How do you communicate Abstract & Location based Puzzles?

[dAlephNull]

Many DM's out there might agree with me when I say that creating clear and well matched puzzles for your players to figure out is one of, if not the hardest aspect of DMing, but that no really memorable campaign is complete without them.

You can't give a puzzle a CR, unless it has a trap or monster element, and in my opinion, the best puzzles don't. On the other hand, it gets old really quick to run up against a "my blank is blank, but my blanks don't blank, what am I?" carved into a stone door before every boss-battle.

I try to include a lot of abstract, character based, or situational puzzles. It helps to have a very broad definition of "puzzle". For example, the most succesful puzzles for me are merely testing the attention of my players by inserting seemingly innocuous information or elements that become significant later. Or just putting two and two together; i.e. in a recent adventure, players had to pull down a chain that cold damage as a chill metal spell. It took them a while to figure out that if they splashed water from the brook several rooms previous onto the chain, it would freeze, and eventually the ice would be heavier enough to pull down the chain, opening the iron door or whatever other mechanism.

But that's easy, since its something that I can easily work into my narrative, or into a prop.

But something that has always been a really pivotal element of RPG videogames, and of general adventuring canon, is puzzled that are location based, or searching based. For example:

Getting a map, and using it to find buried treasure, for example. The problem is, I don't really know how to manage that in a narrative format like DnD without it ending up extremely boring, or extremely lead-by-the-nose, or just a glorified search/perception check.

Has anyone out there figured out a good solution to integrating this fairly classic RPG device into a tabletop setting? I'd be eager to hear even half-formed ideas.

 

[am181d]

I don't know that this'll be particularly relevant, but:

In one campaign, one of the characters started out with a shield with a weird etching on the back. Eventually he figured out it was a map, and then he figured out that the map could be overlayed on a map of the town they had traveled to and that it aligned to reveal entrances to a series of catacombs beneath. (That required, among other things, scaling and re-orienting the maps until they could overlay it onto specific key landmarks: both the town map and the catacomb map called out sewage drainage pipes.)

Once they had completed the overlay, it revealed a few different subterranean areas, including a secret hiding place for cultists, and a crypt that contained a magic sword they were looking for. The direct root to the crypt was blocked off by a cave in, but -- wouldn't you know it -- there was an indirect root through the unaffiliated cultists layer. Sadly "don't worry, we're just passing through" didn't go over so well with the cultists.

 

[dAlephNull]

That in and of itself is a great idea. One thing that made me think of is having symbols or graphics thatcorrespond to landmarks the PC's encounter, and have the glyph be representational but mostly symbolic so they'd have to both remember the symbol and connect it to the landmark. Hmmm...

I remember in Tomb of Horrors my favorite puzzle was the very first, and a simple one indeed. You had to find the entrance to the tomb, and it merely required you to prod into the sand with a 10 foot pole. We spent hours devising mining supports for the excavation we were undertaking.