It's worth making the case that most players don't like puzzles (if that's your view) but it's not helpful advice for someone who thinks their players will enjoy them and is asking for help making them better experiences.
Fair enough. In this case, I note that if someone thinks their players will enjoy puzzles, they're almost certainly wrong.
And so don't do them.
I, too, have had great success both times I ran the Whispering Cairn—the puzzle challenged them, but they solved it without too much trouble.
Puzzles are fine and fun as long as they are simple, flexible, full of hints, and full of alternatives. The absolutist "Never ever do a puzzle ever never" is definitely not the right policy.
In this case, I note that if someone thinks their players will enjoy puzzles, they're almost certainly wrong.
Because your anecdotal experience from different players trumps their anecdotal experience with the actual players in question?
I really don't understand the point here. I mean I get that you don't enjoy them and have never seen anyone enjoy them (and maybe you've sat through them?), but surely the concept of a table liking puzzles isn't totally alien? Those people who say they enjoy them can't all be mistaken, can they?
Reviving this thread to note that I did attempt the puzzle I was threatening. Based on this feedback, I added more flexibility. It was a 'twelve tiles, four doors with three slots each, place the tiles correctly to open the door, place them incorrectly to trigger the traps' puzzle, with riddles (written in ancient runes that you needed a Linguistics check to fully solve) to indicate the correct placement.
Finding all the tiles was part of it - they were made from a variety of materials and some of them were being used as mirrors, building materials or loot by a band of gnolls.
To add flexibility, I made the puzzle 'broken' - some of the floor was collapsed, meaning you could climb down to the level below the tomb and climb back up to find one of the four treasures and discover (displayed on the other side of the door) which tiles were needed for that one, reducing the possibilities. One of the puzzles had been 'solved' by the gnolls, and the treasure was already gone (stolen by creatures below, along with a couple of tiles), and the nonvaluable tiles left in place.
To add more 'realism', I decided that the puzzles weren't so much a key as a trigger to a spell, for reasons of Prophecy that I won't go into.
Results:
They didn't bother climbing around the broken floor until it was no longer necessary - like all good adventurers they like to solve one dungeon level to save on map-drawing.
They wanted to disarm the traps to allow more trial and error - I made this difficult but possible.
They failed to spot that the mirror on the wall was one of the puzzle tiles for a long time. (Mirrors in dungeons are oddly scary to adventurers.)
Even though they made bad linguistic rolls and got 'broken' versions of the riddles, they were still able to solve the two puzzles that could be completed with the available tiles with only moderate trial and error.
The large amount of information involved (four riddles, many tile descriptions) was a problem - essentially the most enthusiastic player wrote things down, and then anyone not sitting on that side of the table wasn't involved. This led to a certain amount of the 'some players not participating' that I was warned about.
Overall, it went OK. I'm not going to make a habit of it.
Ok, so I've come back through and re-read this thread. Recently I picked up Lost City of Barakus from Necromancer/Frog God Games and I finally pulled together a group willing to play it. Thing is, whole sections of the dungeon are either all puzzles or they're an extended scavenger hunt.
For example, in order to get somewhere at some point of the module you need some tiles. As written there's NO clues the pieces are needed other than the doors that are missing the tiles. Also there's no clues where the tiles are.
Based on this thread my players may revolt and flip the table.
So now I'm a week out from starting the campaign. I'm frantically trying to re-read the module cover to cover in order to figure out how to clue my players in. This module is old school and sandboxy so I get WHY there aren't any clues but it just seems like there's some major things in here that folks may never even find.
In my experience optimisation puzzles that are integrated with the story work the best. Optimisation puzzles are where there are multiple ways to solve the puzzle and some methods are better than others. What I mean by integrated is that you don't have to break the immersion. Combat is a kind of optimisation puzzle that is usually well integrated with the story. An optimisation puzzle can be as simple as finding a way to cross a large river. Players like coming up with ingenious and unusual ways of solving simple optimisation style puzzles.
Reminds me of a relatively simple puzzle: a maze. Nothing special, no brain-crunching really required. Just picking out directions and being lucky.
But mazes can be big, and there can be a lot of dead-ends...
A few sesions back, my party entered a maze, and the GM told us there were three paths, and asked us which to take. None of us had any skills that could help us make a choice, so I say "to avoid getting lost, let's always keep to our left".
Best decision of the session. Even the GM ended up saying how this made the whole session much simpler and run more smoothly. Instead of being asked 1000 times which direction we take, and being frustrated with all of the wrong decisions we took, the GM just plotted our path and we played out the encounters that were along the way. The characters took a lot more time and did more encounters than the most direct path would have taken, but odds are we'd have taken a bunch of wrong turns anyways.
Our group is very much like the one Orfamay Quest described. Had we been forced to try to really solve the puzzle, I think some people would have stopped paying attention pretty quickly. And yet, a maze is mostly a no-brainer puzzle, where one is doing constant (albeit sometimes slow) progress. Riddles... urgh. They either have to be painfully obvious so that they don't matter, or so difficult that the PCs are expected to find the answer elsewhere as part of the quest. Middle-ground solutions can work okay, but are unlikely to work well, in my opinion.
@ Goblin_priest
That is a good way of solving simply connected mazes.
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There are no spoilers here.
Paizo's own Thornkeep dungeon has a door at the very entrance that is a big puzzle. The puzzle pieces are scattered and PCs might even get some them without EVER knowing they are puzzle pieces. There are no real clues.
When I played it, I was annoyed at this door. We had skipped around a bit and for very good roleplaying reasons, had completely overlooked the only one clue that might have got us thinking along the lines to the solution - without that clue, we didn't even have a place to start figuring it out. Finally the GM resorted to making INT rolls to solve it. Our party wizard rolled really crappy but our party cleric rolled well, so he gave the cleric a clue that more or less gave away the whole puzzle. Two minutes later we had solved the door, but none of us felt good about that.
When I GMed it some time later, I made a side quest to force players to find the initial clue, and added some bits of information to a local NPC who tipped the PCs off to the puzzle and his ideas on how to solve it, even before they ever found it. Then when they did, the players had some good info to actually solve the puzzle, and they did, in about 15 or 20 minutes. They felt really good about solving it and nobody got terribly bored (it wasn't a case of a couple engineers struggling to solve it while the rest of the players surfed YouTube - everybody participated and it was good).
I don't think it would have been nearly so good if I hadn't foreshadowed the door and forced a side quest to get the clue my first group never got.
TL;dr: Puzzles are dangerous devices that usually make the game worse, not better, but if handled right, they might be fun - even that might still require the ideal sort of players to appreciate it.
You know your player better than me, but personnaly i'd like to try to solve the puzzle and understand the full story.
BUT, you have to plan carefully : with a first obvious indice, and give some clues to the next indice.
Also, prepare some backup plan, and several ways to find each piece of the puzzle.
Player who play character with the right skill (knowledge, linguistic, read magic, ... ) should have an advantage but if they share what they learned from the skill check with the party anyone can find the solution !
Last thing : don't force the player to find the full story behind, if they don't want to spend time solving the puzzle they can complete the quest and get the item. But maybe this is going to have some consequence, or maybe they could have found a better treasure with the full-story.
I already play a game where we missed an important puzzle for the story, because we didn't even know there was a puzzle, or a way to find more informations. So a insist that the first piece should be obvious enough.
In another session, I solved a puzzle in 5-10 min. The GM told me later that this was supposed to be the main point of the session and that he spend lot of time creating it and had some tips ready to help us, so he was pretty disapointed.
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@OP: I just want to say I don't see any good reason to discourage this idea of yours, even though some on here have. I think it's a really cool (to say nothing of time-honored) idea and should be a lot of fun to work on, and wholeheartedly support it. Ignore the wet blankets.
@OP: I just want to say I don't see any good reason to discourage this idea of yours, even though some on here have. I think it's a really cool (to say nothing of time-honored) idea and should be a lot of fun to work on, and wholeheartedly support it. Ignore the wet blankets.
Good advice!
Although he probably won't read it, since he hasn't posted since August.
True, hopefully other people will find this thread useful,
I would like to add, as a player I'm going to do things in my power to avoid spending the time to solve the puzzle if it is possible.
A locked door you need to solve a puzzle to open? Sunder with an adamantine pick, dimension door, and gaseous form are just a couple ways to avoid it. And if at all possible I will avoid it.
How do you open this puzzle box? With a hammer.
How do you open this puzzle box? With a hammer.
With an intelligence check.
How do you open this puzzle box? With a hammer.
Now THAT'S thinking out of the box...
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How do you open this puzzle box? With a hammer.With an intelligence check.
And that's why puzzles usually fail in this kind of game: the GM goes to all the trouble to design a puzzle and a reward, deciding how the puzzle can be solved, trying to think up clues, steps for partial success, etc., and a player undermines all that work in 3 seconds by asking for an INT check.
The funny thing is, the player is right. A character with genius (or higher) intelligence really should be good at solving that kind of puzzle, and almost certainly is more of a genius than the guy playing him (even the smartest of us probably don't have INT scores above 20).
As I said before, puzzles only work if you have the "right" group, and every player in that group who is not the "right" kind of player will be bored and whip out his smart phone for some alternate entertainment. For the "right" group, they're awesome for sure, but not for every group.
Ultimately, the best kind of RPG puzzle is one where you give the players enough clues that they can solve it in a relatively short time, before frustration sets in. It's best to give them the clues before the puzzle, when possible, because if you give it after the puzzle it feels like you're helping them solve it, but the same clues before the puzzle have a whole different feel, and later when the players solve it they feel like it was all them and you didn't hold their hands. This takes a lot of work and planning and if all goes well the players solve it in just a few minutes and move on. Lots of setup for a few minutes of fun, but every player can feel like the group accomplished something when that happens - hopefully fast enough that boredom and frustration don't enter the picture.
I love to use puzzles -- with one HUGE caveat -- they're always 100% optional. Like, to the side of the main action. If people choose to totally ignore them, I'm fine with that. For example, I might put some paintings on a corridor wall that provide clues as to how to bypass a big encounter area up ahead. Any one of the following might happen, depending on the group, and I'm fine with any of them:
ALL of those responses are "correct." If you set up the puzzle so that any one of them isn't, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Don't be that guy.
I say "fie" to both Orfamay and Claxon. FIE! I say! This is an excellent way to tell a tale and involve the players. One just has to do it in a way that engages the players in a fun way.
Idea: The artifact sits in a ceremonial room on an altar where motes of light dance over it in a spectacular and fascinating way. Very magical scene.
On the way in, there were interesting encounters in a temple environment where there were interesting bas relief murals upon the walls depicting an ancient people's beliefs, history and way of life.
Anyone who approaches the artifact appears to get "zapped", disappears, and reappears a few seconds later either having lived an interesting experience, or weak and nearly unconscious from some traumatic event. Most treasure hunters leave the temple to tell the tale.
Here's the deal:
The ancient peoples to whom this artifact belonged were very religious (like Egypt-level religious). The stars and the constellations and movement of the planets were important in their religion, as were certain important leaders, discoverers and heroes.
The murals should reveal this through a series of [Knowledge Checks].
The motes of light above the artifact move to depict various constellations in the sky (according to this ancient culture). There are dozens of possible patterns. Only when the altar is approached during a specific constellation does the artifact allow itself to be touched without consequence.
The consequences however, are not all dire. Through the use of a [Maze] spell, certain chapters of the people's history can be told, like that episode of Star Trek TNG where Picard lives out decades of his life on another planet in just a few moments of time. Hehe.
The wrong constellation: The PC's in the room are transported via [Maze] to an ancient battlefield where they are part of an army taking on waves of terrifying undead soldiers led by a powerful overlord. They must slay the overlord to be free of the endless battle. If any fall in...
These are great ideas. I may need to borrow and adapt a couple to a game I want to run. And, I have to say my group had the Tomb of Horrors puzzles and our GM played it where we had to figure it out, no skill checks would help us. My group had it done in less than 5 minutes and the GM was stunned and highly impressed. We were very proud of the achievement and it added something to the game.
And that's why puzzles usually fail in this kind of game: the GM goes to all the trouble to design a puzzle and a reward, deciding how the puzzle can be solved, trying to think up clues, steps for partial success, etc., and a player undermines all that work in 3 seconds by asking for an INT check.How do you open this puzzle box? With a hammer.With an intelligence check.
It's interesting that you mention that because if I'm playing an int based character that is immediately what I do. I ask for int check to know what's going on, or a clue, or something. Which unfortunately goes one of two ways, they either give the whole thing away or don't give "enough". If I'm playing a super intelligent character they might be able to get it. But I'm an engineer, puzzles are usually words games. Something I have no fondness for. Or they require you to have noticed something, something my character might have noticed but I as player was distracted from.
Right now I'm running as game, and I have a player who keeps asking for investigation missions and I really don't know how to run them. In game they are as simple as roll dice for diplomacy(gather information), perception to find clues in the right spot, etc. I really don't know what she means when she says investigation, but I get the feeling she wants to feel like Sherlock except Pathfinder isn't rules don't work in a way to cultivate that feeling (IMO).
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Right now I'm running as game, and I have a player who keeps asking for investigation missions and I really don't know how to run them. In game they are as simple as roll dice for diplomacy(gather information), perception to find clues in the right spot, etc. I really don't know what she means when she says investigation, but I get the feeling she wants to feel like Sherlock except Pathfinder isn't rules don't work in a way to cultivate that feeling (IMO).
At low levels, you can do this fine with rogues and bards and stuff, but once spells really take off, those guys get sort of sidelined. You can still keep doing it, though -- and really, really well -- if one or more PCs are primary casters. Then it turns into a game of progressively outwitting each other with spells.
For example, the PCs interrogate someone, but it's actually someone else under an illusion. So even though they use discern lies and zone of truth, that person is telling the truth about what he/she saw -- except he/she isn't who they think.
Lots of times, you end up using locate object to try and find an object -- or scrying to try and spy on a person -- that someone else already cast nondetection on. So you have to come up with a more clever way of approaching the problem, one the bad guys didn't think of. Sooner or later, either they outwit the bad guy and he ends up going down like a chump, or they stall out and go home as failures, or they miscalculate badly and you end up with a TPK. So you and the players need to have different expectations from what you'd have in a standard game.
As the spells get more powerful, the scenarios can get even more elaborate. At one point, I was involved in a campaign in which we wanted to blackmail the BBEG with a letter. We knew he had discern location, and my PC couldn't keep it on his person, so I burned the letter, and left hints around that I had been working on developing a protection from discern location spell. We finally caught up with the BBEG because he in turn was too busy working on a punch through protection from discern location spell to continue what he was doing.
If you've seen the show Lie to Me, it's got a lot of really good ideas for this sort of thing -- the main character can automatically spot when anyone is lying, but he doesn't usually know why they're doing it, and the plot goes from there. In literature, check out Vance's Rhialto the Marvellous, in which an assembly of wizards all try to use time stop to rig the same raffle.