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Thoughts? Yeah.... don't do it.
This is one of those ideas that looks great on paper and sounds like an awesome narrative trope -- which is is -- and in particular can be a great way to provide information in a movie or illustrated book, where the writer controls the character's reactions to the puzzle.
I've literally never seen it work at a gaming table.
Unless you make the puzzles very very obvious they usually don't work very well. They simply eat up game time and rely on player's meta-knowledge, not the character's in game knowledge. This is bad, because there is no reason the smart player playing the int orc barbarian should be the one to solve the puzzle over the 20 int wizard played by a less studious person. But if you allow the puzzle to be solved by using character skill checks/ability checks it just becomes kind of pointless as a real "puzzle". It's just another skill check.
Overall, I've just never seen them implemented well in a game.
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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 battle, they take 1d6 Wisdom damage upon their return, but otherwise suffer no real physical harm.
[Knowledge Check] on murals: Reveals two or three scenes where certain constellations were in the skies over important events. If the players approach at THESE times, they can see and hear the words and deeds of certain important individuals -- a heroine, an inventor, a great leader who led them to freedom.
Armed with this information, the PC's can put together the story of the people who built the temple, and find which of the temple's murals (use a symbol like a crown or two crossed swords or something -- just one amongst dozens of symbols in the temple) has the scene they're looking for; in that scene, there will be stars in the sky depicting the correct constellation by which to approach the altar.
Additional fun: when the altar is approached at the last, the PC's are transported to the time and place where the artifact played an important role, and the actual historical figure will give it to them if they show the proper respect (much like Percival retrieving the Holy Grail in Excalibur).
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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.
And Unicorn Stew is an excellent way to feed your family. One just has to catch a unicorn.
Shrug.
Sounds like a challenge to me!
My PCs are smart, and enjoy a challenge. I don't think it will be too difficult or boring for them. If visuals are the key, I could involve props.
As for metagaming, that can be a problem, but can be overcome by 1; making sure the PCs don't know things the characters don't, 2; giving int based hints so the wizard is more likely to get a clue than the barbarian, and 3; realising that even in real life people surprise you. With 20 int there is a chance of overthinking things (who here doesn't know a really smart guy who can do the dumbest things?) and that the orc might see it a different way. I guess like when Frodo works out the riddle to Moria that stumps Gandalf. People can surprise you.
Owly, good ideas - I will bare those in mind.
Just for the record, you're getting your terminology wrong.
PC = player character.
Also, if I recall correctly Gandalf is still the one who solves the problem, and Frodo has nothing to do with it. Merry says something that inspires Gandlaf to realize the answer.
Yeah, your right - stupid me.
It's alright, we all make mistakes. I read your post and was confused for half a second until I realized it, that's the only reason I commented on it.
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I only advise using puzzles as a story telling device in order to indicate what kind of dweeb the puzzle maker is.
For example, puzzles whose motifs are all about how the puzzle maker is a cool guy that beat evurybody and got all the gurrls. "This one is about the time where Jenny, the prom queen, TOTALLY thought using necromancy to make zombies was hotter than being the quarterback of the swords-ball team".
Or puzzles in an abandoned dwarf city where the whole thing is just a racist joke about elves. "In order to open the door, you must bend over the male (PFFFFTTT) elf statue and position the orc statue so the 'key' goes into the 'lock'. The challenge of this puzzle is figuring out which is the male elf statue."
Either make it a huge ego thing, or make it a deliberate attempt to be insulting and annoying.
I think it's something worth handling with care - if the group aren't all into it, puzzles and riddles can easily become one or two guys monopolising the spotlight with the rest of the players not even caring enough to be onlookers.
If everyone is on board, I've seen them work well. In our group our most memorable moments over the years have been the resolution of puzzles. However, we've also spent a couple of hours failing to answer a riddle - although we enjoy that potential loss, many would find it decidedly in-fun.
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.
This is an awesome idea! Reminds me kinda of the flashbacks in Brandon Sanderson's brilliant Stormlight Archive series. I love the motes representing constellations and the epic space-time warping magics!
To Orafmay's point: this is a game. It's an escape from reality for a few hours to roll some dice, hang with friends and chill. If the players are INTO the kind of stuff you're describing Josh, then cool but a lot of players just want a game.
If the players are up for it then whatever device you use the players should be engaged. Puzzles, Maze spells or whatever, they should be active participants. Another good way to grab them is to weave their characters' stories or history into the artifact in some way.
I've literally never seen it work at a gaming table.
What's it like when it doesn't work? I was going to have a "collect the tiles and put them in the right slots" puzzle in a dungeon, and I'd be interested to know how it's likely to backfire on me.
If it's a case of "the players got stuck for two hours" - I just can give them more clues to make it easier.
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I've literally never seen it work at a gaming table.What's it like when it doesn't work?
Total disinterest on the part of the part of the players, and a complete loss of anything like immersion, versimilitude, excitement, or pointfulness. The momentum of the game session grinds to a complete halt, the energy level drops to something that would embarass a sloth on Quaaludes, et cetera.
I was going to have a "collect the tiles and put them in the right slots" puzzle in a dungeon, and I'd be interested to know how it's likely to backfire on me.
Well,....
* Alice will say "oh, it's a puzzle" and disappear into the ladies' room.
* Bob will say "I was never good at those," pull out his cell phone and start checking his email
* Carol will start a conversation with ...
* Dave that may or may not be related to the game at all
* Eve will attempt to solve the puzzle, get frustrated, and go downstairs and start rummaging through the pantry for more Cheetos.
* Francis will try to "solve" the puzzle through force main, for example, by grinding all the chess pieces to a fine powder.
* Gene will just sit there
* Hank will pull out his tablet and surf the web for the answer to the riddle
It's not so much "the players got stuck for two hours" as "the players went home," whether physically or just mentally. Puzzle solving in an RPG context is less exciting than a Mets game, so why not go watch the Mets?
If it's a case of "the players got stuck for two hours" - I just can give them more clues to make it easier.
That doesn't work. Saying Cheetos aren't the solution, Eve is something she probably already knew.
Mark Hoover is right. This is a game that is supposed to engage the players. Since the players showed up for a role-playing game, they want to role-play. They want to pretend to be someone else. You should give them something that engages their roles, not them as people.
Me, Orfamay, solving an intelligence test, is something that I do all day from 9-5. I'm at the table to be Tharazustra, Mistress of the Dark Tapestry, not Orfamay Quest. And that's generally also true for Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, Eve, Francis, Gene, and Hank.
Which gets back to what I said. Puzzles are great "in a movie or illustrated book, where the writer controls the character's reactions to the puzzle." But as the game master, you don't control Dave's character's reaction, and you certainly don't control Dave's reaction.
It's like running a whodunnit adventure. Mysteries are among my favorite genres of literature and film.... but they're astonishingingly difficult to run as an RPG, because 1) I can't make the group of players like mysteries as I do, 2) I can't design characters to work together like Holmes and Watson, and 3) I can't control the intelligence level of the players to make sure that the puzzle comes together at the appropriate time. If I'm writing a book, I can make sure that Poirot misses the crucial clue until the antepenultimate chapter, then suddenly realizes "Nom d'un nom; I am a complete imbecile" when he twigs to the significance of the missing crossbow string.
And this is with the dramatic hook of a murder or something inherently exciting. Puzzle-solving doesn't even have that level of drama (when was the last time crossword puzzle solving was televised on ESPN?), so everyone just tunes out.
My experience is the same as Orfamay. Puzzles come out and 3 out of 5 players disappear (myself included) while the 2 people who like that sort of thing delve into it. The rest of us go grab drinks or snacks or use the bathroom.
I dread puzzles mostly because I simply don't have the patience to wait 20 minutes while doing nothing. We have precious little game time in the first place (we play every other week from 7PM till 11/12) and I get very annoyed with wasting a significant portion of it on a puzzle.
If the players are INTO the kind of stuff you're describing Josh, then cool but a lot of players just want a game.
Further to this.....
Your players are presumably showing up because they want to play Pathfinder.
How would they react if you said to them, when they showed up, "You know, I decided that, for a change, instead of Pathfinder, we should all sit and try to solve crossword puzzles tonight. So I picked up a couple of books at the convenience store, and there are lots of pencils...."
Or even better, send email around the night before and tell them that. How many of your party would politely beg off on the grounds that they needed to mow the lawn or catch up on schoolwork or just spend time with their sweeties?
If you've got a group of players that would sit around a table and try to solve crosswords with the same gusto that they'd storm an imaginary pirate stronghold, then go for it. But that group is close to unique, in my experience. Without exception, all the groups I play RPGs with want RPGs.
There's only been one puzzle I've ran into that felt like it would work super well, and it involved a list of animals, and then rooms with various hazards with whatever the rewards was at the end. Through magic charms in the puzzle, you could partially polymorph into any of the animals, but only once, and it only lasted long enough to do a single room. There were more animals than rooms, and multiple ways to solve any given room, so it was more of an exercise in creativity than anything logical. I presume that were the party to die the magic would reset for the next group, and the charms were explicitly stated to not work outside of the puzzle chambers.
My DM stopped putting in puzzles after I solved one (not the above puzzle, that was a fun night of RP) so fast he didn't believe it was right and we spent the rest of the night with no progress until he realized, yes, we were right from the beginning, and the endless waves of monsters should never have come after us.
If the players are up for it then whatever device you use the players should be engaged. Puzzles, Maze spells or whatever, they should be active participants.
I'd just like to support this point.
In particular,....
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.
... this sounds dangerously close to we're role-playing the characters watching TV.
On a TV show, this is great -- the writers and actors get to do something different from what they've been doing every other episode, and the audience is just as passively involved watching the TV show that the characters are watching. (This was, in fact, the framing device used on the Classic Trek episode "The Menagerie," where Kirk spent the entire double-episode watching TV.) Kirk, the character, probably enjoyed it -- it's a good episode. Bill Shatner probably enjoyed getting paid not to do much. The player controlling the James Kirk PC was probably bored to tears.
Holodeck episodes are another trope that's much more fun on a TV series than at a gaming table. As I said before, I'm there to play Tharazustra, Mistress of the Dark Tapestry. If I wanted to play Nell Gwynn, I'd have played her instead. Why should I want to play Tharazustra playing Nell Gwynn?
I've literally never seen a single "puzzle" encounter work at all, ever. As far as using them to tell the story of the item, you have to ask yourself what exactly was the puzzle's creator trying to do? If the puzzle could be solved by anyone with basic knowledge of their civilization, it clearly wasn't meant to be a good security system as any child who grew up in that world could wonder in and grab it the artifact without even really meaning to. It would be like if the password to the United States nuclear arsenal consisted of a five question quiz with questions like "Who was the first president of the U.S.?" and "What important document did the founding fathers sign in 1776?"
I'd say don't do it, but plenty of others have beaten me to it. Instead, I'll give you some guidelines to follow if you insist on implementing puzzles/riddles anyway:
Keep them very simple. Don't worry about them being solved way too easily - that's better than being solved never. If someone tries an Int check to look for a clue, and they get anything over a 10, give them a clue. If they get above a 15, solve part of the puzzle for them. If they're rolling checks, they've run out of ideas, and giving them nothing new will make them officially lose interest.
Don't make solving the puzzle a requisite for progressing, and NEVER make failing to solve the puzzle a death sentence. Be prepared for the PCs to say "I give up" and walk away. Always make a puzzle an obstacle for something extra, NOT the mandatory goal. Multiple choice puzzles are always a better option than an open-ended question. If they have literally no idea, they can always just take a guess.
I've had to deal with puzzles multiple times as a PC, and it's gone both ways - good and bad. The encounter rests solely on the DM. You need to gauge your players' level of interest, and as soon as you see them reach for their hand-held electronics, PULL THE PLUG!
I would try it if you think you have the narrative skill to do so, but try to avoid the old Player's Paradox of "Just because you know it doesn't mean your character does / Your character only knows as much as you do."
I would play it as such: If the meaning of your puzzles doesn't become apparent to the party within a real life time frame of a set amount, allow them skill checks to provide hints and clues. Especially ones that deal with recent or semi-recent events in your characters personal struggles (encounters with like foes, similar organizations, the same deity or cult, or members of a nation's society/culture). Barring their lack of success on that front, perhaps before sending them into your temple, have a cleric guide NPC who is pretty much just a fall back to keep things moving, or jog their memory (and maybe try to murder them all later).
As Cuup said though, don't make puzzles, traps, secret doors, or like items a mandatory event without SOME way of relatively quickly overcoming or bypassing them, because I've done it, and its a disaster. Events hinged upon the party overcoming these obstacles themselves just become lost in translation as the story sweeps them forever onward.
Last but not least, I applaud you for trying something outside of pure combat and mindless story telling to enhance your campaign! Much good luck to you in your endeavors.
I would play it as such: If the meaning of your puzzles doesn't become apparent to the party within a real life time frame of a set amount, allow them skill checks to provide hints and clues.
That doesn't work.
I'm quite serious. You can't provide clues to someone who's downstairs getting drinks, or who has just popped out the cell phone and no longer cares enough to pay attention. "What? Think of a rainbow? Whatever,... Hey, have you seen this YouTube clip with the annoyed cat?"
I would play it as such: If the meaning of your puzzles doesn't become apparent to the party within a real life time frame of a set amount, allow them skill checks to provide hints and clues.That doesn't work.
I'm quite serious. You can't provide clues to someone who's downstairs getting drinks, or who has just popped out the cell phone and no longer cares enough to pay attention. "What? Think of a rainbow? Whatever,... Hey, have you seen this YouTube clip with the annoyed cat?"
OK, I don't think we need to pretend that every group behaves this way toward puzzles. It's apparent from many of the above posts that that's not the case.
However, it is a valid point to suggest that no matter how well you handle a puzzle, your group may still throw their attention out the window anyway. I think the first thing you need to do is talk to the group out of game about their stance ON puzzles, tell them there may be puzzles, and how can we come to a stance as a group to make it not suck?
I've always wanted to use this with a wizard. A series of paintings depicting various scenes of something in a chronological order. Each painting will feature a different view of his spellbook. Once you have them in order, it reveals all the pages needed to reconstruct a spell that's needed to pass further into temple/wizard's tower/dungeon/whatever.
The only example of a puzzle that I have seen work is when we had to head through a few puzzle rooms in what were IIRC training halls. The puzzles themselves were pretty trivial. "Step on all the squares without touching one of them twice" type stuff. We finished them pretty quickly.
What made them spruce up the game a little was when we had to do them a second time while performing a fighting retreat. No sitting around Uhming and Ahhing at the puzzle, just scrambling to do them as efficiently as possible so we could get the hell out of dodge.
OK, I don't think we need to pretend that every group behaves this way toward puzzles.
I'm quite serious. You can't provide clues to someone who's downstairs getting drinks, or who has just popped out the cell phone and no longer cares enough to pay attention. "What? Think of a rainbow? Whatever,... Hey, have you seen this YouTube clip with the annoyed cat?"
We also don't need to pretend that the groups that do not behave that way are anything other than extreme outliers. If you're going to design a car to be driven by human adults, don't use General Tom Thumb, Deep Roy, and Warwick Davis as your design cases.
It's apparent from many of the above posts that that's not the case.
No. it's apparent that there are a minority of people on this thread that have seen this kind of thing work extremely rarely, and there are also a number of people (myself included) that have never seen this kind of thing work.
I don't think "we need to pretend" that every person who gets struck by lightning dies. But I'd still recommend against it in the strongest possible terms.
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...I just thought of something.
Maybe you should NEVER use the puzzle as a means to keep someone out.
Oh, you should still have them. You have them to distract intruders for a good 20 minutes.
And the slide pieces/rotating bits/perfectly aligned crystal babies all are designed to activate an alarm trap the instant anyone tries to move them, which tells who ever is in charge that someone is messing around.
After that, there would be 10 guards waiting right behind the door that the puzzle opens (...and the guards have an instant switch to open the door if they take too long).
If nothing else, it makes a nice little surpise that gets the combat players to wake back up immediately, and it does characterize the person that made the place- he is not a cliche idiot. He knows that you can generally brute force these traps, and he uses them for different purposes.
You can use this as one of many different tricks to show that the BBEG is genre savy. He grew up reading those penny dreadfuls with tales of heroes too.
Sidenote- that is how the minimum wage guards get in without needing to figure out the puzzle every time. They just jiggle the bits, and waits for someone to ring him in. And technically, if interrogated, it isn't lying to say that solving the puzzle opens the door, and it is the only way to get inside without someone letting you in.
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YES, puzzles can work! They can they can they can!
That said, there are a lot of pitfalls that GMs frequently run afoul of when mixing RPGs with puzzles, and they can make the experience a bad one, so go forward carefully or not at all.
You have to let the characters breathe in a puzzle encounter. Just like in any RPG encounter, you must avoid forcing a single course of action—something that puzzles do by default. This is why they're so unpopular on this thread, and why they're so dangerous for GMs who go in unprepared for PCs to act like PCs.
Here's how a typical puzzle encounter goes, and how it crushes player agency: The GM describes the puzzle; within that description lies the answer (however many layers down); the players analyze the description, parrot the answer to the GM, and are allowed to continue.
You'll notice here that at no point do the players or characters make any choices. Even actions such as "let's try pulling these two levers" aren't really choices in the RP sense, because such actions reflect the desire to "get it right," not to act like a character would. It doesn't matter what kind of character you are or what your character would do—your GM has mandated that this is what your character does.
How To Avoid Crappy Puzzle Encounters
So, first of all, ALWAYS ensure that there is a method of bypassing the puzzle, and be open to creative methods of getting around it. Disable Device on the door/lock is a good place to start, but allow almost ANYTHING the PCs decide to try to affect the environment to some degree. Giving your PCs the genuine choice of whether to engage the puzzle on its terms is as important to your game's RP quality as offering the choice of whether to charge in to battle or set an ambush for a combat encounter.
Second, and this flows from the first point, don't be precious. That's a big lesson to learn for GMs in every environment, but especially during a puzzle encounter. You may have concocted an elegant solution based on your setting, which requires the PCs to re-enact the legend of the wooing of the ancient dragon prince or some such, but you probably have a surly dwarf in the party who just wants to get on bashing things, and suggests using the dragon prince statue as a battering ram to bust on ahead. This is where many GMs get offended at the player's lack of respect and are tempted to strike the PC with lightning, or worse, say "you can't move the statue." Other flavors of this include "there is no other way out," "there are no other items nearby," and "nothing happens." "Nothing happens" is the worst thing you can say during a puzzle encounter, because it means the PCs don't have any actual control over their environment, and thus their choices don't matter. As soon as a player gets a whiff of that, she will tune out exactly as described in other posts on this thread. GMs who require that the players land on the "right" solution end up with empty tables... even when it's a puzzle, and there really IS only one right solution.
Finally, remember that you have more power over the PCs during a puzzle encounter than at any other time. Puzzles rely EXCLUSIVELY on your descriptions, and omitting a clue that a PC could reasonably have discovered is very frustrating and a big no-no. Don't put crucial information behind skill checks that might fail—languages nobody in the party can read, or a lock that can't be bypassed, or some such. The players should have all the information they need when they get to the puzzle, and a few extra hints as well.
So basically, allow your lovely, perfect, elegant puzzle to be completely smashed to pieces, or bypassed in a stupid way, or generally just completely misinterpreted. Don't make it too hard, and never, ever, ever allow yourself to force the "one solution" philosophy on the PCs.
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By the way, my favorite puzzle in a game went like this (I was a player):
The key to exit the room was under a brass-and-glass case on a pedestal in the center of a tall room with three windows. From each window was streaming a colored beam of light: Yellow from one, Red from another, and Blue from the last. Between each pair of windows hung a tapestry in the secondary colors mixing the two windows colors: a green tapestry between the yellow and blue windows, a purple tapestry between the blue and red windows, etc.
Finally, at the back of the room was a statue with huge gems in its eyes. These gems were easily removed and acted as focusing prisms, allowing one to stand in the light from one of the windows, hold a gem aloft, and direct the resulting beam of colored light anywhere in the room.
The solution? The glass case was unlocked. All we had to do was go pick the key up. Still took us 15 minutes to solve, but we had a great time combining light until someone thought to try the case.
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I actually like Joe Holmes post more than I thought I would when I started reading it.
Yes if you 'puzzle' is a complex situation that might have several potential solutions, it would be more likely to be accepted. I can remember one where solving the puzzle was the safest way to pass the room, but certainly not the only way. You could just run through. Fight your way through the golems. You could try to figure out a way to drag the statues out of the room so they didn't animate into golems. Etc...
I will disagree with Orfamay a little bit. People that like the puzzle infused adventures are not, in my experience, vanishingly rare. Though I would say they are definitely in the minority.
Actually, in the 80's they might have been the majority. There seemed to be a time when they were pretty much expected in an adventure and people got disappointed if there weren't enough puzzles.
I also want to mention that a very common problem that often comes up in puzzle adventures is clarity of communication.
Most of the time the GM has a very clear mental picture of what the puzzle looks like. I find that rarely ends up being what the player has in mind from the verbal description or rough marker sketch. Usually once the 'solution' is figured out or handed to the players, most of them are nearly as confused by the solution as they were by the puzzle.
They don't remember that a tiny dragon was mentioned to be in the corner of the painting. Someone meant a button to be pined to a shirt while someone else thought they meant a button to press. Someone thought the lever was sticking out of the wall or some sort of mechanism. Someone else thought the lever meant a loose pry bar to try and pop the panel off. Etc...
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I guess I'm old school, but I don't get all those people who seem to think that roleplaying games and puzzle solving are some sort of fundamentally opposed thing and people who like the one won't like the other. I've always thought that solving puzzles/riddle/mysteries is a fundamental part of gaming, at least as intrinsic to the activity as beating up goblins (or other bad things).
I guess I'm old school, but I don't get all those people who seem to think that roleplaying games and puzzle solving are some sort of fundamentally opposed thing and people who like the one won't like the other. I've always thought that solving puzzles/riddle/mysteries is a fundamental part of gaming, at least as intrinsic to the activity as beating up goblins (or other bad things).
I don't necessarily think they are fundamentally opposed, but I think they can get in the way of each other.
Most of the time when I see a puzzle in a novel, legend, module, or whatever; it wrecks my immersive experience because it doesn't make any sense for it to be there. There have been a few cases where it makes sense, but not many. Yes, I know it is a staple of some of the older stories. However, I don't think it actually made much sense in most of those either.
It also gets in the way of my enjoyment because I am horrible at puzzles. Most especially those portrayed by a poor verbal description of an essentially visual puzzle. I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, but that just isn't my strong suit. So every single time a new puzzle pops up, I get to basically just sit there and wait while the 'puzzle people' have fun figuring out the puzzle. My character may have an int and wis of 24 and should be easily able to solve the puzzle. But me the player can not. So I just sit there and wait.
Heaven help if we don't have one of the 'puzzle people' in the group. We will just sit there trying things basically at random while the GM keeps giving more and more clues and getting more an more dejected because we can't figure out the puzzle and are not having any fun with it.
Also, you joined puzzle and mystery together. To me they are very much not the same thing. A mystery makes sense in many adventures. Yes, the traitor is trying to cover his tracks and you have to figure out who he is before he escapes. That could be a good story.
The problem there is PF is a pretty dang high magic system. Even just a few low level spells make mysteries very hard for the GM to sustain. Unless of course the bad guy is quite a bit higher level. In which case, he doesn't really need to worry about PC's discovering them.
I guess I'm old school, but I don't get all those people who seem to think that roleplaying games and puzzle solving are some sort of fundamentally opposed thing and people who like the one won't like the other. I've always thought that solving puzzles/riddle/mysteries is a fundamental part of gaming, at least as intrinsic to the activity as beating up goblins (or other bad things).I don't necessarily think they are fundamentally opposed, but I think they can get in the way of each other.
Most of the time when I see a puzzle in a novel, legend, module, or whatever; it wrecks my immersive experience because it doesn't make any sense for it to be there. There have been a few cases where it makes sense, but not many. Yes, I know it is a staple of some of the older stories. However, I don't think it actually made much sense in most of those either.
Not as much opposed as irrelevant to each other.
Some people like RPGs. Some people like baseball. But there's no reason to believe they're the same people. If a group showed up at Citi Field to watch the Mets and instead were told they'd be playing Pathfinder, most of them would be annoyed. If they were told they'd be taking IQ tests, most would be annoyed.
Why is it supposed to be different for Pathfinder players?
The first instalment of Aged of Worms AP has a puzzle which worked surprisingly well at our table (given they didn't get it out without me basically solving it for them). It took most of a session and the group all enjoyed it - I think that should be the barometer though. If you run a puzzle, you need to be prepared for what to do if they get stuck or otherwise lose momentum. Don't be fooled by "they're so close!" if they start looking bored. By the time they're looking bored, it's gone on too long.
Here's one I thought of a while back. a mural of many colors lay in a room underground, a good perception check will reveal it's secret after several minutes of study, or you can turn off the light and hope there's a dwarf in the party. Darkvision turns everything black, white and grays, so dark shades become black and light shades don't. The light shades merge under darkvision to become words. otherwise they're merely fragments of runes all in many colors that break up the image for ordinary players. Obviously it's designed for a race with darkvision.
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DM of the Rings puzzle
That's.... pretty accurate, actually.
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Some of my favorite challenges in PFS have been puzzles.
One suggestion that I have to make puzzles more bearable:
- have the puzzle printed out
- have enough puzzle sheets to give one to every player
This one simple act will mean that everyone has a better chance of solving the puzzle, and that distracted players have a reference in front of them that can remind them what is going on.
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We actually had a serious problem with this at GenCon 15 with one of the new scenario. There was an unskippable puzzle which basically torpedoed our table; we had all the clues and we still couldn't solve it. It was a pick-up game so I wasn't mad, but if I had paid money I would have been displeased. One of my friends who played it in the Sagamore said that, according to his GM, only one group in five got it without trial-and-error/significant prodding. The main problem with using puzzles is that tuning the clues is just too difficult; what is clearly obvious to one person can be insane moon logic to another.
OK, I don't think we need to pretend that every group behaves this way toward puzzles.
I'm quite serious. You can't provide clues to someone who's downstairs getting drinks, or who has just popped out the cell phone and no longer cares enough to pay attention. "What? Think of a rainbow? Whatever,... Hey, have you seen this YouTube clip with the annoyed cat?"We also don't need to pretend that the groups that do not behave that way are anything other than extreme outliers. If you're going to design a car to be driven by human adults, don't use General Tom Thumb, Deep Roy, and Warwick Davis as your design cases.
It's apparent from many of the above posts that that's not the case.No. it's apparent that there are a minority of people on this thread that have seen this kind of thing work extremely rarely, and there are also a number of people (myself included) that have never seen this kind of thing work.
I don't think "we need to pretend" that every person who gets struck by lightning dies. But I'd still recommend against it in the strongest possible terms.
We’re not talking about cars, we’re talking about tabletop RPGs. That was a pretty misguided comparison. I’m not going to flip and kill myself if my DM introduces a puzzle to the game. Worst-case scenario, I spend 20 minutes not having fun. Best case scenario, I continue to have fun. Yes, it is a minority that have had positive experiences with puzzles, but it’s just not constructive to insist that 100% of the time, 100% of puzzles have gone terribly, which, based on the fact that there IS a minority makes that – by default - simply not true. This is the advice forums, and saying “no no no don’t don’t don’t” isn’t great advice.
Yes, it is a minority that have had positive experiences with puzzles, but it’s just not constructive to insist that 100% of the time, 100% of puzzles have gone terribly, which, based on the fact that there IS a minority makes that – by default - simply not true. This is the advice forums, and saying “no no no don’t don’t don’t” isn’t great advice.
When we've established that the majority of players strongly dislike puzzles, then "no no no don't don't don't" is, literally, the best possible advice.
"I know the majority of people at my table will hate this -- but I'm going to do it anyway!" In what Insane Troll Logic Bizarro World does that statement make an ounce of sense? If you were throwing a dinner party and knew that 2/3 of your guests had a seafood allergy, would you still serve shrimp? To do so makes you a Major Jerk of Legendary Proportions. If you even suspected that 2/3 of your guests were allergic to the dish you planned to serve, you should change menus. That's ordinary courtesy, to make sure that the people at your table enjoy themselves.
I'm not sure how much more strongly I can express myself within forum rules.
Yes, it is a minority that have had positive experiences with puzzles, but it’s just not constructive to insist that 100% of the time, 100% of puzzles have gone terribly, which, based on the fact that there IS a minority makes that – by default - simply not true. This is the advice forums, and saying “no no no don’t don’t don’t” isn’t great advice.When we've established that the majority of players strongly dislike puzzles, then "no no no don't don't don't" is, literally, the best possible advice.
Not if your players are in the minority group that like puzzles. It's good DMing to design your adventures to suit your particular players' tastes. What "the majority" are presumed to like isn't really relevant - unless you don't know your players very well or are writing a module or something.
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.
I like them. They're classic.