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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5518602" data-attributes="member: 54877">Maybe the way some people run it, but not the way I run it. That is my point. You need not fight the BBEG and beat him. But the way most games are structured and played, the players are going to try their darnedest and pull out every trick or resource at their disposal. That is "optional", but in most minds' that is "defacto required". Now, since I'm often throwing a lot of tough stuff at the players (at least collectively), I do try to avoid "defacto required" as much as possible. But there are real consequences to opting out too often. With puzzles and other explicitly player-challenging tasks, I still make them challenging, but the consequences of opting out are rarely severe--and never severe without the players having multiple ways to solve it. Solving such a puzzle makes the overall challenge of the adventure moderately less severe, while opting out leaves the status quo. Thus back to my analogy with Str. It is generally agreed that a fighter needs to start with at least 16 or 18 Str, before racial adjustments, or be behind. (The variance depends a lot on the campaign where this fighter will play, I think.) So a 20 is a true option where you sacrifice some other stuff if it is worth it to you. But you don't have to do it. My puzzles are like that 20. The 16 or 18 minimum is also an option, in that if you know what you are doing and the campaign is right, you can go lower than that. But you just made it tougher on your self, and you will have to make it up elsewhere or run real risks. Most challenge I put into a game is like this.  I like to do things this way because I nearly always set up the difficulty such that partial failure is well nigh unavoidable. You can stop the goblins, recover the critical sword, prevent the messenger ambush, and--if you really get lucky or pull out the stops, save the local farmers. Meanwhile, the some crops will get burned and horses stolen and maybe a few druids slaughtered. You could have saved them, but not them and all that other stuff too. I simply don't like solving a puzzle to be on that same plane, because my guys would take the party getting TPK'd because they couldn't solve a Sphinx riddle a lot better than it leading to innocents getting torched. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /></blockquote>

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