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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5748243" data-attributes="member: 2067">Sure, that line is different for different people. For me, the player's input comes in creating a character, choosing actions, and applying them in the best situation. If the dolt of a barbarian is answering this riddle, presumably player choice has lead to this event, and so they've stacked the deck against themselves (or been caught off-guard). If the clever wizard is answering the riddle, player choice also lead to that, and they've stacked the deck to win. If they bypass the Sphinx entirely and choose to wander lost in the desert because they are characters with higher WIS and CON scores, but lousy INT scores, that's player choice, too, and might work out better for them. Riddles of many sorts do require some specific knowledge: that is, knowledge of language, of the possible multitude of meanings for words. They are puns and allegories, kennings and koans. There's no specific "pun statistic" in D&D, but I think Intelligence does the job pretty nicely, governing specific knowledge and detail, and being associated with linguistic skill in the form of wizards (who write in books) and languages. The six ability scores are pretty broad, and I think it would be very hard to come up with a challenge that can't be reduced in some way to an application of one of them. Riddles and puzzles differ from pit traps in that the pit trap has no one solution. It is a situation where multiple approaches are valid and interesting. Riddles and puzzles, when they have a solution, have only one, reducing them to a binary system of success and failure. It's more of a test than a situation. For "tests" like that, I prefer to let the dice decide what the characters can actually accomplish, and to let the players decide the circumstances under which dice are rolled (and the bonuses that may be applied).Hey, it's really important for some folks. For me, player choice plays a larger role than player knowledge, and failure can be just as exciting and interesting as success. I'd rather have my players empowered to make decisions that make the best use of their character's abilities, and see what happens as they try and overcome the challenges I've set before them using those (falliable) abilities. Success at a test isn't so important to me that I'm willing to violate the shared illusion of this make-believe world so that someone can turn a failure into one. For me, it's key to remember that even if you're playing a smart guy, and you're thinking of a smart thing, that you're not actually standing in front of a giant hungry monster who has terrorized the countryside since before time. I get flustered and fail to remember simple things around cute girls all the time, and that's not even a little threat to my very existence. <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=";)" /> One can never account for the chaos of the way the world works, and sometimes that chaos will turn what should have been a success into a failure in the moment. Anyway, I grok that it's mostly a stylistic difference, and I'm not trying to win any converts. I'm just hoping to explain my position coherently. <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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