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Klara Meison
2016-12-11, 05:42 AM
Various puzzles blocking access to parts of a dungeon is a common trope within the gaming medium, however I don't seem to see them in various published adventures much. What are your experiences with employing puzzles in dnd? Have you ever done so?

Inevitability
2016-12-11, 05:47 AM
Thing is: unless there's a good reason for them to not do so, it's very hard for players not to come up with a way around the puzzle.

Impassable chasm with a drawbridge that needs to be activated? Wizard casts Fly and takes a rope along.

Locked door with a hundred potential keys and a riddle determining which is right? Fighter smashes it down.

Treasure submerged in acid that must first be drained? Cleric casts Protection From Acid and grabs it.

Klara Meison
2016-12-11, 06:04 AM
Thing is: unless there's a good reason for them to not do so, it's very hard for players not to come up with a way around the puzzle.

Impassable chasm with a drawbridge that needs to be activated? Wizard casts Fly and takes a rope along.

Locked door with a hundred potential keys and a riddle determining which is right? Fighter smashes it down.

Treasure submerged in acid that must first be drained? Cleric casts Protection From Acid and grabs it.

I don't see much of a problem. Those are valid solutions, and you obviously would need to design higher-level puzzles to account for higher-level options, so as to make them useful without being instant solutions.

Inevitability
2016-12-11, 06:08 AM
I don't see much of a problem. Those are valid solutions, and you obviously would need to design higher-level puzzles to account for higher-level options, so as to make them useful without being instant solutions.

I apologize: I thought you were referring to 'puzzles' as in Legend of Zelda-esque, single-solution puzzles.

Stealth Marmot
2016-12-11, 06:43 AM
Dire Stirge is correct, the problem with puzzles is that players often have access to stuff that can make them irrelevant. Especially at higher levels.

When you say "Puzzles" however, do you mean "Obstacles" or actual "Puzzles" where someone has to answer some sort of riddle like pressing certain plates in the right order given clues, or guess the answert to a question like "What is green and brown and red all over?" and you answer "A kobold wearing a brown tunic whose head I bashed in".

An obstacle is just a pit or a cliff or a tunnel going through water or even a pit with acid that you have to hop on narrow platforms to get across. A puzzle requires the player to think to solve it as intended.

Even if you had a setup where nothing the players could do could POSSIBLY bypass the riddle asked, you just need a 7th level or higher cleric cast "Divination" and ask for the solution.

That said, if you have players who LIKE puzzles, you can still add them, but you do so with the understanding that they are choosing to not use their 4th level spell as a cheat code.

As for why they aren't put into published adventures, well I think one of the big reasons is that not every players like them and published adventures usually try to go for mass appeal. Plus there are certainly players who will argue about how mental stats can be hard to represent when you are not as smart as your character. A 20 int character should be able to solve most riddles easily, but the player can't roleplay that particularly well. On the flip side, if the player can just wake an INT check to bypass a riddle, what's the point of even giving it to the player since it will just be another number crunch?

One of the problems about a riddle is that it is without a doubt the most unpredictable aspect of a game when estimating a timeframe. If you make up a riddle, the players could spend 30 seconds on it or 3 hours, or maybe not even be ABLE to solve it.

Finally, there is the actual cheating possibility. See, assuming you come up with a good riddle, and you even test it with some people to see if it is one that will actually go well with the players, then you run into the problem that a lot of people will end up reading the published adventure. They are literally a google search away from any riddle that has been published. Sometimes a player might look it up, sometimes they might already have read the module before or overheard it (especially if they themselves are looking to DM at some point).

Having monsters and even secret passages is not going to be undone entirely with someone having heard the module before, but you can only ask a guy a riddle once. Plus it is easier to change the location of a secret door or swap out a monster than come up with a good riddle by yourself.

Klara Meison
2016-12-11, 07:12 AM
Dire Stirge is correct, the problem with puzzles is that players often have access to stuff that can make them irrelevant. Especially at higher levels.

When you say "Puzzles" however, do you mean "Obstacles" or actual "Puzzles" where someone has to answer some sort of riddle like pressing certain plates in the right order given clues, or guess the answert to a question like "What is green and brown and red all over?" and you answer "A kobold wearing a brown tunic whose head I bashed in".


I'd define a puzzle as "an obstacle that has an explicit thought-based solution(way to bypass it), with other solutions being more costly in terms of resources(e.g. spell slots), consumables(e.g. scrolls), tactical advantages(e.g. element of surprise because goblins in the next room didn't hear you bash the door in) or something else"

So a door requiring you to press plates in a certain order would probably be a puzzle.


An obstacle is just a pit or a cliff or a tunnel going through water or even a pit with acid that you have to hop on narrow platforms to get across. A puzzle requires the player to think to solve it as intended.

Even if you had a setup where nothing the players could do could POSSIBLY bypass the riddle asked, you just need a 7th level or higher cleric cast "Divination" and ask for the solution.

I don't agree with the "requires to solve as intended" part, honestly. Good puzzle should entice the players into solving it by making not solving it not enticing. Sure you can use Divination to solve it, but that's a 4lv spell slot you won't have for the rest of the dungeon. And since Divination isn't even guaranteed to yield a correct result, well, good use of that spell.


As for why they aren't put into published adventures, well I think one of the big reasons is that not every players like them and published adventures usually try to go for mass appeal. Plus there are certainly players who will argue about how mental stats can be hard to represent when you are not as smart as your character. A 20 int character should be able to solve most riddles easily, but the player can't roleplay that particularly well. On the flip side, if the player can just wake an INT check to bypass a riddle, what's the point of even giving it to the player since it will just be another number crunch?

One of the problems about a riddle is that it is without a doubt the most unpredictable aspect of a game when estimating a timeframe. If you make up a riddle, the players could spend 30 seconds on it or 3 hours, or maybe not even be ABLE to solve it.

Finally, there is the actual cheating possibility. See, assuming you come up with a good riddle, and you even test it with some people to see if it is one that will actually go well with the players, then you run into the problem that a lot of people will end up reading the published adventure. They are literally a google search away from any riddle that has been published. Sometimes a player might look it up, sometimes they might already have read the module before or overheard it (especially if they themselves are looking to DM at some point).

Having monsters and even secret passages is not going to be undone entirely with someone having heard the module before, but you can only ask a guy a riddle once. Plus it is easier to change the location of a secret door or swap out a monster than come up with a good riddle by yourself.

Makes sense. Any idea where I might be able to find some good examples then?

Ninja_Prawn
2016-12-11, 07:19 AM
What are your experiences with employing puzzles in dnd? Have you ever done so?

The main problem I've had with puzzles (both as a player and a DM) is metagaming. Most puzzles, especially riddles and language puzzles, require the players to sit down and solve them; they can't be solved in character (of it they can, it would be a skill check that doesn't require the puzzle to actually exist).

So either you ask the players to metagame, or you leave them flailing around trying to work out whether their characters could solve the puzzle based on their abilities and in-character knowledge, possibly inviting them to deliberately fail. I don't really like either of those, and I'm guessing some module writers don't, either.

Stealth Marmot
2016-12-11, 07:29 AM
Makes sense. Any idea where I might be able to find some good examples then?

Book of Challenges. It's a 3.0 book but it has a lot of challenges that are riddles and puzzles that could be adapted easily.

JellyPooga
2016-12-11, 01:08 PM
"Puzzles" fall into two categories;

1) Blindingly Obvious
2) "Please read the GMs mind or the adventure is on hold until either you do or the GM gives you the answer"

Neither of these is entertaining or serves any purpose but to give a GM a sense of smug satisfaction (if he's the type to take pleasure in "proving" how much "smarter" he is than his players) or frustration (if he's not OR the puzzle was easier than he thought and he was trying to "prove" how much "smarter" he is than his players).

Don't use puzzles. Leave them for novels, films and gameshows where they belong. RPGs are not a good place for them because the necessary break in the Player-Character divide ruins immersion and only serves to cause arguments and frustration.

137beth
2016-12-11, 01:28 PM
It's a good way to bring people out of character, very quickly. The DMG in 4e actually does a pretty good job explaining how puzzles differ from other aspects of the game:

Puzzles in a D&D game present a unique form of chal-
lenge, one that tests the capabilities of the players at
the table instead of their characters. Combat is a tacti-
cal challenge for the players, and many traps and skill
challenges present puzzlelike elements, but they also
involve plenty of die rolling to represent the charac-
ters’ abilities. A puzzle, generally speaking, does not.
Furthermore, puzzles present a challenge to players
that’s usually independent of their experience with the
game. Experienced players have an edge in combat or
skill challenges because of their familiarity with the
rules and situations of the game. Unless a puzzle relies
on game knowledge, it’s just as accessible to someone
who has never played D&D before as it is to the hard-
ened veteran. That makes a puzzle a great challenge
to throw in front of a group that includes both experi-
enced and new players—as long as you know that the
new players have some interest in and facility with
puzzles. It gives the new players a chance to join in the
game on an equal footing.
And that's a good thing if you want it, and a bad thing if you don't want it.

braveheart
2016-12-11, 01:40 PM
There are a few types of puzzle, Riddles, math, and logic. In my experience a riddle can either be a irrelevant or completely halt gameplay, math puzzles force the issue of metagaming to solve them, but logic puzzles can be very effective.
Puzzles where colored items need to be placed in a specific order, and each item has incomplete information about its position. Or puzzles where all but one information source of several are false are both excellent logic puzzles that anyone can solve if they take some time to think about them, including the characters you play, pure intelligence doesn't necessarily auto solve these puzzles either, but you could turn an int. Check into a helpful hint.

Yawgmoth
2016-12-11, 01:49 PM
My biggest problem with puzzles is that very often it becomes "figure out what the DM was thinking when he wrote this" not "solve this thing". I can't even recall the last time I had a GM who both (a) used puzzles, and (b) let a logical answer that wasn't their answer work. It's an even better example of the Locked Door Problem than an actual locked door, because at least with a door you can break it down or pick the lock or anything else that involves game mechanics; a puzzle is often "you much be this versed in esoteric BS to pass" and is basically forcing you to metagame.

My worst experience, and this is a core reason I never use puzzles in my games, actually comes from a Mage: the Awakening game. The ST decided to have a series of puzzles in the underworld that involved essentially "which one of these is not like the other" with a series of words. The difference was supposed to be picking out the misspelled words; however, she was absolutely godawful at spelling so the words she had picked out as "right" and "wrong" were a completely different list from the truth! And of course she wouldn't give us any hints because she thought this was so god damned clever. So we wasted a full session and almost spent a second before I straight up said "you will tell me what the **** this gimmick is or I am leaving and blocking you. If your next words are anything but the cutesy little pattern you think you've devised, I'm done." Then we had to roll back an entire session of stupid consequences for failure.

It's as JellyPooga says: Leave that trope to novels and movies unless all of the following are true: Every single one of your players really likes puzzles in their game, every one of your players has a similar logical pathway to yours, you're willing to accept any solution that prima facie could work, and there's an option for "I have no idea, what can I roll to bypass in-character".

Jay R
2016-12-11, 02:10 PM
A puzzle doesn't leave the adventure on hold or completely halt gameplay unless the game's a railroad.

If you must go through that door before anything else happens, then it would put the adventure on hold, but I've never played with a DM that foolish. A puzzle should be on a treasure chest or vault. If you can't solve it. You don't lay down and give up; you just move on without that treasure.

Nightcanon
2016-12-12, 10:59 AM
I'd define a puzzle as "an obstacle that has an explicit thought-based solution(way to bypass it), with other solutions being more costly in terms of resources(e.g. spell slots), consumables(e.g. scrolls), tactical advantages(e.g. element of surprise because goblins in the next room didn't hear you bash the door in) or something else"

So a door requiring you to press plates in a certain order would probably be a puzzle.


I don't agree with the "requires to solve as intended" part, honestly. Good puzzle should entice the players into solving it by making not solving it not enticing. Sure you can use Divination to solve it, but that's a 4lv spell slot you won't have for the rest of the dungeon. And since Divination isn't even guaranteed to yield a correct result, well, good use of that spell.

'Solve as intended' often just means 'guess (or work out) the answer in the DM's head' (as implied by your first paragraph quoted here), and that isn't necessarily enticing because it isn't likely to be as fun. I have resources that I'm happy to use to bypass this situation rather than faffing on with keys or sliding blocks.
Riddles and puzzles are essentially an 'I'm cleverer than you' challenge between the questioner and the responder, and it's virtually impossible for that not to be a DM vs Player challenge, rather than gameworld vs PC challenge.
In a tabletop RPG, there's always another option, even if it is to kill the sphinx, give up and find another treasure room to loot, or quit adventuring and open a tavern.
Unless I'm taking part in some sort of competition or selection process, it's hard to see why suddenly coming up against a 'puzzle' that must be solved in a specific way is something that is likely to happen to me as an adventurer, and even harder to think why opting for an 'outside the box' solution is going to disqualify me.

Knaight
2016-12-12, 04:03 PM
Generally I've found that puzzles don't work so well. Obstacles absolutely do - and it's entirely possible to have traversal obstacles be the main source of conflict in the game, with the party deeply involved in a people vs. nature conflict instead of a people vs. people conflict. That's not to say that they should never be used; I have used them when deliberately running a really traditional game* to introduce the idea to new players, but even then they were often of the traversal obstacles or active defense variety where there were other ways through.

*Or what was supposed to be that and managed to be semi-traditional for about two sessions.

Doorhandle
2016-12-12, 07:14 PM
Thing is: unless there's a good reason for them to not do so, it's very hard for players not to come up with a way around the puzzle.

Impassable chasm with a drawbridge that needs to be activated? Wizard casts Fly and takes a rope along.

Locked door with a hundred potential keys and a riddle determining which is right? Fighter smashes it down.

Treasure submerged in acid that must first be drained? Cleric casts Protection From Acid and grabs it.

Honestly, that sort of thing is why I think there should be more puzzles: to find new and interesting ways to think outside the box.

ellindsey
2016-12-14, 10:25 AM
The last time I used a puzzle in a dungeon, it was when the players were exploring an abandoned temple of a trickster god. The puzzle had an obvious, though difficult solution - make you way across an elevated maze of iron bars to a platform in the center of the room, with half the bars actually being illusions, and a phantom spider appearing to knock the party members off the bars as they tried to cross. It was intended to be annoying and difficult, because the actual intended solution was to think outside the box and not take the obvious way across. The actual solution was to drop to the floor, walk to the center of the room, and then use flight or climbing to reach the platform.

Thinker
2016-12-14, 01:17 PM
Generally I've found that puzzles don't work so well. Obstacles absolutely do - and it's entirely possible to have traversal obstacles be the main source of conflict in the game, with the party deeply involved in a people vs. nature conflict instead of a people vs. people conflict. That's not to say that they should never be used; I have used them when deliberately running a really traditional game* to introduce the idea to new players, but even then they were often of the traversal obstacles or active defense variety where there were other ways through.

*Or what was supposed to be that and managed to be semi-traditional for about two sessions.

I've used them a few times for boss battles. They make the encounter more memorable than standard HP and save calculations and allows me to make BBEGs weaker than the PCs except for their gimmicks.

RazorChain
2016-12-15, 10:24 PM
Even if you had a setup where nothing the players could do could POSSIBLY bypass the riddle asked, you just need a 7th level or higher cleric cast "Divination" and ask for the solution.

That said, if you have players who LIKE puzzles, you can still add them, but you do so with the understanding that they are choosing to not use their 4th level spell as a cheat code.




I love divination and how players think that it's just like calling the gods and asking them random questions. Divination is about forseeing, or predicting a specific event, not "Oh hello! What's the answer to that puzzle?" "Where did I lose my keys?" or "What's the bad guys weakness?"

So once my players decided to be funny and used divination for a puzzle and asked "How will we solve this puzzle?" So I gave them the answer "With a little bit of thinking".

Deophaun
2016-12-15, 10:38 PM
My worst experience, and this is a core reason I never use puzzles in my games, actually comes from a Mage: the Awakening game. The ST decided to have a series of puzzles in the underworld that involved essentially "which one of these is not like the other" with a series of words. The difference was supposed to be picking out the misspelled words; however, she was absolutely godawful at spelling so the words she had picked out as "right" and "wrong" were a completely different list from the truth! And of course she wouldn't give us any hints because she thought this was so god damned clever. So we wasted a full session and almost spent a second before I straight up said "you will tell me what the **** this gimmick is or I am leaving and blocking you. If your next words are anything but the cutesy little pattern you think you've devised, I'm done." Then we had to roll back an entire session of stupid consequences for failure.
Is it bad that I now want to make a word puzzle designed by a half-literate troll?