
___|
XXX|A
XXX|
In this diagram the vertical line immediately to the left of character A is a door, and so is the horizontal line. Both doors are closed when A ends its turn in the position shown. Do both doors open, even though A only had contact with the vertical door when you go to check adjacency?
If so, then the double doors in my example don't work the way I hoped. I was theorizing that only the doors you have contact with when you go to check adjacency will open this turn. But if you get to double-check after the door opens, then the idea doesn't work and you're right that additional language would need to be added to the floor rules if the powers that be decided they wanted to make it work this way.
LoboStele wrote:
However, at the same time, the current rules don't really support more than one terrain line on a grid line. Can you have more than one feature on a grid line? We've never had that before.
As others have mentioned, there are terrain squares adjacent to doors on some maps, but that's about it.
However, it's worth noting that for as long as WotC had me doing the limn lines, which is to say pretty much every map since Ossus, the door limns fall predominantly on one side or the other of the line between squares. I'm fairly certain that's the way they always were; I have the style guide they gave me around here somewhere, and I think that specified this treatment. The exception is blast doors which are in fact printed at twice the thickness of normal doors and occupy the 1/8 inch door width on both sides of the line. The limn rectangles on those doors are double-thick as well.
If anyone wanted to playtest this notion, all they would have to do is treat those extra-thick doors as double doors like I outlined above. See how it affects play, if at all. If it was found that this treatment enhances those maps, it would be an easy thing to put into the floor rules: "Thick doors (those twice the width of a standard door) are treated as two doors standing parallel along the same line."
It'd be very interested to see how this affects maps like my Exodus-Class Heavy Courier, which has a mix of thick and thin doors.
Of course, I like the idea of game effects that key off of the map itself, even if they're not always practical. Nearly all of the blast doors I've ever put on a map have a control panel on the wall near them. I think it would be neat if those doors could only be opened by a miniature that ends its turn in the same square as the control panel...
Thanks again, folks! I'll check back later, but I may or may not start putting a variant door indicator like that shown above on new or reprinted maps. It occurred to me as I wrote this that thick doors already HAVE a variant indicator: their blue rectangles are squares. If the ruling ends up being that doors drawn as shown in my example wouldn't open any different from normal doors anyway, why reinvent what's already distinctive?