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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herpes Cineplex" data-source="post: 1805465" data-attributes="member: 16936">Ah, yes, the time-honored "The people who designed this were crazy, or at least would seem to be crazy to ordinary people" explanation.  <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=";)" /> But hopefully at the end of this thread you'll post what riddle you decided to go with and also what the backstory behind it all was.  My curiosity has been piqued.  (Besides, I hate it when these "hey, suggest a [foo] for my game!" threads never actually tell us which [foo] was used and how it worked out!)Perhaps, but they were the kind of staple that I tended to remove even back in the god-awful days of high school AD&D. <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=";)" />I'm guessing, then, that your players groove on solving big elaborate riddles, so you're catering to their interests by giving them one.  At least, I hope they do; it'd be a shame to waste it on a group that doesn't actually enjoy them.I'll confess I have a hard time empathizing with groups that love riddles, seeing as out of our current group there are only two people who get even a tiny amount of fun out of solving them.  And the one who likes it the most is usually the GM, which leaves one person who kind of enjoys them to work on solving the puzzle and everyone else is just bored out of their skulls; not exactly the best use of our time.But this makes me wonder how the vast riddle-using public out there deals with them.  Are you lucky enough to have lots of players who really get into solving riddles, so everyone's involved?  Or are the non-riddle-loving players just extraordinarily patient while the riddle-lovers have their fun?And on a side note, do you bother to make any distinction between player knowledge and abilities and character knowledge and abilities when using a riddle in a game?  It's always seemed like an insurmountable problem to me: either you make it a riddle that the players have to solve, or you make it a riddle that the characters have to solve, and neither of those choices have ever worked for me.  If it's for the players, then 70-90% of the groups I've played in get bored and frustrated and generally nonplussed because they're not having fun, and you run into silliness like a character who should be able to solve a riddle failing because the player is a dunce, or dumb characters solving riddles just because their players are clever.  And if the riddle is for the characters, then it becomes a flurry of dice-rolling followed by the GM passing out increasingly-obvious hints or even simply saying "you solve it" or "you fail," which is similarly unsatisfying and makes you wonder why we wasted our limited gaming time on it.So if I seem down on riddles in general, it's because...uh...I'm down on riddles in general.  I've never played in a group where they were fun enough to be able to make up for those kinds of annoyances.  Honestly, it kinda makes me curious about what it is we've been doing wrong or what you guys are doing right; any thoughts?--right now i'm going with 'you are all a bunch of freaks'  <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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