What are some of your favorite puzzles in campaigns? As DM's where do you go to find puzzles to challenge your players or try to make a dungeon or encounter more interesting?
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What are some of your favorite puzzles in campaigns?
here are some examples of puzzles I have used in my world of darkness campaign
here is the answer to said puzzle
I can't even understand your "solution".
You need to work on your Hebrew
puzzles fricking suck, it's just a meta challenge for players that slows down IC stuff
You could lean into frickery as part of the point for something like Paranoia. Redact character sheets piecemeal and force players to share information about what each others' action ratings actually mean, add some arbitrary carrot and stick to complicate information exchange and you're already most of the way towards a gimmick one-shot.
Is there a way to set puzzles up in a way that encourages in-character roleplay instead of this? Only thing I can think of is "Roll to see if you beat the puzzle" or those players who don't participate in puzzles because their characters are low int, which are both always stupid and pointless.
Thorium, iodine and flourine look familiar, is it a decay sequence?
its fingers on a hand
thumb, ring finger, index finger, etc
thats why I always give my players the puzzle at the end of session and ask them to solve it between weeks (which they have told me they enjoy quite a lot) the campaign I am running a horror themed one with a huge emphasis on human drama
Wild, i would never have gotten that. How do i solve the puzzle then? Order of length?
just order on hand, left or right hand, doesnt matter
So if i just tried to brute force it and put them on the board in the same order i found them id open the door on my first attempt?
>How do i solve the puzzle then?
It's from a game called Ao Oni. You're supposed to order them by length although ring finger comes after index finger because either the creator fricked up or has a hand outside the norm.
I made this for an investigation game as printable handouts in pieces, but it could be easily adapted anywhere.
Basic puzzle is collecting the tangram pieces and fitting them together on a tile. If they can't fit the thing together (it will be obvious when they are right because it will end up as a horse shape) seeing the actual tile might help).
Can be used as just constructing the horse on the tile to open something up. For an extra layer, the line's progress through the tangram pieces can reveal a colour sequence that serves elsewhere, such as a password.
DM comes up with a puzzle
>I roll to solve the puzzle with my hihg INT character
>no... you are supposed to think... you have to actually solve the...
>20
>I pass the puzzle, let's continue
Not how the game works. Players don't get to declare rolls.
>you cant declare rolls
>Ok I roll for diplomacy to convince you
>18
>I pass the roll, you are ok with me rolling the puzzles
what now?
>what now?
You make a saving throw against poison with your real-life constitution.
finally, a worthy DM
I never understood the logic behind puzzles. Ostensibly they serve as obscure combination locks, but setting aside that anything with a puzzle attached might be coming from an entirely alien culture, rendering any attempt to solve it suicidally foolish, and the fact that they're often in ancient ruins whose mechanisms could have fallen into such disrepair that any attempt to interact with them could cause injury or death, but for all the average adventurer fricking knows the "correct" solution is to find a hidden lever or button and literally any attempt to solve the puzzle proves you're an outsider and triggers an instant kill trap.
Realistically anyone encountering a puzzle should just blast through the area by force unless there is literally no other option and even then they should only have a disposable guinea pig attempt to solve it.
Perhaps an evil wizard want to put things out of range of his really dumb minions?
is a perfect example, it only makes sense in english and even then...
I honestly dont do puzzles in the Sense you have to get into a room and solve something.
For a ttrpg in has no place, as It is for once impossible to visualize and two takes the players out of the crawl.
I rather prefer to do positional puzzles. Valves that fill the corridors with water, levers that open Doors far away, corridors that switch etc. Its much less work intensive for me as a DM and much more fun for the players.
Puzzles in ttrpgs end up being either extremely hard to solve or extremely stupid, there is no inbetween.
>the one thing you can actually work together as human beings playing a game together to resolve
>"hey what if we skipped past this one with a dice roll?"
sad.
If you want to play a riddle game why are you playing an RPG?
Dungeons & Dragons scratches the same itch as doing a crossword or figuring out an escape room (all the rage these days), with pals.
if you want to create a story then that's not a game: that's writing a novel, or some kind of amateur dramatics/improv.
No, RPGs are nothing like solving crosswords. They're generally far more like board games.
they are a collaborative puzzle-solving exercise. the same way old pulp comics and novels would challenge the reader.
yes some people took that and used it as a framework for creating improvized stories, but the GAME aspect is (usually) figuring out how to navigate a dungeon, dodge its traps, and so forth. naturally that will include very open-ended dialogue and problem solving.
The GAME aspect is combat.
that's the one thing you can't simulate, unless you actually duke it out or something. so we leave it to chance, based on numbers recorded on a character sheet.
if you switch from "RP" mode to "GAME" mode then i fundamentally disagree.
You come upon a 4 way split. Each is "guarded" by a statue of a woman with a name plate. Inform, Stake, Placed and Direct.
Engraved on the floor is the following, "4 maidens block your way, 3 in unwed grief lead you astray, while one with hope opens to a better day."