Not so long ago, my players came upon a puzzle and trap-themed level in my megadungeon. I tell the full story of the interaction over here, but the TLDR is that they spent well over an hour IRL brute forcing their way through a hidden door puzzle.
When your players have no clue where to go, how do you go about giving them useful hints to move the game along? Should you? Or does it cheapen the experience when they don't 'figure it out for themselves?'
It seems like a hot-cold system not only would have been helpful, but was essential given how high the DC was relative to their bonuses.
"Your glaive strikes solid rock, but you hear a slight echoing as if there were an empty space. Roll a DC 20 Perception for direction and DC 25 Perception for distance."
It doesn't sound like people had fun brute-forcing the problem. They resorted to it because (a) there was no other way and (b) brute-forcing worked.
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Were these secret doors required for progress? Sounds like another job for the Three Clue Rule. Watery Soup's method sounds legit, too.
Could have been worse. One time, my party got caught in a teleportation spell trap that split us up. Two of our members got sent into a locked room that had a puzzle for a lock. One of those tetris type puzzles. They spent an hour real time trying to figure it out. The GM put one of the pieces into place himself after the first 30 minutes. Then the session ended for the day. They had to go back in the middle of the week to keep working at it. Neither of them had any way to get around the puzzle due to their classes.
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Since it didn't matter how much noise they made, the solution to the problem is simply
PCs: "We're going to brute force it."
GM: (Check notes, no consequences for doing so..., roll dice) It takes 6 six hours, but you find the secret door. Its here."Takes two minutes of table time, and we're all moving along.
This. In the situation described above, this is what you need to do.
A better option though, would be to not have that situation come up in the first place. I highly recommend reading The Angry GM's articles on Why Traps Suck and anything similar you can find.
There needs to be meaningful choice and consequences for that choice. If every trap door was, say, facing west, and there were hieroglyphics depicting the setting sun as being symbolic of the afterlife, or the doors were under statues of some God of Secrets, or even if there were marks in the dust and hint of a draft to suggest where a hidden doorway might be, you'd be rewarding attentive, critically thinking players, instead of just handing them the win after they spent the required amount of time on the problem.
If you don't want them doing this you could make some kind of time limit in the story (like they have to save somebody before the bad guy kills them or something like that.)
Were these secret doors required for progress? Sounds like another job for the Three Clue Rule. Watery Soup's method sounds legit, too.
This was specifically a "challenge your players" dungeon written in the vein of Tomb of Horrors. In the larger megadungeon complex, Monte Cook called it out as an optional level "that not every group will get through." The three clue rule is (unfortunately) inappropriate in this sort of setup.
In other words, it's a deliberately different design style calculated to make life hard for players. And if you're trying to stay true to the spirit of the design, I'm not sure how you go about speeding up play.
Fair enough then. They bought their tickets. I say, let 'em crash.
And if you're trying to stay true to the spirit of the design, I'm not sure how you go about speeding up play.
While I respect Cook and will happily give credit where it is due, I think that the situation at your table is hardly strange enough to be considered unforeseeable. Staying true to the spirit of the design is all well and good, but this is a prime example of a less-than-stellar design; a complex problem with one tedious, uninteresting solution doea not sound like a great setup for a fun session.
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I am in favor of Kasoh solution. I would ask a bit more explanation of what brute force method they will use, but then say "after X hours of work you find a secret door", or if they don't have a chance of success (because the DC is too hard or the methods used aren't appropriated) I will say "After x hour you haven't found anything".
RL time 10 minutes at worst, in-game time and resources have been spent and the story goes on.
I recall an old 1 ed AD&D campaign where the players established a new barony. They found an abandoned keep and decided to restore it. It had an extended underground section and after clearing it the players decided to check it for secret doors with a magical weapon that was able to detect them for 10 minutes every day, at the speed of 1 10x10 square every minute. They spent 10 minutes every day for several months doing that. There was no secret door.
The in-game effect was that the guy with the sword had to be at the keep for about half an hour every day and that the use of the detect secret ability was consumed every day. That was a slight hindrance in other adventures they were having while clearing the territory but the RL time cost was negligible.
That way you know that your character is doing a repetitive core, but you don't have to role play every minute of it.
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it's a deliberately different design style calculated to make life hard for players.
And that is exactly the issue - it's designed "to make life hard for players". Players, not characters. The characters apparently weren't in any danger and spend no recources. It was not hard on the characters, it was hard on the players.
I call that a design failure.
Just last night, I played in a PFS scenario with a very cerebral sort of puzzle--to paraphrase one of the other players, it had a Math section and a Writing Comprehension section. I'm usually pretty good at both, but I'd had a tiring day already, and the solution involved factorials, which I haven't done anything with in 30 years and would never have occurred to me on my own. Fortunately, we had a couple of better-rested math geeks at the table, and with only minimal nudging from the GM, they solved it before it became REALLY annoying.
The GM told us after the game that the scenario did give an option for the GM to hand-wave the puzzle if it took the players too long to solve, but at the cost of a higher DC for a skill challenge later on. I vastly prefer that contingency to the last adventure I played that contained a puzzle requiring that level of brains-wracking. In that one, the players were explicitly given an out on the puzzle, but at the cost of losing a boon on the Chronicle sheet.
Overly clever puzzles can easily wreck the pacing of a PFS scenario, where you only have so much time to complete the adventure. In last night's game, the puzzle came immediately after the first encounter, which was a fight we avoided. But all of the critical fights took place after the puzzle scene. Even though we solved it in less than an hour, it still put a huge time pressure on finishing the rest of the adventure in time.
If you design a puzzle for the players and have no way for the characters to influence things then you have forfeited all right to b@++& about metagaming.
I mean, if you want to get technical, any puzzle solved by the player instead of the character has been metagamed. A player's ability to solve puzzles has no bearing on their character's ability to do so. But that's not very fun when someone says AM BARBARIAN can't solve the puzzle because he dumped Int and thinks a "cryptogram" is a device for weighing dead bodies. So there's always going to be a bit of that, I guess.