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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7590147">For any followers of this thread who genuinely are interested in how "goal and approach" differs from generic "there is a secret door" or "there is a trap", and not just looking ways to argue, here are some usage notes from the above scenario:1. It takes some work to put all these pieces and place, and it took me a while to come up with all of these components.  I sketch some ideas, noodle on it, and the plan evolves slowly.  I can't just plop a secret door in a map and be good to go.  It takes preparation, in this case I probably thought about it over 6 weeks or so.  Consequently this was the only secret door in this part of the adventure.2. As an example of that preparation, there was a perfectly good, perfectly sensible reason why somebody would have sent them a gift of a case of wine.  I wanted to make sure they had wine bottles on hand when they figured out the puzzle*, but there was nothing at the time to make them think it was part of the puzzle.*Confession: when they first explored this room in a previous session I made the mistake of describing it as empty of any bottles, so I had to fix that.3. The bar code was "hidden" among a whole bunch of clues, so they wouldn't overly fixate on that one thing and solve it too quickly.  (Some of the other clues they still haven't made sense of yet, and aren't really clues to achieving goals as much as clues to making sense of the whole story, and to give them the satisfaction of figuring them out.) 4. The little girl was my backup plan in case they needed more prodding in the right direction, which they eventually did.  If that failed I had yet another, even more explicit, backup plan, but in both cases the hint comes as a reward for achieving side-objectives, rather than just given out for free.  So basically you can keep giving stronger and stronger hints until they get it, but the hints should always feel earned.</blockquote>

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