Topic: secret doors
From Zak's Grinding Gear review:
In fact, if there is a major mechanical "bump" in this adventure it's that DMs will need to know exactly how they want to adjudicate the "find secret doors" rules for whatever system they're using before they run The Grinding Gear.
. . .
Before publishing this review, I sent Raggi an e-mail asking how he ran it, here's his response:
I absolutely allow re-tries. Each search takes one turn. I thought that
was the D&D standard... But with all the different editions and clones
that all change minor details, it very well may not be standard...I recommend that--in addition to the other very helpful introductory notes on rules to pay particular attention to when running The Grinding Gear--Raggi includes something like that passage if TGG is ever printed again.
I wanted to chime in with my agreement on this point, for The Grinding Gear and also for other publications.
As documented in the Death Frost Doom Experiences thread, I struggled with adjudicating the secret door in the High Priest's Temple. The characters suspected a secret door was present, rolled to find it, and failed. We've been using Moldvay Basic as the rules foundation for the campaign, and reference to page B21 provided: "Each character has only one chance to find each secret door." I readily made it an interactive challenge after that, but I hit a mental block and couldn't think of a mechanism for the secret door. Thankfully the player came up with a good idea on his own and I went with that.
As a result, when I first opened The Grinding Gear and looked at the dungeon map, I saw all those secret doors and thought, "Oh hell, I hope Jim describes how those work."
Stating in the module that the dungeon has been designed with the assumption of allowing re-tries to find secret doors would help some. However, if that requires a mysterious change in the rules of a given campaign, it may be an unwanted signal to the players that important secret doors lie ahead.
I would suggest a better solution would be to specify a default mechanism for secret doors in the module. Or, a small table of random secret door mechanisms. Having the nature of the secret door provided allows it to work in both campaigns that do and don't allow re-tries, and also campaigns that omit rolling for secret doors at all in favor of interactive exploration.