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ANOTHER thing to add, since I would add this...
when players make DC checks with the knowledge skills... have some sort of flat answers made per knowledge skill check...
DC 30 = giver of life = regiver of life, starts life anew, what makes life start again, etc
then the characters could find minor helps that the characters might know but the players might not know and then help push those thoughts into the players head
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So you would never put a riddle in one of your games? I personally believe that it is a very common trope for the fantasy genre and can be entertaining. Of course this riddle was given by a gargoyle on the side of the road for the chance of extra treasure if that helps.
I wouldn't ever, unless I had players ask specifically for them, but that's my personal bias. I can't stand riddles. "Intuit my arbitrary thought process" does not constitute fun for me. Trope or not, I personally find them a drag. Maybe because they're an exercise in abstract pattern-recognition as opposed to logical evaluation.
That all said, your example would have steamed me especially well-cooked. I happen to disagree with literally every line of your riddle. There is exactly 0% chance I would ever arrive at the desired answer because I don't associate even one of the points given with the answer given.
More beautiful than nymphs? Dryads. Hot elf chicks. Seoni?
Stronger than giants? Balors. Gravity. Gnomish body odor?
Blah, blah, blah. There are about a million answers I'd come up with for each element and precious metals or gems aren't on the list. See, for a riddle to not be utterly infuriating not one element can be subjective or misleading.
People are beautiful, as are landscapes, paintings, or poems. Chunks of crap dug out of a pit? Not so much. People are strong, as are bridges, physical forces, urges to stab riddle-makers in the eye, and the stench of garbage rotting. Broken rocks? Not so much. Neither heat nor pressure are in any way associated with chaos. Both are orderly and understood kinetic energy (while Brownian motion comes into play, it's still not chaotic), and worse... "chaos" is a loaded word in D&D.
Anyway, not to bash, but hopefully this gives some insight as to why your players turned into a lynch mob. And if they didn't actively try to string you up and instead just grumbled, count yourself lucky; they should have.
Pressure and heat are constants where SPOILER is formed. There's nothing chaotic about that, in my opinion. Erupting volcanoes may be chaotic. But the kind of pressure and heat required to make SPOILER are constants, and about as ordered as geology gets.
There's nothing about this riddle that is win. I'm a pretty smart guy and I gave up pretty quickly.
And by the way, there is currently a thread called Free Spelling Lessons, in which I clearly explained the difference between THAN and THEN.
What you were saying was after the giants were strong, then... then what?
After the nymphs were beautiful, then... then what? What happens after the giants are strong and the nymphs are beautiful?
What has it gots in it's pocketses?
-Was HIGHLY debated among the hobbit riddlers. It was finally decided that
1) It wasn't a proper riddle, but since golum essentially made it one anyway by agreeing to answer.
2) You're allowed to bend the rules a bit to save your life.
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"Order from chaos, giver of life.
All love this, yet all seek to mutilate.
Stronger then giants, more beautiful then nymphs.
What am I?"
Order from Chaos only works for SPOILER if you know a lot more about natural sciences than most do. Here's what I'd probably go with:
EARTH. As in, the land.
Order from chaos - in many mythologies, the earth and sky were among the first things created (from chaos, which was the primordial state).
Giver of life: you put seed in, you get crops/tree out. The fertility/motherhood connection is old as dirt, and there are many mother earth/ father sky deities out there. To most people, SPOILER likely has pretty little to do with giving life. Quality of life, perhaps :) .
All love this - fights for land have been common since, well, nearly as long as people have been fighting. SPOILER is valuable in modern societies, but nomads or other early cultures don't care for it much. You always need the land to feed you.
Seek to mutilate - farmers till the soil, in a way scarring the land. We build cities on it, draw rocks and other things from its bowels, and mangle what lives on it.
Stronger than giants: The earth is unbreakable and the primordial solid. There is nothing stronger than it.
More beautiful than nymphs - the land is beautiful and majestic, as most of us can attest. Do I need to start posting links of beautiful natural scenes?
"Order from chaos, giver of life.
All love this, yet all seek to mutilate.
Stronger then giants, more beautiful then nymphs.
What am I?"EARTH. As in, the land.
That would have been my answer as well.
In order to get SPOILER as an answer, the words 'giver', 'mutilate' and 'strong(er)' weren't appropriate IMO, for reasons given by previous posters.
'findel
"Other... habits" aren't what get them the moniker "blood diamonds". Their use to fund political violence of various forms is.Washed in blood may apply to the real world, but that's because they're mostly mined in less than civilized places.Ahem, not so much. It is because the price of diamonds is kept artificially high by bottle necking the supply. Since there are plenty of people around to mines that know that diamonds are actually rather common they can grab the extra and then turn around and sell them on the black market in order to supply their other... habits. Diamond is not a rare material -- only the method in which it is sold creates such insane pricing.
Wow something they do over and over again... aka a "habit" -- one which involves blood and lends therefore lends to the name 'blood diamonds'.
So again a habit that leads to the name -- or exactly what I said the first time.
Honestly try harder especially in a thread about riddles and the meanings of words.
I guessed water, or rain.
Water gives life, mutilates things, is beautiful and strong...
I correctly guessed diamonds though only after I first read the hint that it was something tangible; otherwise I might have been led astray with thoughts of "nature" or "time" or some such concept.
I figured that the "giver of life" part was in reference to carbon being the fundamental basis for life, though a decent understanding of chemistry/biology seems rather anachronistic.
How fair it is might depend on the number of hints and tries the PCs receive. When running puzzles, I usually grant a number of hints based on ever increasing successful intelligence checks.