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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 917899" data-attributes="member: 172">I think riddles can be entertaining. As Monte said (I forget if it was in the DMG or elsewhere) you have two planes to provide challenge in the game: challenging the players and challenging the characters. I think that a well handled campaign should do both, and riddles fall in there.I do think that you should know your players, though, and riddles are not something that you can simply pull off of the shelf. Sometimes it is very hard to communicate to the players the exact meaning of the riddle, and they over-dwell on some nuance of the wording. I usually allow Int checks to corale them back on track.The trick is, if it is a tough riddle, don't make the players depend on it for success. Rather, reward them (or remove obstacles) if they succeed. Otherwise, you are setting your players up to fail.Over on the Necromancer Games boards, I took a lot of heat for not liking one of their highly praised modules, What Evil Lurks. The problem with WEL is that is has multiple layered puzzles near the end making it very unlikely that the players will be able to unravel the plot... this is what I call a "plot bottleneck", when there is only one, very narrow path to success.</blockquote>