Puzzles and Traps

[Jürgen Hubert]

Puzzles and traps are two very iconic elements of traditional "dungeon-delving" adventures, and they see heavy use in kinds other adventures, too.

But here I must make a confession: I loathe puzzles. Now, I don't mind actual mysteries, where the PCs gradually uncover one layer after another to find the truth about a conspiracy, ancient horror, or impending threat. In fact, I love mysteries.

But nothing annoys me as much as being in front of a blocked passage where the PCs are facing a logic puzzle - possibly presented by some sort of rhyming verse - and where there is one thing and one thing only to grant them passage. The GM might think the solution is obvious (or not), but if the PCs don't come up with the solution, the result can be hours of frustration when they try out every conceiveable thing without making any progress. And that's not my idea of a fun game.


Traps, on the other hand, can be okay if used in moderation - and indeed, they can make logical sense at many occasions. After all, the current bad guy is probably wise if he invests some money in security precautions. But if you overdo it, the odds are high that the PCs will become paranoid and carefully search every 5'x5' block of floor for hours before proceeding.


But I'm willing to hear from people who have used these tools more effectively than I did. So please, tell me about games where traps and puzzles have made an adventure more interesting instead of frustrating!

 

[Cor Azer]

I greatly enjoy puzzles, but I also realize that many players do not share my enjoyment. FOr that reason, on those occasions I do include a puzzle, it has one of two conditions:

1. There's at least one other identifiable way around it. This other way may not be safer, and it may be little more than "brute forcing through", but it's there.

2. It's not crucial to get through. IE, there's nice treasure on the other side, but the MacGuffin needed to thwart BBEG is not there. It may be elsewhere in the dungeon, but the puzzle-blocked area is just a side trek.

Conversely, I loathe traps... or rather, I loathe traps that are scattered about indiscriminately. A well- and frequently- travelled dungeon should not have every single door and hallway trapped - that way leads to too many dead minions. And as you mentioned, it leads to paranoid players and characters.

I'll trap treasure chests, or vault doors, but if you ever find a standard guards' barracks trapped, it's because you chased someone into the room and they threw up a crude "delay you for a moment snare" or some such.

 

[Huw]

Puzzles are okay, provided that they're not vital. In Hall of the Rainbow Mage there are several puzzles, but if you don't solve them, then you've just got a fight, or maybe a longer path to go down.

An example from this module is a secret door which is meant to be opened by a special key. However, it does have an (albeit high) DC to find and open. The party I played with got through without the key, and the module still worked.

 

[Lockridge]

I agree with everything Cor Azer said.
I'll just add that its part of a DM's job to keep the game moving and keep it fun. Its not fun to be stuck at a door for hours of real time.
If I see frustration instead of fun I will sometimes employ "tricks". Some folks frown on this sort of thing but one trick might be to have an Umber Hulk (or other burrowing creature) appear through the door. The PCs can now get through but they now have a fight on their hands as a cost of passage. When I used that trick the players were actually relieved to see the monster. This doesn't fit every situation of course.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

I love puzzles, but I seldom include them in games. I did include one here in a pbP game that I run, but these boards are a different experience. The puzzle took the party about a week to figure out in RL terms, but in game time it wasn't actually that long. And to be honest, I've had NPC conversations where the party is flirting take away from the game for longer than a week!

Tabletop, I seldom use traps and if I do I do an INT check to give frustrated players the ability to say "I'm stupid, this ain't fun any more, but my character could probably come up with the answer." Some may say it is a cop-out, but the way I figure it I doubt I could cast many magic missles in RL. But in Role Playing I get to do greater things than a simple magic missle. Thus, I am not my character which means that my character should be able to know things that I cannot figure out.

In general, though ... I don't use puzzles unless I know it is of a variety that someone in the group likes to do and they can legitimately be solved in a short time with cooperation from everyone.

Traps - on the other hand - are awesome. I like traps. But I only use them in places that make sense. I like the comment above about too many stupidly placed traps in heavy traffic areas leads to dead minions ... and to that I would add having to reset the trap all the time!

 

[Pielorinho]

NCSUCodemonkey uses puzzles to great effect in his con games. I've played twice with him, and loved all the puzzles. (Of course, I like brain teasers in general, and I'm afraid that I may have hogged the puzzle-solving in the last game ).

Some things that made his puzzles work:
-He was goofy about them. Yeah, they were puzzles; so what? He didn't try to hide that.
-On the other hand, in the game, they weren't designed puzzles. Instead, you might encounter a chasm you needed to cross, the bridge having broken, with only a few planks available and a few pillars across the chasm. YOu had to figure out how to cross the chasm. No evil bad guy had put a puzzle in the middle of the adventure.
-They were concrete. He didn't just tell you the rules, he handed you a physical object to manipulate. Here's the chasm (a board); here are the planks (little foam strips of varying lengths); here are the pillars (little pegs on the board, to which the foam strips can be attached). Show me how you cross!
-They were varied. There might be five puzzles in the game, but they were all very different from one another. I don't want to discuss other varieties, since I don't want to give away his game secrets, but there were a lot of different types that appealed to different players.

What I DON'T like are games in which:
-The puzzles are of the GRE variety. "Thog is massacring villagers. Each villager is wearing a hat. The one wearing the feathered cap did not get crushed under Thog's warhammer. The one wearing the beanie died immediately before the one impalede on the horns of a passing minotaur. The one killed by Thog's breath was wearing...." Those are horrible. Never put them in your game.
-Ones inflicted on the PCs by an ancient, long-dead race. What are those ancient, long-dead races thinking? That's just not plausible.
-Ones inflicted on the PCs by a sadistic wizard. I tell you, if I'm a sadistic wizard, I might put a puzzle in my dungeon, and kill any adventurers that fail to solve it. But the ones that solve it successfully? I'm gonna kill them even more: the smart ones threaten my ego.

Daniel

 

[delericho]

I like both puzzles and traps. Their major use, IMO, is to challenge the players directly, rather than challenging the characters. I find this to be a good thing, but also something that is extremely difficult to handle well.

There was a recent "Design & Development" column on Wizards.com that caused me to radically rethink my handling of traps in the game. It pointed out that a good trap won't simply be placed arbitrarily, and therefore a smart player will always know when to check for traps. However, the problem with that is that the characters will therefore find and remove virtually all traps without fanfare or (frankly) much interest. And those traps that aren't spotted too often are simply 'spoilers' (you get zapped by lightning. Lose 24 hit points), which again isn't much fun.

Instead, the column suggested that traps should be considered an encounter in their own right. Perhaps the entire room is trapped, with all manner of moving blades and mechanisms. The rogue then must interact with the trap on a round-by-round basis, perhaps dodging past one part of the mechanism to allow him to disarm another, or whatever. (And, of course, a really good DM can combine two or more encounters into one - try combining a trap like that with an attack by Wraiths.)

The key to traps like this is that there are really two parts: the game-mechanical 'trap' bit, and the non-game 'puzzle' section, where the player figures out how best to use his character's abilities. In general, the 'puzzle' bit for this sort of trap should be fairly simple - you don't really want to have this one trap consume the entire game session, after all.

(Oh, and as with all puzzles, there should be multiple ways past. If the Wizard wants to just bypass it with a Disintegrate, or the Fighter wants to just suck up the damage and smash it down, they should be able to do so.)

Puzzles, on the other hand, are generally defined by being entirely non-game-mechanical in nature. The players have to figure out the answer to proceed (or open the vault, or otherwise reap the rewards of defeating the encounter). And, although you can bypass this to some extent with Intelligence checks, that rather defeats the point of having the puzzle there at all. Might as well simply say, "The Sphinx asks you a riddle. Your Int check is high enough, so you answer it and move on", which seems a bit dull.

Here, again, it is crucial that there be multiple ways through, including at least one way through that doesn't rely on solving the puzzle. These can be non-optimal routes (it's reasonable, for example, to require PCs who don't solve the puzzle to instead have to fight there way through tunnels filled with troglodytes and rust monsters), but they must exist, except in the case where getting past the puzzle is strictly a nice-to-have.

When developing the puzzle, start from the solution and work backwards. Make sure all the pieces needed to solve the puzzle are easily available to the PCs... provided they realise they need them. They work out a set of clues to aid the players in solving the problem. Work out how many clues you think are needed... then double it.

Finally, assign a (real) time limit to the puzzle, beyond which you won't hold up the session any longer. Decide whether to rule that they party Wizard solves the puzzle once that time has elapsed, or whether to rule that the party Barbarian gives up in disgust (or whatever... but the key thing is to avoid frustrating the players for too long, so you want to move them on at this point - might be better to have orcs kick in the door at that stage instead). You could play this by ear, by watching for signs of frustration from the players, but should have a back-up plan in advance.

If the players solves the puzzle, they get the XP for doing so (a normal puzzle should have a CR equal to the Average Party Level, IMO). If they don't, they don't get the XP (even if your ruling has the Wizard solving it). Oh, and they get the XP if they come up with some sort of clever solution for the puzzle.

Of course, as with traps, puzzles should not be placed arbitrarily. They're entirely appropriate in the lair of a Sphinx or Brass Dragon, but less so in the lair of some orcs.

Anyway, just some thoughts on how I will handle these things, should I ever get to run a game again.

 

[IcyCool]

Well, they are pretty much the only thing that makes the Challenge of Champions fun (they're all about puzzles). Try one of them sometime. I think there was one in Dungeon recently.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I had a really bad experience with a puzzle. The DM actually playtested the puzzle with other students. If we failed to figure out the puzzle within 30 steps, we would fight something. It wasn't an easy or pleasant encounter either. The playtesters solved the puzzle in about 20 rounds. It took us about 50 to solve it.

Oh yeah, we had to beat the puzzle to move forward

I like the Code Monkey puzzle idea. I saw something like that in a Star Wars novel, too. Of course, it doesn't work if you can just cast Fly

The Design and Development article is a great idea for making a trap. It shouldn't look like a Resident Evil trap.

There was a similar series of nasty traps in an Alias episode. Alias had to climb down a chimney that was very hot. She had a special suit for that, but a complication arose. Then she came to a room she knew was trapped with machine guns. She threw some large, bouncy kevlar balls into the room and waited for the guns to run out of ammo. There was an electric floor trap she somehow avoided, then the acid room shower, which she fixed by gumming up the showers. She had to get the McGuffin out of the shower room. However, it was taking her too long, and the stuff she used to gum up the acid showers was not going to last forever!

 

[Wild Gazebo]

I have used several puzzles. But, I must admit, I really don't like them anymore.

One of the tricks I used to keep my players happy and engaged was: add levels of success instead of pass/fail. Another was allowing characters with varying intelligence a different scaling of clues. So that characters with high intelligence had more clues than characters with low intelligence. At first I wouldn't let them colaborate but at the first sign of frustration I would allow them to share all of their clues. I would never stop a game dead for any length of time that would cause my players undo frustration...so I would continue to give more clues unless asked to stop (which happened a few times).

And I always let brute force work...with consequences.