December 22, 2025: Quick And Easy Idea: Locks

For tabletop gamers in a mystery-type campaign, here's a simple and probably cheap way to add some tactile and visual pizzazz to your game: common locks.

If you've lived as long as I have, you've quite possibly acquired a drawer of various locking-type mechanisms over the years . . . hopefully with the appropriate keys or combinations. If so, you can hand out locks to represent in the physical world actual "locked" elements of the game. For example:

• "The evil henchman's office has a door that would be impossible to blast open. It seems to need an elaborate passcode system." (The GM hands the players a lock secured around a piece of cardboard that says "Henchman's Office.")
• "The computer system requires a password to enter. If you understand the security system correctly, you're pretty sure you only get two tries before it locks up the system entirely." (The GM hands over a closed lock labeled "Computer System.")

Later in the game, the players can acquire, say, a mysterious key or a lock combination. You know what that means . . . right?

There are a few "tricks" to making this work (in my mind). First, in most campaigns, the lock should not be a representation of the lock itself, because most household locks are ludicrously trivial to overcome – anyone who's spent time perusing Facebook has probably seen videos along the lines of "I'm going to open this lock using a piece of cheese and a toy dinosaur . . ." If you give the players (or the heroes) the opportunity to just brute-force their way into those locks, they probably will. Honestly, those type of barriers are best represented abstractly: "Make your Burglar! roll . . ."

Rather, this technique is best suited for gaming situations where there's no good way for the adventurers to get through the locking mechanism without finding an actual key or combination (or whatever the real-world key or combination represents in game).

It's also worth noting that just because the players have access to a lock at the gaming table (to serve as a tantalizing reminder), the heroes may not have access to the same lock. (If you use a corkboard or other method to represent locations, the physical locks might be placed on those areas as a reminder.) This can be especially tense if the players end up with, say, six mystery locks, all in different locations, and only one unlabeled key . . . Where do they go next?

As an alternative idea, for those serving bagels at the gaming table, you might consider lox.

-- Steven Marsh