ThatGuyThere said:
1) Much better to have handed over a prop bible and a prop book of mormon. And they better have had an index in them. Describing books would make the "trap" much more difficult. On that point, I agree.
She did, I never said otherwise. Sorry for the miscommunication. She handed me a Bible and Book of Mormon when they popped out. The Bible was a huge deluxe edition with just about every feature you could imagine: maps of historic locations, conversion tables of historic measurements, many pages of translators notes, an index and concordance, blank family geneological tables, and several hundred pages of things other than the actual canonical texts.
The original poster, as several others have pointed out, simply kept counting things in the hope that something counted up to a convenient number. That would have made for a lousy puzzle, even if it had worked; and his solutions had little to do with the clues at hand. And from the clue, "The solution is in one of those two books", he took the suggestion, "Count more things". I'm suprised the DM didn't respond with frustration herself. Once the poster came up with a reasonably good idea - maybe looking up a relevant passage, and including it, or looking up a passage about offering himself up to God, and entering it's chapter:verse into the "clock" - she could have said, "You hear a grinding noise, as the doors start to open...". She just wasn't willing to accept the lackluster, "Didn't work? Then I count something else..."
Did you actually read my post? I tried praying at the "Hope" door, kicking down "Wrath", confessing sins in front of "Justice" and sitting and waiting in front of "patience". I tried using the books as physical keys looking for pressure plates or slots, I tried searching the books for notes placed in there or hidden keys in the books. I tried entering appropriate symbolic numbers like "10" for ten commandments in the "Justice" door, but since every wrong number put my character closer to death, and a third wrong answer would spell death, as well as running out of time, it makes you skittish about trying new answers. Pardon me for thinking that a puzzle where the solution would involve numbers might be mathematical in origin somehow. I thought the puzzle might make sense, not be an arbitrary and disjointed thing, which it was.
I'm willing to agree that it wasn't a simple puzzle. I'm willing to agree that it was, in fact, quite difficult. I'd never have gotten it. But you wanted to play Intelligence 5, Academics (Religion) 4; your character is One Smart Cookie (and possibly one of the leading religious scholars worldwide). And his solution to a religiously themed puzzle was not to draw upon his own (presumably vast) knowledge of religious iconography or lore; wasn't to consider the usage of the words Wrath, Hope, Patience, etc, in the context of Judeo-Christian theology, and wasn't even to really take a look at the situation of the puzzle.
Intelligence 4, Academics (Religion) 4 actually, and it really didn't matter, since my character's stats were irrellevant to solving the puzzle since I, the player had to solve it, and all rolling did was get "hints" which was having the basic facts of the puzzle restated to me and being told I'm overlooking something (duh).
It was to count things. And when that didn't work, to count some different things, in the hope that might work, instead.
No, I didn't, please read the original post. I tried many other things, but it was clear that the only thing that even produced any response at all was entering a number into the clocks, which, silly me, made me think that a number as an answer might mean a numerical solution to the puzzle.
)
