The Locks and boards entry left the door in a shape I thought was finished: a bar from inside, three grades of boards, three ways through. The Real interiors entry then made the door a tile you stand on, and standing on it turned out to change what a door is for. This is the third pass, and I think the last for a while.
It breaks both ways
A door used to be a one-way thing. From the street, a zombie could push a barred door until it gave. From inside, a barred door was simply solid: a zombie that got shut in behind one stayed shut in forever, milling in a room it could never leave. That made a locked door a cage, and a cage is a trick. Lure one in, bar the door, and the house had a permanent prisoner that could never touch you.
Now the door is a weak shell and it breaks from either side. A zombie sealed in with nothing left to hunt heads for the nearest way out and gnaws the weakest thing between it and the street, boards or bar, exactly the way it gnaws its way in. It takes a while and it’s loud, so you hear it, but it happens. And a door that’s been chewed open is open for everyone: the boards are gone, the door hangs open, and anything on the street can walk in.
The rule this protects is the one under all the others: a refuge is a delay, never a wall, and that has to be true from the inside too.
A broken door can be rebuilt
The other half of the same fix. Until now a caved-in door stayed caved in. You could nail boards over the hole, but the door never came back and could never be barred again. That’s a slow rot: every house a horde has visited loses its door, and after a few weeks a city has no doors.
You can now rebuild one. From inside the building, with two planks in your pack, you put it back on its frame. It comes back as a barred door, so the house is shut the moment you’ve finished, and only then will it take boards again. Rebuilding makes noise and costs a good chunk of energy, which is right: hammering a door back together in an open doorway should not be a quiet thing.
Stand in the opening
This is the change I’m least sure about and most attached to. Every action on a door or a window, bar it, board it, tear the boards down, now has to be done from on the opening’s own tile. Not from a step back inside the room. On the sill, in the doorway, on the spot the Real interiors entry called the exposed moment.
The reason is what the tile means. A doorway is the one place in a building that is inside and outside at once: a zombie on the street can reach you there, and so can anything already in the room. Boarding a door from the safe side of the room, with the horde outside, was free. Boarding it from the doorway, with the horde outside, is a decision about whether you have the seconds.
A few things didn’t move. Prying or breaking a door from the street still works from beside it, because from the street beside it is as close as you get. Stepping out through a door, or jumping out a window, still works from a step inside, because leaving in a hurry should not require a precise stop. And rebuilding a broken door works from anywhere in the room.
The doubt is whether standing in the doorway to board it reads as tension or as a tax on careful players. I think the careful player boards the door before anything is on the street, and the tax only lands on the one who left it late. But that’s the argument for every rule I’ve ever regretted, so I’m writing it down to check later.