Scholarly puzzles and issues

[Jd Smith1]

In my Zweihander campaign, I have a player who has created a PC who is a scholar. It is an extremely low-magic campaign (the group doesn't even include a spellcaster of any sort).

I am looking for examples of ways to challenge his PC, who is a very bookish sort ; while I always have a heavy RP and investigative aspect to my campaign, I've never really had a pure scholar in a group. Any suggestions for dealing with this sort of thing?

EDIT: Apparently, I wasn't clear: I don't want instances for skill rolls for this PC. What I looking for are scholarly challenges that will involve the player, not just dice fodder. Non-tactical issues such as captured notes, letters, journals, and the like. Again: this isn't D&D.

 

[prabe]

Is doing research a thing? Like, finding out what there is to find out about whatever problem they're facing? Is there some advantage to knowing these things without needing to game out the research?

IIRC, there's a thread in that game about knowledge at least potentially being a source of corruption (or maybe Corruption). That might be what the scholar puts at risk, as much as or more than physical harm.

 

[Blue Orange]

Maybe you have to find the location of some treasure--time to hit the library! Maybe the library's in an inaccessible or dangerous place. Maybe the books your character needs are guarded--time for the fighters to do something, or sneaky characters need to steal them. Then, of course, they're in some weird language or code he needs to translate or decode--maybe the code's in another book...

 

[Haiku Elvis]

Does the character has a specific area or theories they are researching? Do they have rivals either in a race to discover "the truth" or opponents with a rival theory. Scholars usually had patrons for financial support and these often tied in to the rich therefore powerful patron's political, religious, beliefs or claims so disputes could expand and get ugly quickly.
Is the scholar theorising that the builders of the ancient monument were really from ethnic group A not B maybe affecting claims to that disputed territory or proving the current estimate of Angels that can dance on the head of a pin set by the orthodoxy has errors in it or even just developing an irrigation system for growing expensive food X for his patron that would threaten the next Baron over and his current monopoly on pineapple cultivation.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Does the character has a specific area or theories they are researching? Do they have rivals either in a race to discover "the truth" or opponents with a rival theory. Scholars usually had patrons for financial support and these often tied in to the rich therefore powerful patron's political, religious, beliefs or claims so disputes could expand and get ugly quickly.
Is the scholar theorising that the builders of the ancient monument were really from ethnic group A not B maybe affecting claims to that disputed territory or proving the current estimate of Angels that can dance on the head of a pin set by the orthodoxy has errors in it or even just developing an irrigation system for growing expensive food X for his patron that would threaten the next Baron over and his current monopoly on pineapple cultivation.

That just sparked an idea which should work for a half-dozen sessions (its a sidebar issue), which should give me breathing space. Thanks !

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

Does the character has a specific area or theories they are researching? Do they have rivals either in a race to discover "the truth" or opponents with a rival theory. Scholars usually had patrons for financial support and these often tied in to the rich therefore powerful patron's political, religious, beliefs or claims so disputes could expand and get ugly quickly.
Is the scholar theorising that the builders of the ancient monument were really from ethnic group A not B maybe affecting claims to that disputed territory or proving the current estimate of Angels that can dance on the head of a pin set by the orthodoxy has errors in it or even just developing an irrigation system for growing expensive food X for his patron that would threaten the next Baron over and his current monopoly on pineapple cultivation.

Academic wars! Battles to retain tenure or support from a powerful patron! And there are always threats of assassination from enemies...

 

[Haiku Elvis]

That just sparked an idea which should work for a half-dozen sessions (its a sidebar issue), which should give me breathing space. Thanks !

Cool! glad it helped.

 

[Darth Solo]

It's like chess: there's a formula to every move that translates to each and every next move.

You reverse it and design a trap that if they fail it has little or no noticeable consequence but gets worse every 60 seconds in a subtle way that requires additional saves. Like contracting the Flu. Even with a failed trap check you leave them alone until they get to a certain point then the poison darts and pit-traps activate 60 seconds after they fail the trap.

Let them think everything is okay --- then drop the net. It's like when they try to deceive an NPC and fail --- let them think they they succeeded then later spring the ambush from an angry NPC who sensed their lie.

Let a failure drag undetected like a slow dagger striking at the worst moment.

 

[Rune]

A math puzzle:

If 4 times 125 is 5, what is 5 times 80?

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I might suggest a modification of the way mad scientists are handled in the original Deadlands:

Ask the player what their scholar is interested in and work with them to define an invention or discovery that they want to work towards. In a sci-fi game this might be "discover a way to allow n-space travel inside the gravity radius of a planet". In fantasy it might be "find the lost spell-book of the Lich Emperor of Kaldak". It's helpful if this goal is at least tangentially useful to the rest of the party.

Then get the player to write a short description of what they think the theory behind this goal, or what might be needed to achieve it. For the fantasy example and an unimaginative player, it might be really short - "discover his resting place; read the book". My experience has been that players who want to play scholars are pretty engaged and give a lot of info, though!

Next, you use that as a base and expand out to maybe 5 core steps needed to achieve the goal (the number of steps depend on your campaign arc length and how much emphasis you like on sub-plots). For the fantasy example it might be:

1. Find the remnants of the family of the only surviving person who built his tomb, and get a map from them
2. Correlate the ancient map to the modern era
3. Go to the location and find the tomb
4. Remove the curse on the spell book so you can open it
5. Translate the spell book

Then it's up to you if each of those goals is a simple skill check, a scene, or a whole session. Depending on your players you might use it as a way to force moral choices ("if you look the other way and let me murder the queen, I'll give you a talisman that can break any curse") -- whatever your game wants.

One important thing is to let the scholar know how close they are. Simply saying "now that you have the location of the time you feel you are about 40% of the way to your goal" is good enough. But if they just keep getting new tasks it can feel dispiriting. Ideally, they should be super-excited when one step away and be badgering the other players to interrupt the team goals to get the research done!