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View Full Version : Making the players work



Jastermereel
2009-09-11, 12:23 PM
In an upcomming session, I'm thinking of giving my players a code to work through. I could simply make it a skill check of some sort, but I felt it might be more rewarding for the Players to try and figure it out on their own (with skill checks providing possible clues).

My idea involves handing the players a printed page of text (excerpted from Moby **** or similar) with the key letters written in a different color or highlighted if held up to the light (3 layers of paper, with the middle one cut like swiss cheese to let the light through), and they have to decipher what is said, is that too much of a task?

Has anyone else done this sort of thing where the players have to do work for a puzzle rather than the characters? How well did it work for you?

Sipex
2009-09-11, 12:32 PM
My players prefer to do their puzzles on their own (with skill checks to get hints of sorts of course).

I find it works well as long as all your players can contribute somehow. For instance, we had one place that was basically 3 puzzles in a row so how it worked was those who didn't want to contribute helped eliminate the waves of skeletons spawning nearby.

valadil
2009-09-11, 12:46 PM
I've played and GMed this kind of puzzle. How well it works depends on the group. Most groups are patient enough to play through a puzzle like this once, but will tell you afterward if they didn't like it.

My advice is with any puzzle is to make it progressive. There should be steps that are taken to solve the puzzle instead of a single eureka moment where the whole thing goes from unsolved to solved. This will mean that even if your players spend an hour on the puzzle, they'll feel like they're succeeding as the progress. It also means that if they whine for skill or intelligence checks, you can give them clues toward each step without giving away the whole puzzle. The best example of this I've seen was in a rotating cipher. A successful linguistics check gave us full punctuation. It helped a ton but solved nothing.