PDA

View Full Version : Gamer Tales What is the best/worst Dungeon Puzzle you've seen?



Johnny Krillers
2017-01-24, 03:45 PM
As the title states, let's share some of the best/most fun and or worst/nonsensical of the puzzles you've seen in a dungeon, or what are the best that you've run. Try to keep positive and non-ranty with the worst if you have one, maybe how you would have fixed it? I'm curious.

My favorite that I've seen in a game was from the D&D stream "High Rollers", the characters had entered an ancient temple of Melora (elven goddess of nature, the wilderness and the sea) which had an option of two doors to get into the temple proper from the atrium/entry way area that they were in, in between the two doorways was a statue of an elderly elven man with a blooming flower in his left hand and a sword in his right, above his head was a carving that read: "Only those with the wisdom of the wilds may pass without trial. When Melora's name is spoken the way shall be open." in elvish. The statue came to life and spoke to them saying that the sealed door on his left was just a way into a hallway that would let them through without incident, and the open doorway on the right was a series of trials and challenges that would end at the same place. The statue was very polite and conversational, welcoming them as pilgrims and explaining the issue, but very crucially never said Melora's name and claimed to not know how to open the sealed door, just that they needed to solve the riddle with "cunning and guile", whenever they said "Melora" he would just smile, or ask if they were worshipers, whenever he mentioned the temple, he just called it "This/The temple". The solution was just asking the statue to say "Melora", when he did, the door opened and they were able to pass.

There weren't a lot of puzzles at my first table as the group I was with didn't generally do a lot of straight up riddles or mazes or anything like that, it was more of a "how do you get past this really inventive trap that your lack of a rogue is making you pass?" kind of a deal, that said we once accidentally killed a construct of Stitch from Leelo and Stitch 3 rooms a head of time and before we had done more than heard him in the distance, the room we were in was mostly featureless except for a pool of ankle high water kept inside the room magically and what looked to be 626 written in chalk on the wall, we tried everything we could think of to erase or scuff it (I don't know why that was our first course of action) and nothing did anything, until I, the ranger of the party decided to splash it, we heard a scream from down the hall, and there was a blue puddle of goop with a key sticking out of it, I don't know why or what the original intent was but it was a cool set up that kinda helps me see why neither of our group DMs did a whole lot of puzzle writing.

The worst I saw, which was also from the same table as my second example, it's important to the set up to know that our DM had an NPC party member whom I had been given control of after my character died to a trap that we didn't find a creative solution around, he was a young knight trained under the kingdom's champion (whom we had gotten killed in an early skirmish with a dwarven army that had been convinced and corrupted by the big bad), we came up to a chasm in the dungeon like lair of the arc big bad, when a group of the retinue that had followed us tried to jump over, at the middle of the chasm a series of tentacles shot up and pulled them down, our ranger tried to run across, because it looked like the tentacles were avoiding an invisible bridge, and he was grabbed exactly in the middle and dragged down, after a long uneventful period of table planning, I had my former NPC stick his arm out over the chasm to see if the DM saying "exactly over the middle" was important, it got my character's arm ripped off, after a while longer the DM took over the young knight, whom he claimed seemed to be in a trance, and just walked calmly across the invisible bridge with no ill effect, saying "You just had to be calm and non aggressive." So then we had a one handed paladin, an under leveled necromancer with no zombies, whom the paladin had been trying to kill and two guards as written in the 3.5 DMG against our young knight whom it turned out was really the Dark Mage big bad of the arc that we had been tracking all over the kingdom for the past five sessions, along with his followers. The lack of any hint or instruction screwed over an up to that point fun and interesting campaign.

Inevitability
2017-01-25, 05:27 AM
Not a dungeon puzzle, but I once had the players hear about an individual called Ranwa Hiz, who seemed to be the BBEG. Only problem: they had no idea what they looked like or wanted, and had never before met them.

Some sessions later, they find a small piece of paper with nothing but eight straight lines leading from the top to the bottom at differing angles. It takes them a while, but then one of the players decides to write Ranwa Hiz at the top, follow the lines down from each letter, and write the same letter at the connected position at the bottom, essentially scrambling the letters according to a set pattern.

The result? 'Hazirawn', the intelligent sword the party had been carrying around for months. Jaws dropped at the realization that the BBEG had been next to them all that time.


I strongly suggest using an intelligent weapon as a BBEG one time: no player will expect it!

DigoDragon
2017-01-25, 09:56 AM
I strongly suggest using an intelligent weapon as a BBEG one time: no player will expect it!

Okay, yeah. Totally doing this now.


My old group were a bunch of jokers, always having a bad pun or geeky quote to throw into the game. One time I set a side passage in a dungeon with a large double door that had the carving of an elven face upon it. It was locked and above the handles was the inscription (in Elvish) to 'Knock knock before entering'. Whenever someone knocked on the door, the door's face animated and it would reply--

"Who's there?"

I had thought this was an obvious puzzle. All the PCs had to do was go through and tell it a knock-knock joke. It didn't even have to be a good joke. Yet, the PCs didn't seem like they wanted or could even think to answer the door's question. At one point the bard eventually answered with his name, Rundell, and of course the door continues on--

"Rundell who?"

Now the party was Really confused. I could not believe that this group, who could crack jokes in the most serious of scenes like the death of a beloved NPC, couldn't think up one lousy pun for this door. Eventually they attacked the thing. Well, the door had traps to defend itself, and I was even fair to stat the traps out so they could be disabled. And they were. At this point I expected the rogue and bard to make an Open Lock check and just bypass the whole thing. It wasn't even too difficult for them to do.

Nope.

The party gave up and went down a different path... After 2-3 hours of real world time trying to figure this door out!! :smalltongue: I even gave them some hints about how the door seemed to have a bit of a jester-like look, like it was made for a laugh, But no, they failed to get this puzzle. After the session they asked what the deal was with that door. I told them how to solve it, then I showed them the path behind it. Not only would it have bypassed two very difficult encounters the party faced that night, but all the good loot was down that path.

The players were probably kicking themselves for a week.

GungHo
2017-01-25, 11:15 AM
Worst: Someone really, really, really enjoyed the Tower of Hanoi puzzles that Bioware puts into their games and tried to do it all via spoken word, but really, really, really borked the description, and had a verbally violent response when people tried to use a prop to show him what he actually said to us vs what he actually wanted us to do. And then he threw things when I, while they were all kvetching, wrote a program in VB that solved it for all n with happy face disks.

theasl
2017-01-27, 10:21 PM
Once, my college friend DM put a puzzle in a beginner dungeon involving an apple tree, a bunch of cats, and a scale which opened the final door. Apparently, the solution was to put the lone white cat and three apples on the scale to balance it, because Hello Kitty (who is white) weighs three apples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Kitty#Character). He even put a note in l33t speak, "appl3", to add another hint at the three apples. Needless to say, we got it at random by trying various cats and apples...

Not sure whether it was the best or the worst. Pretty funny when we figured it out and he explained it, though.

Quertus
2017-01-29, 12:15 AM
I love puzzles. Happily, I've gotten to solve a great many in my time playing RPGs. It's hard for me to pick a favorite. But let me tell you about a few failures.

One was a failure because the only way to advance the story was to solve the puzzle. But, because one of the players made a mistake early on, the puzzle wasn't solvable until we found a way to start over from scratch. We wasted 3 hours on that puzzle because there wasn't a "skip" option, or an obvious way to tell when we had made an error.

Another was horrible because it was a word-based puzzle, and the GM had a typo / misspelling. At least this one was technically still solvable, as there were 3 "paths" to progress this scenario.

But the worst I've heard about involved a puzzle with no cognitive / logical requirements beyond whether the player could follow the GM's "instructions" / hints, and ignore the presented scenario.

So, in summary, make your puzzles make sense. Ideally, make your puzzles give feedback. Vet your puzzles. And, even so, don't make solving the puzzle be the only way to advance the story / scene.

Some groups may add in other requirements, like make it make sense for the puzzle to be there. Or let us use character skills, not just player skills, to solve the puzzle. I, personally, couldn't care less for either of those requirements. Although anything physical, from visuals or handouts to an actual puzzle box to open, is a bonus!

daniel_ream
2017-01-29, 02:44 AM
Worst? There was a brief fad for tesseracts in dungeons as a result of an article in Dragon. More generally, rooms that act as silent and undetectable elevators, or round rooms which seal shut, spin randomly, and then open up again in a different orientation. All various ways to screw with players mapping the dungeon.

I consider that cheating. If getting back out of the dungeon safely is any part of the play structure, this is on a par with having the hallway to the exit suddenly collapse in a cave-in as the PCs approach it.

Most fun? I played a Changeling: The Dreaming game once where there was a written prophecy handed to the group that included the line "by shifter's kindness you will find the way". Unfortunately, due to the GM's atrocious handwriting the word "kindness" was read as "kidney", and no one ever mentioned this out loud to the GM (as a silent testimony to the illegibility of the note, we all read it as kidney. I mean, it clearly said "kidney" right there.)

This lead to the assumption that we were going to need to perform some kind of haruspicy on a Pooka in order to follow the clues to the rest of the prophecy, with the GM completely unaware of why we thought that.

Boy, that campaign escalated quickly.