Best...Puzzle...Ever....

BryonD said:

Spoiler

The middle guy on the right knows he is wearing black.

If he were wearing white, the guy behind him would see two whites and immediately know HE was wearing black and so he would easily yell out the answer. He lack of response indicates that he is seeing one black and one white. Thus, the second guy MUST be wearing black.

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NICE!!! Where'd you get it, though?

I adhere to my stance that riddles & puzzles are the absolute best ingredient of good D&D games.

I adhere to my stance that riddles & puzzles are the absolute best ingredient of good D&D games.

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I agree

These riddles are good so far, the more the better

Rigur and BryonD, I raise my black hat to you !

A friend of mine was given it by a work colleague.

Get a subscription to GAMES magazine for a year. It's pretty much ALL brain-wracking puzzles.

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I did that a few years ago. My players couldn’t figure any of them out.

My all-time favorite puzzle/trap has to the tesseract (sp?) that was published in Dragon magazine back in the early 80s. It would take me too long to describe it, and I’d need a diagram, but the short explanation is, imagine a stack of 6 sided dice. Perhaps 4 or 5 stacked on top of each other in a column. Now imagine that each one is a room. Now imagine that there are doors on all the walls, floors and ceilings. Now imagine that the space is warped so that when you leave one door, you step into another on another level. The diagram showed which doors were connected to each other. Gravity was relative (IRRC). That plus some illusions and some traditional riddles made for one of the craziest games I have ever run.

OK, I ran this one for my group once. It's essentially a dungeon level, and the goal is to manipulate levers that open and close secret doors until you can find your way to the stairs down. Each lever is connected to 3 of the secret doors. When you move the lever, the doors open if they are closed, and close if they are open. A switch could open 2 doors and close the third, etc..., depending on what their current configuration is. There is a switch in the middle of the puzzle that resets it, closing all the doors so you can start over.

The secret doors are lettered A, B, C, E, F, G, H (I forgot D)
The switches are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4

These are the doors that open/close when you hit the switches:

Switch 1: Doors B, E, G
Switch 2: Doors A, E, F
Switch 3: Doors A, H, F
Switch 4: Doors C, E, G

So what order do you need to hit the switches in order to get to the southern room? Keep in mind that some switches are in rooms that can get closed off by secret doors, so a switch you hit previously might not be currently available.

Here is the map:

note that with my puzzle, there could easily be multiple solutions. There could even be a ridiculously easy solution. Once I found a solution I stopped looking for more, so the one I found could overly difficult. On the other hand, it could be the only way.

My group, of course, just bypassed the whole thing with a Stone Shape through door H. Bastards.

The switch-secret door bit:

rigur said:

Second guy from the right will know which color (black)he has based on the fact that the guy behind him doesen't shout out that he has a black hat and that the guy in front of him is wearing a white hat.

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Ha! I'd decided it took Trainz 15 minutes for his character to feel his head getting warmer in a black hat in the sun....but you could solve it that way too, I guess.

Crothian said:

I like puzzles, but they aren't for the characters they are for the players. Do people find it's hard to do puzzles while trying to stay in character and what that character would possibly be able to solve?

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The problem with staying in character for puzzles is the Intelligence ability score. While it's easy for the genius playing the Int 6 Fighter to pretend not to get the answer to a riddle, it is not so easy for the normal player playing the Int 18 Wizard to pretend to get the answer even though he hasn't a clue. Thus, you either let everyone contribute (and thus have fun) equally or you penalize the group because the player's Int doesn't match his character's Int. Either choice though can break versimilitude.

Persoanlly, I hate puzzles because they are so contrived. Who would spend time creating a bunch of sliding rooms where opening the doors moves the rooms around? The builder is trying to protect something. Why give anyone even a small chance of finding it?

When someone (not the DM, the NPC) puts two doors in front of the party and says you can choose the lady or the tiger, only a fool doesn't have two tiggers waiting behind the doors.

And the worst kind of puzzle is the word puzzle. Dungeon's challenge of champions V is full of puzzles that rely on English word spellings. My characters don't speak English. Letters in my languages don't look like English letters.

But that doesn't mean they aren't fun on the board. So I'll just be quiet now.

jmucchiello said:

Persoanlly, I hate puzzles because they are so contrived. Who would spend time creating a bunch of sliding rooms where opening the doors moves the rooms around? The builder is trying to protect something. Why give anyone even a small chance of finding it?

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You are right, I don't throw in puzzles in often becasue of this. There has to be a good reason the puzzle is there. Normally, its to keep people out only allowing a person of some worth to go farther.