Why use Riddles and Puzzles?

[Dr. Lagrangian]

We all know riddles and puzzles can be a good addition to a dungeon. They can test a player (or character) and be an interesting break from combat.

But don't they seem a little out of place?

Why protect your vault with a riddle or puzzle, when you can use the product of two very large prime numbers?

Why build elaborate life size chess pieces to guard a macGuffin? or require getting exactly 4 gallons of liquid into a 5 and 3 gallon pitcher to activate the doomsday machine.
Why guard your front gate with a password, but make it rediculously easy for anyone to figure out (Speak Friend and Enter)

Even worse, is that many don't challenge players. They are either too strange to solve, or too simple to be a challenge. All riddles I have ever heard turned into: "If we heard it before, we can solve it, if not then we can't)"


In short: Why do these things exist?

or for those who are more creative than I

How do you design a puzzle or Riddle that makes sense? How can they be legitimately utilized in a dungeon structure?

[Foryn Gilnith]

It's usually a test of a sort. If you have the will (or mere intelligence) to solve the riddle (or solve for the 19437th term of the 43982th-degree polynomial), then you're worthy of entrance and the associated treasure/knowledge/club membership/etc.

Sure, you can't solve it; but if you're resourceful enough to divine up the answer, that's good enough.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I think probably the most obvious reason is to keep "the riff-raff" out. A peasant would probably be scared off by the monsters alone, but a bunch of well-armed adventurers can handle that. Throw a puzzle or riddle at them and they might not do so well.

Plus, there's the fact that riddles and riddle-games feature heavily in older literature. Tolkien touched on it with the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter of The Hobbit, and he was drawing from much older Nordic and Germanic mythic traditions.

The issue with riddles in D&D is whether or not it relies on character knowledge or player knowledge. I remember a riddle I wrote for a game a while back:

"The wise man and the judge try to keep me
The fool and the wounded run from me
When I leave you are glad to be rid of me
but when I return you wish you had not cast me aside "

The answer is "sobriety" and I had hoped that the fact that the person who was supposed to answer the riddle was the drunkard of the group would make the answer obvious, but I ended up stumping everyone. If you make the players try to answer the riddle, it can be an interesting diversion, but if they're really stumped it will just annoy them. On the other hand, if you just have the characters make Intelligence or Knowledge checks to try and determine the riddle, you've reduced it to just random chance, discarding the whole point of having a puzzle in the first place.

Besides, if they simply wanted to keep everyone OUT, they'd just brick up the entrance. Generally speaking, these are places that are meant to test the people entering them, and reward them for their success.

[Reaper_Monkey]

Besides, if they simply wanted to keep everyone OUT, they'd just brick up the entrance. Generally speaking, these are places that are meant to test the people entering them, and reward them for their success.

Pretty much this.

If you want to make a door only open to known allies or your own race, then its much similar writing some simple instructions in your own tongue and assume that almost all of who can read it are meant to be allowed in (and the ones who are are not would be cunning enough to get around it anyway), than making a highly complex magical sensor to do the same job or simply leave it open for anyone.

Equally, if you wish to keep safe a powerful item which you wish only the most pure of heart to retrieve, then you set up riddles and tests (puzzles) which a person who is not pure of heart is unlikely to fathom or will be compelled to pick the deliberate wrong answer (like stealing lesser treasure before hand).

Or, simply if you only want those who will provide the most entertainment for running around your death trap, then its easier to filter out all of those you deem unfit with a few simple puzzles and tests of might at the start. Most evil/crazy/sadistic wizards/master minds/demons fall into this category which explains the frequency of such things in your regular sort of dungeons. It saves them from focusing their attention on lesser sport.

[random11]

Like others mentioned, the only legitimate option I see, is if the owner of the place wants people in, but only people who pass certain tests.
Of course, even then the owner might want to give some people a free pass. If every delivery man will have to answer three riddles, the old wizard will never eat any pizza, and you know how cranky old wizards can get without pizza!

If someone wants to keep people out, a locked door and a guard will do just fine.
I once did a very funny thing with riddles:
The characters entered a room with a locked door (no keyhole), 9 levers and a set of 9 lights.
Every lever turned on and off certain lights, so of course the characters assumed that they need to turn them all on to open the door.

Fact 1: The door can be easily open with a hidden button.
Fact 2: Every lever also triggers an alarm in the main guardroom.
Fact 3: It's REALLY fun to watch players get frustrated by a riddle, and when they finally "solve" it, they discover that the door is still locked, and that they are surrounded.

[random11]

Equally, if you wish to keep safe a powerful item which you wish only the most pure of heart to retrieve, then you set up riddles and tests (puzzles) which a person who is not pure of heart is unlikely to fathom or will be compelled to pick the deliberate wrong answer (like stealing lesser treasure before hand).

I always found the "moral tests" quite useless.
Both the players and most enemies know about the item and who hid it in the dungeon, so instead of a moral test, it's actually a simple psychological game of "what would the owner want me to do?"
Usually, it's not that hard to guess.

[Saph]

Because epic-level casters like to have fun, and one of the things that they find fun is creating weird original dungeons with puzzles, riddles, and deadly monsters. Then they find some adventurers, chuck them in, and get some popcorn.

I mean, as a DM, it amuses me to watch PCs solving puzzles, riddles, and weird deathtraps, so I figure there are probably some D&D wizards who'd find it amusing too.

[WalkingTarget]

My favorite variant is the standard "one door leads to certain death, one to the goal" with two guards, one who lies and one who doesn't. Except if the players "solve" the riddle they've failed to pick the third door that's hidden and both of the obvious doors are death traps.

Why is there a riddle door in the building? To sucker in anybody who doesn't belong there.

[Kurald Galain]

Why protect your vault with a riddle or puzzle, when you can use the product of two very large prime numbers?

Because a faux-medieval world wouldn't have heard of two very large prime numbers. Do you know the Caesar Cipher? It is created by shifting each letter three positions to the right. Lw lv odxjkdeob hdvb eb prghuq vwdqgdugv, exw hvvhqwldoob xqeuhdndeoh vhyhudo fhqwxylhv djr.

Other than that, they exist because whoever build the dungeon was insane, terminally bored, and/or both; this also explains some of the more ludicrous traps from e.g. the Grimtooth books.

Anyway, I've seen the obligatory riddle or two in convention modules, but they're quite boring in play, really. Either someone knows the answer, or it's "roll an int check and enter", or nobody knows and we are stuck for the next half hour. All three are pretty boring. Puzzles, on the other hand, can be fun to figure out, as long as they work on logical methods, and not on some gimmick that you must have heard before.

[Lysander]

The reason you have a riddle instead of a password is that you want intruders to have a chance of making it through. Like Reaper Monkey pointed out, it could be to weed out members of your culture/race/alignment or just set up a minimum required intelligence.

Remember, not all dungeons are like personal safe deposit boxes just for the creator's use. Sometimes they're more like time capsules, where a culture preserves it's treasure for a worthy person in some distant age. Maybe the magic sword that is the only thing that will kill the demon destined to return was put away for safekeeping, and the dungeon has physical and mental challenges to ensure that the champion who gets it is worthy in all regards.

[daggaz]

Surprising you included Tolkien's mines of moria in there...The idea wasnt to have some random empty dungeon pass protected. The mines, after all, were bristling with dwarves and traders at their height, so anbody who wanted to attack thru the front door? well its not like they would get very far, even if they could get past this first defence. Ultimately, it was an attack from within (or below) that got the dwarves, so the front door had nothing to do with it.

If you read further into it, you might even come to the conclusion that the magic guarding the door could somehow detect intentions, so that only a "friend" could open it as well. All in all a fairly solid first bulward against unwanted intrusion.

In my own campaign, I am busy weaving several large scale puzzles into things. If they players figure them out, it should be epiphany like and they will understand certain aspects of the plot, as well as gain a significant advantage as to what to do next and what is going to happen next. If not, they will still get there, but they will be more like frontliners in the war.. able to see and act and affect things, but missing the secret reasonings behind the scenes without even knowing it.

[Saph]

How do you design a puzzle or Riddle that makes sense? How can they be legitimately utilized in a dungeon structure?

Well, one approach (if you want it to make sense) is to design a puzzle made by somebody who REALLY DID want to keep everyone out.

Eg: an underground dungeon that has traps that, when activated, do one of the following:

a) kill every living thing within a certain radius,
b) cave the whole place in,
c) set off a fuel air bomb within the complex,
or d) all of the above at once.

Then set up extra traps designed to kill anyone who bypasses the first traps.

I'd say that trying to extract a vital object from a place like that is a puzzle. Not a particularly nice puzzle, but within the capabilities of a mid- to high-level party.

[Bouregard]

I always found the "moral tests" quite useless.
Both the players and most enemies know about the item and who hid it in the dungeon, so instead of a moral test, it's actually a simple psychological game of "what would the owner want me to do?"
Usually, it's not that hard to guess.

Let's say I'm the goodly Lord Pureblood the Faithful and I want to protect the "Hearth of Good". I will place the Hearth of Good in a big chamber filled with treasure, anyone who just grabs the hearth will go unharmed, everything else will trigger something really nasty.

Or setup some guardians. They will not attack on their own, however are placed in a really vulnerable postion (back to shadows or are spottet first by the party from a ledge). It's easy to kill them and rewardable (good equipment). However only a truly good person would first talk to them and so get a password or hint out of them to survive the next funny deathtrap of doom.




A simple question like "You are faced with someone who killed his brother in cold blood, what would you do?" and then judge someone of their reaction is really stupid.

[Katana_Geldar]

I've actually just done them for the sheer fun and novelty admittedly, as it was in a Star Wars game and the place they were in was not too much of a stretch to have one: a Sith Academy for assassins. Though the DMs guide DOES say not to have them for purely their own sake.

[valadil]

I think probably the most obvious reason is to keep "the riff-raff" out. A peasant would probably be scared off by the monsters alone, but a bunch of well-armed adventurers can handle that. Throw a puzzle or riddle at them and they might not do so well.

I like the opposite explanation better. The riddle keeps out the peasants who would just get themselves killed anyway. Once the adventurers get inside, the monsters are the real threat.

Puzzles and riddles are part of the genre. They're not part of modern culture though (at least not to a great extent). An encounter like Bilbo's with Gollum wouldn't work because the players probably wouldn't have any riddles handy. So instead they end up as part of a barrier or boundary.

When I GM I'm a little obsessed with making sure riddles make sense. I can justify an encoded message. I can't justify a guard that opens the door if you can answer a childish puzzle. If I do use a standard puzzle I usually preface it that the puzzle the players solve is an abstraction of what the PCs are solving.

[penbed400]

well it matters on the situation really. I've had a dungeon completely comprised of puzzles and trickery devised so that the person who gets to the end first has proved himself incredibly intelligent and capable against trickery and thus was chosen for the quest of going out into a world of devils. Because only those with enough knowledge of trickery should even be considered.

I've had a forest where it was only riddles because the master of the trees only allowed the wisest of creatures to gather water from his well that had healing properties.

And I just make my players answer the riddles themselves, I have a fairly intelligent group where I can ask them challenging ones, leave for a soda and slice of pizza and by the time I come back they have an answer.

It helps to not have set answers for them because really most riddles are too ambiguous and have multiple answers that works for them. If the riddle is , "I have never existed, yet I do exist, the human race relies on me and yet I can be a fear inside their heart, what am I?" And you decide that the answer is "Tomorrow" and your characters say "Power" then give it to them anyways, I mean really? I'm not gonna make them come up with the exact answer I want them to unless I have placed hints all along the game. Like they find somebody who's last breath is, "If only we never feared tomorrow...*gasp*" and its centrally themed around tomorrow...power works just as fine.

[Tyndmyr]

"The wise man and the judge try to keep me
The fool and the wounded run from me
When I leave you are glad to be rid of me
but when I return you wish you had not cast me aside "

I feel it necessary to quote XKCD. Communicating poorly is not cleverness. I love all problem solving riddles, I despise all riddles that essentially consist of describing something in a way that nobody would actually use.

See also the difference between an enigma and a conundrum.

In terms of gaming, it's a problem since the puzzle ONLY exists due to it being made intentionally vague. It's an arbitrary puzzle. Look at yours, and try to think of all possible objects, ideals, etc that fill the above criteria.

A good puzzle either has exactly one answer, or sufficiently few answers that any that fulfill it can be accepted.

[Sinfire Titan]

I include traps and puzzles to drain resources. I don't expect it to stop them, I expect it to slowly whittle away at their ability to fight equal-level opponents. One particular "trap" was a Spell Turret (DMG) that cast Polar Ray, Dissentigrate, Reach Slay Living, and Repair Critical Damage (on itself). The entire purpose was to force the party Psion (who had a hard-on for Timeless Body) to expend PP. The room was set up to slow the party, with Grease traps, Permanent Acid Fog, and other goodies. I didn't expect it to take more than 10% of anyone's HP, and didn't even ask for it to take more than 5% of the Psion's PP. It drained him a little, hit the rest of the party a little, and then got bypassed. It lived up to my expectations.

When it comes to puzzles, I usually add a combat encounter that requires the players to think while dealing with a threat. I don't do riddles, I prefer jigsaws. The players get some pieces set up? Cool. The enemies mess with the pieces? The party realizes that they need to deal with the bastards.

[Tyndmyr]

Yeah, adding combat to puzzles adds a time factor, too. People can't simply putter around, take 20, etc. Thinking on the fly is much more challenging.

Bonus points if each area flows into the next so that it integrates more or less seamlessly. I can't always pull it off well, but when it comes together, it's quite nice.

I'm a big fan of elaborate traps and linking things together, of course. Linked doors are an obvious device, but hey, it helps keep the overly cautious parties from clearing *everything* painstakingly slowly.

[DiscipleofBob]

I remember a trap my brother used:

Two paths with two doors blocking each. One led to the next area, the other one led to a trapped room where the door would shut and some sort of otherwise inescapable trap would kill the player. Each door had some sort of harmless sentient construct embedded in it. One would always lie, one would always tell the truth. Seems familiar, right?

The catch: the construct guardians are misinformed. Leading down the "correct" path instead leads to the trapped room while going down the "wrong" path moves ahead. Why? Why would a wizard NEED a puzzle to remind him where to go in his own study? This was used to mislead all-too-clever adventurers.

The trick to using a good puzzle in an adventurer is to come up with something players haven't experienced before and defies their expectations, but not something that will halt the game and storyline if they can't solve it.

[sonofzeal]

I feel it necessary to quote XKCD. Communicating poorly is not cleverness. I love all problem solving riddles, I despise all riddles that essentially consist of describing something in a way that nobody would actually use.

That's a very different situation than XKCD was referring to. In their case, ambiguous wording mislead the listener. In this, a series of cryptic clues are given, statements about the thing itself that are all too broad to be useful individually but hopefully add up so that there's only one thing that satisfies all of them. It's a very difficult form of puzzle, but one that can be solved by an intelligent and deductive listener, unlike the XKCD one which relied poorly on misdirection.

[deuxhero]

"The wise man and the judge try to keep me
The fool and the wounded run from me
When I leave you are glad to be rid of me
but when I return you wish you had not cast me aside "

The answer is "sobriety".

Isn't "law" better?

[LurkerInPlayground]

Rule of Cool.

Sometimes mythology doesn't need an explanation.

Besides, fantasy is comfortable around such anachronistic pulp assumptions.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I feel it necessary to quote XKCD. Communicating poorly is not cleverness. I love all problem solving riddles, I despise all riddles that essentially consist of describing something in a way that nobody would actually use.

See also the difference between an enigma and a conundrum.

In terms of gaming, it's a problem since the puzzle ONLY exists due to it being made intentionally vague. It's an arbitrary puzzle. Look at yours, and try to think of all possible objects, ideals, etc that fill the above criteria.

A good puzzle either has exactly one answer, or sufficiently few answers that any that fulfill it can be accepted.

Judges and wise men need to be sober in order to make sound decisions. Only a fool or someone who has been emotionally hurt would drink solely to get drunk. If you're drunk you don't care that you're drunk, but after the hangover passes and you realize the stupid things you might have done under the influence, you wish you hadn't decided to drink in the first place.

It made perfect sense to me. None of the other answers I could come up with fit all those requirements.

I'll admit it took a lot of hinting for the player to get it, but that's because he was roleplaying his character as a stupid drunk who didn't know what sobriety meant in the first place. All the other riddles I provided were borrowed from the internet and the players figured those ones out in a snap.

By the way, could someone please provide a link to the XKCD comic Tyndmyr is referring to? I'm curious as to just what the context is.

[Tyndmyr]

It's not that it couldn't apply, it's that it *could* also apply to other things.

Power. Responsibility. Authority. Sanity. Law. Justice.

[Arutema]

Why guard your front gate with a password, but make it rediculously easy for anyone to figure out (Speak Friend and Enter)

In Tolkein's defense, that wasn't a password, just a simple set of instructions in Quenya Elvish. Anyone who could read Quenya was assumed to be a fried and was instructed to "Say 'friend' and enter."

It was only a riddle because Galdalf botched his Decipher Script check and translated it as "Speak, friend and enter."

Of course, this was too complicated for the movies to explain.

Summary: concise instructions + dead language = riddle.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Puzzles are used to protect something that you will want to access without being bothered much.

Think of it as the silly "Give a question so you can recover your password if you forgot it" thing on most websites. If you forget your password, you can rely on your riddle to gain access.

Same thing. Your riddle is used to let you in, while keeping others out. Or rather, letting in a certain type of person, while excluding others. An example of this would be in the book (and movie) The DaVinci Code. At one point, the protagonist was asked a series of questions to gain entry into his friend's estate. The purpose of the questions was to make sure it was, indeed, his friend and not someone posing as him.

We can extrapolate this reasoning to be used as a kind of 'lock' which any member of the group would have the 'key' for, without relying on physical objects which can be lost or stolen. Those with the answers can pass through, those without the answers are stumped.

This works particularly well in 'cult' setups, wherin initiates of the cult have been indoctrinated with their belief system. A puzzle which requires knowledge of this belief system will keep out non-believers and heretics, but admit the faithful.

The key here would be to find, capture, and interrogate a cult initiate, discover the answers, then proceed into the dungeon. The party may have already had opportunities to do so. If they have, then it is no barrier. If they have not, then they should go do so. Either way, is it logical, at least from the cultist's perspective.

Another type of 'puzzle' is to make the opening mechanism cater to something which the party is not, because the creator or intended user of the mechanism is not anything similar to anything in the party. They then have to figure out what the mechanism is, and how to operate it with the materials at hand.

A small creature with a far greater degree of fine manipulation, but not much raw strength, might have an intricate keypad which one must operate in a skillful manner, inconveniently located near the floor on the wall, at least for a Human.

Likewise, a large, strong, but clumsy race might have a door with a large wheel that takes a great deal of strength to turn, placed six or seven feet up.

It isn't that it is designed to stump people, so much as designed to be optimal and ergonomic for the creator or intended user.

[random11]

Let's say I'm the goodly Lord Pureblood the Faithful and I want to protect the "Hearth of Good". I will place the Hearth of Good in a big chamber filled with treasure, anyone who just grabs the hearth will go unharmed, everything else will trigger something really nasty.

Or setup some guardians. They will not attack on their own, however are placed in a really vulnerable postion (back to shadows or are spottet first by the party from a ledge). It's easy to kill them and rewardable (good equipment). However only a truly good person would first talk to them and so get a password or hint out of them to survive the next funny deathtrap of doom.




A simple question like "You are faced with someone who killed his brother in cold blood, what would you do?" and then judge someone of their reaction is really stupid.

Will it filter out the bad guys? not necessarily.
Think of Aladdin as an example, the bad guy KNEW that all the other treasures are traps, so why can't the current bad guys know it?
The shortest version: The bad boss told some underlings to get it, they failed, but the bad boss learned the lesson from how they died while sending the second group.
Also don't forget that traps are a common thing in the D&D world, so a tempting treasure is usually a test of trap detections instead of a test of morality.

Will it allow good people to come in? define good...
It seems that adventurers (including the good ones) in fantasy settings make most of their money from dungeons such as this.
The common good adventurer will either take the treasure like he does in all the other places, or suspect that it is a trap, which is a conclusion that isn't connected with morality.

The vulnerable guardian option will fail for the same reason.
First of all, why would any good man judge people by sacrificing his own underlings?
"George, it's your turn to stand in this corridor and look only to the north. Unfortunately John died in this spot, but it was for a good cause, he could have revealed the details of a trap but he died before"
Second, while loot is tempting, not all bad guys are stupid evil. They might know they need help to pass through, they might not want to waste time on loot when they need the important item, they simply might be really bad at sneaking, or they might even have a code of honor despite being really evil.

[Sliver]

Riddles and puzzles are a way to put in an old wise proffesor outside that tried to solve the puzzle for years and Bob the Crusher solved it in a minute and rubbed it in while fighting the proffesor using the same treasure he got from solving the puzzle.

[Katana_Geldar]

Sometimes players can just solve them with sheer luck. I had the Knights and Knaves logic puzzle with a blue hologram and a green hologram, they had one question to one of them before they both disappeared. Funny thing is, they wasted their question (by asking the guy who lied and he gave them the wrong answer) but picked the right door anyway.