Puzzle dungeon tips?

[redemedic]

If anyone has had an effective puzzle dungeon experience or a puzzle dungeon that went terribly wrong, could they post it on this thread? Thanks.

[redemedic]

I am a new DM and having trouble coming up with a format for a dungeon that would keep my players from cheating, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

[pragma]

What do you mean by cheating? Characters using abilities to bypass puzzles is part of the game and, in my mind, worthy of being rewarded. (Yes, that includes Passwall and Teleport, which require some thinking to get around.) Players who happen to know the answers to common riddles is much less fun, but not cheating in my book. Players looking up the answers on your materials and/or the internet seems pretty bad.

Any rate, I think puzzle dungeons need a light touch: you can only throw so many puzzles at my players before they get listless, angry and disruptive. As a result, I like to build dungeons around a single big puzzle where you have to make risk/reward decisions about whether to explore and fight more to get more hints or puzzle pieces. One of my favorites is a dungeon that just happens to be laid out like a 2x2 magic square but all the numbers have been replaced by a pretty obvious substitution cipher. Exploring the dungeon gets you more number tokens you can use to guess the answer to the puzzle and more examples of the cipher you can use to figure out what's going on. Light reflecting puzzles can also work well for this.

[redemedic]

Yes, I definitely accept the use of spells to circumvent problems as you have mentioned, however my problem is that they look up the answers to any riddles I give them. Your dungeon is a great idea, and I believe that adding combat to the dungeon is a great way to get my players involved. Your answer is the kind that I was looking for, so thank you.

[Laserlight]

I don't usually use riddles, but I sometimes use puzzles. My party was in an abandoned gnome city, and ducked into an Escape Room. The "room" was actually a series of rooms, in a tesseract, and they had to figure out the path through the rooms as well as the challenge in each room.

My favorite was the red pixie that flew along at the top of the wall, using a reaction to evade every attack. The tabaxi monk tried to catch it for three or four rounds before she realized it was a laser pointer.

[Zhorn]

Avoiding word puzzles unless you modified them yourself is the easiest way to avoid players just looking up the answers.

One of my previous DM's made their puzzles lore related to their homebrew world. Passwords to magic doors and locks would be names of characters or artefacts from the story's history.

[KyleG]

Putting my kids down a corrider with different colored floor tiles only some of which are safe on Saturday. Let's see if they have been paying attention to the decor.

[HappyDaze]

Make sure to separate the PCs and then hit them with traps that require both Strength and Intelligence to bypass (like a puzzle that has really heavy/stuck pieces). For most characters this will be a kick right in their dump stats.

[HappyDaze]

Putting my kids down a corrider with different colored floor tiles only some of which are safe on Saturday.
Are they all safe if they wait until Sunday?

[MrStabby]

A few tips:

1) Make the puzzles consistent with the world. They should make sense. If there is a puzzle that needs to be solved to open a door in a dungeon, why did the designer think this was a better solution to a key?

2) Think about if you want this to be something the players solve or the characters solve. Both are valid but will give a different gaming experience. Character solutions are likely to be more check based, players solving the puzzles will give a different feel.

3) Think about balance. What will your puzzles need to be completed? Will the sessions be dominated by the wizard with lots of utility spells and great advantages on knowledge/memory based checks? Will the strong barbarian be the one climbing to the inaccessible places whilst the dex based ranger is stuck on the ground. Make sure all party members can participate.

[Maelynn]

my problem is that they look up the answers to any riddles I give them

That's incredibly lame. Does this happen in between sessions, or right at the table? In case of the latter, I wouldn't allow it. Perhaps you can sic a heavy monster at them every time you see one reaching for their phone... "triggered by your scrying/divination attempts, a large and angry Ogre suddenly appears! Roll for initiative!" "the Ogre is gone, now you can focus on th- hey! Another plea to the Google God? With a sizzle, another summons has triggered! Roll initiative against this Chimera!"

If you don't want them to be able to look up the answer, then just take existing puzzles and modify them in such a way that the answer is different. I've done this with a few puzzles for the escape room I developed, just make a few tweaks and you have a brand new puzzle that even Google can't find.

I'll share one puzzle from my escape room, entirely my own invention. It was for a lock that had letters instead of numbers. I had a few cutouts of images in an envelop, seemingly unrelated. A cup of tea, a bee, an eye, a jaybird, etc. The solution? T-B-I-J. Just name the images out loud.

[redemedic]

My favorite was the red pixie that flew along at the top of the wall, using a reaction to evade every attack. The tabaxi monk tried to catch it for three or four rounds before she realized it was a laser pointer.

Beautiful.

[redemedic]

That's incredibly lame. Does this happen in between sessions, or right at the table?

Usually between sessions, but thanks for the idea and example, these suggestions are exactly what I have been looking for. You guys are really helpful.

[SpikeFightwicky]

There's one that I liked from Tomb of Annihilation, where

one character had to sit on another's shoulders to make it through a temple without triggering the traps. The lore of the temple and some of the remaining imagery showed hints to the solution (I think there was a myth about a toad that rode on an crocodile) and the traps were setup to be obvious to anyone at about a 10 feet eye level. If the players figured it out, they had to make checks to remain balanced and navigate while stacked. If they didn't figure it out, they could still potentially find the traps, but they were more difficult.

[redemedic]

That is really cool, I like that.

[redemedic]

Thanks for the help.