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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Horatio" data-source="post: 5520772" data-attributes="member: 63829">As a DM, I do challenge players from time to time. Mostly in a subtle way that thay do not feel challenged even if they are (they generally dislike puzzles, but only as long as they know it is a puzzle, if I manage to make puzzles look like something different*, they are happy). But most of the player "challenging" comes when they solve various mysteries (murder mysteries, sometime NPC or unstealable objets disappearances). Now, here's why it is "challenging" instead of challenging. When making those mysteries, I set the intiatial stage (murder victims and places where they were found and/or murdered, rooms from where some valuable object disappeared, etc), add some NPCs tied to that and let the heroes in. Now they start the investigation and solving. Naturally, players always try to interpret found clues, informations divulged from NPCs (possible vitnesses, contacts, important NPCs, etc). Eventually, they come to a conclusion (not neccesserily the mystery solution, usually just a starting position for the next stage of investigation). Now here comes the best part: whatever they will come up with, I take as the truth of what really happened, and continue upon that (so they think the captain of the guard did it while being mind controled so he has no recollection of that night's events? Ok, with that, I quickly add evidence supporting it, like a vitness that saw him walking strangely, almost as a zombie, etc.), continuing to the grand finale. Sometimes, I complicate it a bit, just enough to not let them think they are always right, so they won't get susspicious. And when they try to come up with really crazy implausible ideas, I let them actually fail the investigation (happened only twice so far). It has several advantages: - players are happy, because they will eventually get it right almost all the time, players like being right- DM has to work less, because all the intriques, conspiracies, motives, figures behind figures, etc. are done by players "for" him- DM is happy because players are happy * involves story immersion, the pieces of puzzles are tied to memorable moments (to be sure, I create the puzzle pieces after the memorable moments, essentially creating a puzzle that coresponds to events and various details presented in those memorable moments, is that cheating? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />) so most of the players remeber and when the opportunity to use them presents itself, they almost always "take the bait" and "get it correctly".</blockquote>

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