DMing Puzzles: Not Too Easy, Not Too Hard, What's Just Right?

[Tequila Sunrise]

During the last adventure I ran for @Rechan and others, I invented this puzzle to guard a door:

A four-pointed star is inscribed on this door, with its upper arm longer than the others. (An inverted cross.) A fingertip-sized oval adorns the end of each arm. Above the star an inscription reads:

"Spring, summer, autumn and winter
Which do you favor?
Not the one of your birth
Wait for the moment of your death
Everything falls into the seasons of life"

The PCs soon discovered that the four-pointed star is a 5-point combination lock: the ovals must be touched in the right order to open the door. Unfortunately the players got frustrated after being zapped by the accompanying energy trap several times, so they never worked out the puzzle. And in retrospect, I wouldn't have done any better. EDIT: Post #7 has more details.

Which brought upon me an epiphany: It's shockingly easy to invent a realistically difficult puzzle. And when I say 'realistic,' I mean a puzzle that any mage worth her salt might invent to protect her magical laboratory and doodads. All it takes to make a tough puzzle is two or three layers of misdirection, like I did with this one. Robert Langdon makes it look easy, but that guy's a trained professional!

I guess this is why some DMs allow their players to solve puzzles with skill checks. But that feels lame. Why actually invent the puzzle myself if it's going to be bypassed with a single roll? Why not just say "You encounter a word puzzle. Roll a [whatever] check"?

I have an idea on this front, but first I have a sick interest in finding out if anyone here can solve my puzzle. Any puzzle aficionados in the house?

 

[Tovec]

I use puzzles in a few different ways, especially when dealing with recurring damaging trapped puzzles..

1. The puzzle is looking for a keyword or phrase. If I were a mage making this trapped puzzle box I better remember what the keyword is. I may be clever but I make more than one box like this then it could get painful if I happen to forget more than one. I may have written a clue (or answer) down somewhere.
When dealing with a longer poem-puzzle like you used, this would be optimal. The PCs find the box, get zapped, keep looking, find clue, decypher box, open it and continue.
Example, a NPC led the party down a hallway while whistling a merry tune. This allowed that NPC to unlock the traps along the way. When the party returned later and tried down the hall they were beset by dozens of traps and were clueless to avoid them, until they realized what had happened the previous time they were there.

2. The puzzle is optional. Yes it is going to be hard, yes you have a chance of hurting yourself badly but there is nothing saying you HAVE TO complete it. Go try it, fail, rest up for a few days, try again. Maybe this leads to them setting up camp at if it is a fixed location puzzle and then they have to deal with others coming along. If it is a puzzle which can be moved, and they do, then it could be something they play around with after encounters when they are resting at night and then one day *click* it opens while they are just fiddling with dials.
This is great for random boons you want to give them but want them only to use at the right time.
Example: sad as it is... Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has a great example of this. The golden snitch Harry opens after months of playing around with it.
Example2: Indiana Jones (in Raiders for the best example) has to work around the enemy group and get into the map room to figure out the solution.

3. If it is necessary to have, and they can't find (or shouldn't be) a clue/answer/way around it, then they might want to find someone who can magically open it. They may want to smash it open and accept the consequences of breaking magical effects. Give them an out, give then some idea of how to succeed and get the trinket locked inside.
This often leads to them hiring a mage, or pack of mages, to do something magic-y and game related to get it opened. Requires travel, time and effort but proves worth it at the end.

These ideas aren't exclusive to a puzzle (box or otherwise) but are tips I would give for traps, hidden bases or enemies. I think all three give them more roleplaying opportunity than a "roll a knowledge (local) check DC 27" would ever do. I'm not saying a knowledge check isn't appropriate for part or even most of the major aspects of the puzzle but I think that when it relies solely upon them rolling a check you lose something from the attempt.

 

[Balsamic Dragon]

The solution to your puzzle is that the cross is actually a compass rose, with north pointing up. Touch S, W, N, W, E (as indicated by the first letter of each line of the poem).

 

[Loonook]

That works... Except that a really paranoid mage would never leave their mnemonic in plain sight for their personal use.

This seems to be the kind of thing that would be found in a travelogue, diary, etc. or perhaps on the mage or carved into his favored Shield Guardian. I never understood the idea of leaving your riddles for puzzle solving right out there.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Balsamic Dragon]

The longer answer to your question is that there are two hard things about putting puzzles into your game.

First, why would someone put the puzzle there if they don't want someone to get in? It's just as easy to make the password something obscure and fail to leave the requisite riddle. These are questions that should be answered, otherwise the players get taken out of the world by feeling like they are just playing a game.

Second, gauge the interest of your players in solving puzzles. I just ran a LARP full of puzzles, but I was very upfront about what it was about. As a result, I got a ton of people who wanted to solve really hard puzzles (and they were really hard!). But I would never put any of those puzzles in a normal roleplaying game or LARP. Your players need to want to do it and have fun, or it isn't worth the considerable effort to come up with good puzzles

 

[OnlineDM]

I used puzzles in my second and third adventures, Tallinn's Tower and Descent Into Darkness.

In Tallinn's tower, the party enters a large, round room filled with slightly maze-like walls and glowing runes on the floor. They encounter a poem written on a wall that explains (in vague form) what's going on in the room, what they need to do about the runes, and what happens with the monsters that keep getting summoned. Most parties figure it out before summoning too many monsters. The solution DOES involve some skill checks, and I've actually had some players ask if maybe this could be changed so that the order of runes is ALSO a puzzle. I haven't done that yet, though, and I'm not sure that I want to.

In Descent Into Darkness, there's a room with varying runes on the floor, some of which are safe to step on and some of which are not. I went through several drafts of this puzzle before finding one that works. The current version has worked well so far, and the fact that the party is on a timer in this adventure ramps up the tension. However, I do allow for a skill-based way to "solve" the puzzle if I have a table of players who don't like puzzles.

So, my overall thoughts are:
- Puzzles require a surprising amount of play testing in order to work
- The puzzle has to make sense in-game
- Give players who don't like puzzles a way to solve it with in-character skills

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Balsamic Dragon solved it, so here is my new thought on handling puzzles: For every layer of misdirection that a puzzle includes, the PCs can make an [arcana?] check to gain a clue. For example this puzzle has two layers of obfuscation: the solver has to realize that the solution has nothing to do with the poem's season motif, and then has to realize that the four-pointed star is in fact a compass rose.

So anyone trained in arcana can make a reasonable check to get the clue: "The season motif is misdirection. It has nothing to do with the puzzle's solution." Another check reveals that "The four-pointed star is found in the corner of every earthly map." My hope is that these clues will make puzzles solvable for my players, without just giving them away. After all, even Sherlock has DM help on his side!

To give a little bit of context to this puzzle and the dungeon it's in: They were both made by a long dead mage named Lanfera, who lived in an age of opulence and enlightenment. Everything in the dungeon is optional, and the puzzle can be short-circuited by an [albeit high] arcana check. (Nobody asked me about that during the adventure though. Maybe I should have told the players so.)

The solution to your puzzle is that the cross is actually a compass rose, with north pointing up. Touch S, W, N, W, E (as indicated by the first letter of each line of the poem).

That was quick! If you don't mind me asking, do you have a lot of practice solving puzzles or do you just enjoy it? Or is my puzzle just that easy?

(Same questions for anyone who solved my puzzle.)

That works... Except that a really paranoid mage would never leave their mnemonic in plain sight for their personal use.

Yeah, using a puzzle at all is a compromise to the gamey part of D&D over the immersive part, for the sake of fun. If Lanfera really wanted to keep her property safe, there wouldn't be a puzzle at all. She'd just lock these rooms with a traditional numeric combination lock, with the code being something that the PCs have absolutely no way of knowing or guessing. (Her birthday backwards, the first five digits of pi, her social sigil number, ect.)

And putting the wrong combination into the lock would trigger a massive energy surge that no 1st level PC has a hope of surviving. And the guardian monsters scattered around the dungeon would be giant elementals that the PCs have no hope of defeating.

But that's not fun for anyone, so Lanfera set up puzzles to help looters plunder her stuff, with traps that give second chances and guardian elementals the size of halflings.

- Puzzles require a surprising amount of play testing in order to work

No kidding! Unfortunately it's a lot harder to play test puzzles than it is monsters. (I can do the latter alone at home.)

 

[Loonook]

That was quick! If you don't mind me asking, do you have a lot of practice solving puzzles or do you just enjoy it? Or is my puzzle just that easy?

(Same questions for anyone who solved my puzzle.)


Yeah, using a puzzle at all is a compromise to the gamey part of D&D over the immersive part, for the sake of fun. If Lanfera really wanted to keep her property safe, there wouldn't be a puzzle at all. She'd just lock these rooms with a traditional numeric combination lock, with the code being something that the PCs have absolutely no way of knowing or guessing. (Her birthday backwards, the first five digits of pi, her social sigil number, ect.)

And putting the wrong combination into the lock would trigger a massive energy surge that no 1st level PC has a hope of surviving. And the guardian monsters scattered around the dungeon would be giant elementals that the PCs have no hope of defeating.

But that's not fun for anyone, so Lanfera set up puzzles to help looters plunder her stuff, with traps that give second chances and guardian elementals the size of halflings.


No kidding! Unfortunately it's a lot harder to play test puzzles than it is monsters. (I can do the latter alone at home.)

Not putting Acrostics on your prized possessions should be in the Mage's Sanctum handbook. The rest of your listing just says that the mage was poor and couldn't afford such opulence (keeping up with the Joneses just didn't work out)... But come on. Separate the pieces, provide them in some sort of book, or something.

Slainte,

-Loonook.

 

[Balsamic Dragon]

That was quick! If you don't mind me asking, do you have a lot of practice solving puzzles or do you just enjoy it? Or is my puzzle just that easy?

I both enjoy solving puzzles and have had a lot of practice at it, and your puzzle was not too hard

However, gauging difficulty under stress conditions is another story. I had a GM give me a tower of hanoi puzzle once in a game. This is an easy kind of puzzle, but since it was a seven piece tower, it took a long time to perform all the moves. The party was taking damage while I was trying to solve the puzzle in real time, and everyone was kind of shouting at me. As a result, I kept making mistakes. Sometimes I am fine under pressure, but we all have our bad days, and this was definitely one of mine. In another situation, with another GM, there was a much more difficult puzzle. However, because the party was helpful and supportive, I solved it much more quickly.

So I recommend making puzzles easier than you think they should be, rather than completely frustrating your players, and setting up some kind of system (such as skill checks) to provide hints if necessary.

 

[Li Shenron]

I love puzzles, but I put them sparingly in my adventures, mostly because it's hard to find good puzzles.

I have some extra suggestions:

- know how good your players are at solving puzzles... no-brainer here, simply don't throw a hard puzzle at a group of people who aren't keen on this sort of stuff; if you game with people who are low on math and logic, use only simple riddles

- if the puzzle is hard, try to have the party stumble upon it at the end of a session! we had a couple of truly challenging ones that could not easily be solved during a gaming session... if you expect it to take longer than 10 minutes (e.g. the size of a break), better to let them go home and have all the time to solve it later

- if you think there's a chance the puzzle won't be solved, don't put it at a critical location, such as a door/gate that must be passed in order to complete the quest; instead, put it before a bonus such as a nice treasure that is otherwise not required to complete the adventure

EDIT: I don't mind too much about the whether it makes sense that a wizard would have put a puzzle to guard his stash... maybe the wizard's dead anyway, and he wanted his treasure to be found, but only by worthy adventurers and since he was a wizard, "worthy" to him meant smart