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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 3093423" data-attributes="member: 259">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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> ).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</blockquote>

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