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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5731771" data-attributes="member: 54877">That's a good way.  Another good one is to make it explicit to everyone that there will be some potentially unsolvable things in the campaign.  And by explicit, I mean writing it down in a campaign guide, saying it multiple times, discussing it, etc.  That is, there should be no doubt.  Then when the players run into something that seems unsolvable, they don't butt their heads against the brick wall for hours.  If they are interested, they give it a decent try.  If they are really interested, they file it away and come back to it later. That latter only works for a long campaign where you have the patience as a DM to not give the game away on everything.  (You should, however, still have plenty of other readily solvable, vitally important things, to keep the frustration down.)  Players can get an immense amount of satisfaction from the thought that they were smart enough to realize that X wasn't solvable at level 3, but X was quirky or interesting enough to go try again at level 7.  If the reason it was solvable at level 7 was both because of new character abilities and other things they learned in the meantime, so much the better.   I don't know.  To me there is a critical difference between optional but tough mystery, puzzle, problem, etc. versus hardcoded or arbitrary adventure barriers (with or without "pixel bitching").  The former is fine as long as your players enjoy it, and you don't let it turn into the latter. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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