I found a rather strange example in the rulebook regarding opening a door & portcullis when they are next to each other.
For the door you have to draw a door-card and for the portcullis you have to succeed a strenght check. So far so good, but when you (finally) open the door wioth the right card and you fail the strenght check, it states that in the next turn when trying again you have to draw another door card. Why would this be as the door is already open? thematically i would found it rather strange that when you have a door open (which you know is hard to do, as you will fail enough of them as well) you would close it after a failed strength check.
I havent read the whole rulebook yet, but perhaps it is stated that doos automatically close again after opening?

Shmoozer said:

I suspect the rules are written this way to keep the amount of bookkeeping in the game to a minimum. If the door stayed open you'd need some kind of token or something to mark the open door. If your hero failed once and walked away, taking another path instead, you'd need some way of remembering that door is open in case someone else came along (or the first hero came back) and wanted to get through there. Muliply this by however many door/portcullis combinations are on the board and simply remembering by memory isn't necessarily going to cut it.

The way the rules are written, there's nothing to remember. You tried, you failed, the next time someone wants to try they start over. Without reading the rules I would also expect that if yo succeeded and got through and someone else later tried to follow you, they would also have to draw a door card and roll a strength check. Maybe it's not thematic, but this isn't an RPG. It's a board game. Having to open the door again makes about as much thematic sense as getting $200 for passing a square marked "Go."

I wouldn't expect the rulebook to state explicitly that doors close automatically, nor would I expect it to state that they stay open. Without some method of recording open doors, however, it only makes sense that they count as closed again.

May I suggest an answer to this?

You've got all kinds of cards and tokens all over the place in this game anyway, what's one more? Keep the door open card in front of you for as long as you're in that room. put it in the discard pile when you leave. Minimizes bookkeeping and allows you to not have to avoid the logic fallacy of "why should I have to open a door if I just opened it and am trying to get through it?

DemonNiko said:

Sounds like a perfectly good house rule to me. Easy, clean, functional. The logical disconnect doesn't bother me too much, but if it bothers others this would work fine.

DemonNiko said:

The only problem that might crop up with this is that keeping the open door card in front of you until you leave the room reduces the chance for other players to get through doors. It might be better you use some token that is put on a character sheet to indicate they have opened their door.

Xiayose said:

Well in all honesty you shouldn't have it in front of you all that long. I'll give an example: I try to open the door, and I get an open door on the first turn. I place the open door card in front of me and try the porticullis. I fail on the porticullis and so I keep the card in front of me until next turn. Next turn I ignore the door since I've got the card in front of me and try the porticullis again. This time I make it, I move into the next room and discard the open door card. Unless the door deck is *really* small; it should inconvenience no one because you shouldn't have to reshuffle the deck that often. Let's use a similar example. I've gotten the door open on the first turn, but after 3 turns I just can't get that porticullis open so I give up and go back out the way I came and try to find another route. As soon as I leave that room I would discard the door open card which means it would close up after itself when I left. This should also inconvenience no one unless the deck of door cards is stupidly small and needs to be shuffled constantly. If you're holding onto that card for longer than 5 turns, you're just trolling the other players and deserve to die in that castle for wasting all that time. That being said, I could totally see tokens being used instead, but I personally wouldn't like it because someone's bound to forget they have a token in front of them and confuse it with something else. I'm easily forgetful with that stuff and so it's just not good for me, but I'd say go for it if it works for you.

DemonNiko said:

Well, I think this is a good solution...