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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riastlin" data-source="post: 5624613" data-attributes="member: 94022">Wow, really hard to pin this down to just one or two most memorable, but I'll give it a shot.  These two moments actually came from the same encounter and are from my first adventure running as DM. The party is pursuing the villain through a noble's manor and has come to a room with a closet.  In the closet are signs of a heck of a lot of fire.  The walls and floor are scorched, with some of the scorching carrying over to the bedroom.  Also in the closet is a single pedestal with a box on it.  Opening the box reveals a series of gems laid out neatly in the box and on the inside of the lid of the box is a grid of letters. This was a basic word search puzzle.  The puzzle contained the names of the assorted gems.  If you "circled" the hidden gem names, the remaining letters spelled out a phrase:  "The key is the emerald in the right column."  Pressing that emerald would cause the secret door to open and the party to be able to follow after their prey.  Pressing the wrong gem caused an explosion. So the half orc looks at the lid (I had written the grid out on a sheet of paper) and sees the word "Ruby" right away.  The half orc says "A-Ha!  I press this ruby here!  Closet and room blows up and the party kindly asks the half orc never to touch the traps or puzzles again.  This was also all done completely in character. The second moment came as the party had spent several minutes (probably about ten) examining the word search.  They refused any offer of hints as they wanted to solve it themselves.  Finally after about those ten minutes, the ranger jumps up, throws his hands over his head and shouts "I push THIS emerald!" (of course picking the right one).   As a DM running his first ever adventure (homebrewed at that) this was really satisfying because my players really got into it, solved it, and were thrilled at having solved it.  The half orc wanted to know how he figured it out and when told the logic simply said "See, I had the right idea."  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> All in all, it felt like the exact right amount of challenge in the puzzle as it wasn't a given, but was definitely solvable and without too much time.  Seeing the players become engrossed in a session is the best reward as a DM.  Starting out well I think also helped me get through the inevitable rough patches that would follow and encouraged me to stick with it (which is good since I'm pretty much the only DM in our group).</blockquote>

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