I need a good puzzle or 12

[Vegan Kid]

I'm currently running a D&D 3.5 game. It's a pretty standard setting, nothing too out of the ordinary apart from a running theme of the 4 elements (earth, wind, water and fire) throughout the campaign.

My problem lies herein. I'm TERRIBLE at coming up with puzzles for my players. I do like to put in a good dungeon crawl every now and again and try and break up the hack and slash with a puzzle, but all my puzzles seem to be way too easy or stupidly hard. To make things worse, i'm just not all that creative with the puzzles and just end up ripping them off from Resident Evil

What puzzles have you put in your game or played through yourself. Power level isn't really an issue, as I will no doubt end up using them later in the game.

 

[ender_wiggin]

Don't make your puzzles required for the plot to advance. Because more often then not, the group will get stumped for some time, and then bored, and then your session is shot.

Instead, make them optional side quests with interesting and memorable rewards.

I know this doesn't answer your question but to be honest I could use some advice in that territory as well.

 

[Simm]

If you can find them the six Challenge of Champions adventures from Dungeon magazine. Each one was ten puzzles designed to be completed in fifteen minutes real time.

 

[jcayer]

I've had some good luck finding stuff at puzzles.com
Additionally, the most entertaining one I've thrown at my players involved a chess board. Off to one side, 8 bishops, another side, 8 knights, 8 rooks, and 8 queens. They had to figure out the rules, but the goal is to put each group of pieces on the board so they don' threaten each other.

So for bishops, a straight line of them does the trick. For rooks, diagonal across the board. Knights aren't bad...good luck with the queens. I've done it, but after 30 minutes, and they were still loving it at that point, one of them offered to make a history check to see if he had seen this before. He rolled well, so I put three pieces on the board for them. They solved it 5 minutes later....1.5 years later and it is the only puzzle I've put out that took them longer than 10 minutes to solve.

Here is the solution and write up for the queens: Eight queens puzzle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Quickleaf]

If you're ever running a roguish/thieves' maze type dungeon I've got a great solo puzzle written up for 4e that should be easy enough to adapt; with a little creativity you could change the theme to something elemental. I posted it somewhere on ENworld before, but here is the quick version...

The PCs come to a pit at the other end of which is a door. The door itself is the height of two men, running flush with the edge of the pit, and covered in dagger marks. Along its surface are nine imbedded carvings of a lighter species of wood. Engraved on the stone at the edge of the pit is this riddle:

“I am the finder of hidden treasure,
Yet I am also the assassin’s gold.
I am the product when twins couple,
Yet I am also the lover left behind. Who am I?”

Each carving on the door bears an illustration and a title in Thieves’ cant.

The 9 panels are thus from left to right, top to bottom (thieves’ cant name first, and common name in parentheses): 1. Old Hand (recruiter), 2. Rum Diver (pickpocket), 3. Hitman, 4. Box-Man (safecracker), 5. Guildmaster, 6. Scapegallows (escape artist), 7. Dice Runner (Gambler), 8. Fence, 9. Sharper (con-artist).

[sblock=The Answer]Hit the panels in the following order: 1, 3, 7, 9, and 5; each represents one line of the puzzle with the guildmaster struck last. This forms an ‘X’ which is the answer to the puzzle, causing the door to lower down like a drawbridge, providing a way across the spiked pit. Striking the wrong panel or striking a panel in the wrong order triggers its trap. However, the traps don’t fire until five panels have been hit – then they all fire at once.

1. “I am the finder of hidden treasure” = ‘X’ marks the spot
2. “Yet I am also the assassin’s gold” = crosshairs or ‘X’-ing out a name on a hit list
3. “I am the product when twins couple” = two lines intersecting in an ‘X’ (also 2 + 2 = 4)
4. “Yet I am also the lover left behind” = ‘X’ as in XOXO or ‘ex’ (also the number 1)

4 +1 = 5, the number of panels which must be struck to solve the puzzle

They must be struck in this order, according to the puzzle: 1st: Old Hand, the finder of the “treasure” of a rogue recruit; 2nd: Hitman, whose contracts are the “assassin’s gold”; 3rd: Gambler, whose “twins” are a pair of dice; 4th: Sharper, whose con leaves behind the “lover”; 5th: Guildmaster, who seeks out talented rogues, pays assassins, and is chosen by two former guildmasters or the one who overthrows the last guildmaster.[/sblock]

 

[Mark]

This might help -

101 Traps Puzzles And Challenges