Defeated by puzzle - campaign over: Here is the offending puzzle!

[apesamongus]

The puzzle in this thread is for the players, if it was for the characters it would take a die roll. Since it has to be solved by the players that is who it is for.

Which is why the suggestion was for the players to DEMAND that the GM let them roll. It's not a question of what the GM intended - he's a head, so who cares what he intended - it's a question of how the players should have reacted to the problem.

 

[Tatsukun]

Perhaps we're looking at this in completely the wrong way. Maybe the blanks are supposed to hold completely different symbols. For example, there are what...35 empty spaces? Maybe you're supposed to put in a sentence instead. Something like "Fill in the proper symbols into the blanks." That's exactly 35 letters, isn't it? Bloody awful coincidence, don't you think?

That would explain the grammar error from the (assumed) native speaker.
I like this idea the best of anything so far. But what order should be used? Simple left to right, top to bottom? Maybe there is some grouping?

Hmmm, I'll ponder more about your great idea!

-Tatsu

 

[apesamongus]

But it wasn't that single roll that caused the TPK, there were other dice rolls that got you to the place that one more bad roll would cause a TPK.

And this one puzzle was at the culmination of an extended campaign. I'm sure plenty of different things led up to that puzzle.

Also, there are plenty of save or die spells out there, that can destroy a party if the wrong person dies early.

 

[Tatsukun]

Oh, could you set the scene for us a little more? Where / how did the PC's encounter this puzzle? Was it painted on a wall or something?

How exactly are the PC's to fill in the answer? Do they have paint or something?

Thanks

-Tatsu

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

The first time I played Vampire: The Masquerade (back in 1st edition), my GM came up with a campaign that was centered around a chessboard. What this meant was that everything that happened in the campaign would have been related to a predetermined set of moves in a particular game of chess that a couple of elders were having...the idea being, I suppose, that they were taking their game into the world and using various characters as pieces.

Anyway, one of the first things that happened was that the piece that represented one of the PCs was "taken", and removed from play, so his character was captured or something and he didn't show up to Elysium that night. So he was apparently supposed to sit there and wait for the whole campaign. Fortunately for him, the DM went off to the bathroom, and without knowing why he had set up a chessboard on the other table, we started fiddling with it. When he came back, he was aghast. His "clever puzzle" that would have given us the clues to figure out what was going to happen so that we could subvert the elders' plans eventually.

It turns out that he hadn't written down the positions of the chess pieces, and so the carefully planned order of play was destroyed forever. Or something. Anyway, he threw a fit and we were all of the opinion that it was a pretty dumb plan, and weren't interested in solving some chess puzzle anyway. Campaign came to a grinding halt in the first session.

There are two morals to this story:

1. Don't hinge your campaign on a single puzzle, trick, or trap, without having a backup plan to keep the ball rolling.

2. Don't leave your cunning puzzle sitting around where the players can mess with it.

 

[Ottergame]

After looking at it again, I'm wondering if the DM didn't make up the whole thing with a pattern that is relatively easy to see when all the symbols are present and then just erased some without noting that he had taken so many that there is no clue to the pattern anymore.

That's the conclusion I came to. He had a pattern, but without trying to think of what is was going to look like to the players, he deleted some key symbols. He wouldn't notice because he KNEW the answer, and would assume the players could figure it out.

But what gets me is that this is going to just let this long running game die like that. More then the puzzle itself, THAT's the most boneheaded thing the DM has done.

 

[Algolei]

That would explain the grammar error from the (assumed) native speaker.
I like this idea the best of anything so far. But what order should be used? Simple left to right, top to bottom? Maybe there is some grouping?

Hmmm, I'll ponder more about your great idea!

I had a great idea? Uh-oh!

I didn't count the squares very accurately, so I may be off. Same goes for the letters in the sentence. It was just something I thought of as I was concluding my previous post.



Although, I have been claiming to be an idiot savant all my life...!

 

[toberane]

Anyway, one of the first things that happened was that the piece that represented one of the PCs was "taken", and removed from play, so his character was captured or something and he didn't show up to Elysium that night. So he was apparently supposed to sit there and wait for the whole campaign.

Any Gamemaster who does something like this is a horse's hindquarters that I would never play with again. I know this from experience. I (indvertently) did this one time.

I was DMing a grojup of PCs, two of which weren't able to be there, at least for the first part of the evening. I had the two absent PCs get kidnapped and the rest of the PCs went to rescue them. Unfortunately, the rescue attempt took longer than expected (the rest of the night actually) and the 2 PCs who had been kidnapped were very unhappy once they showed up and had to sit there for several hours waiting for a chance to play.

A few important differences here, though... mine screw-up was accidental, while it sounds like Your GM planned ahead of time to remove a character from an entire campaign. Mine was also for only on night, while your GM might have removed this player from several sessions of gameplay. That is just a complete lack of respect for the players.

Needless to say, I haven't tried the "kidnap one of the PC's" ploy since then.

EDIT: Oh, by the way, did I mention that one of the players who's PC got kidnapped was my wife? Yeah, she made sure I felt really bad about what I had done.

 

[tkilburn]

Naive response for the day

Are we sure this isn't a simple answer hidden in pretty packaging? I mean, a really evil villain might just make sure that all the blanks removed were the same symbol to make it easier for the henchmen, but lay it out in a complicated manner to fool intruders.

 

[Tuzenbach]

Is this helpful?

Yes, actually. Color-coding the thing makes it easier to look at. It tells me that, as the three symbols are put into groups that border like symbols on ONE or more of each individual square's 4 sides, that the two blank squares on the extreme left CAN'T be triangles.