Smart vs. Intelligence and Combatless Roleplaying Sessions

[Oryan77]

One question I have for people who only do skill checks instead of actually solving puzzles/riddles is...if a player isn't as smart as his Wizard with an 18 Int, yet he knows the answer to a puzzle before rolling dice, does he still have to roll a check to see if his "Wizard" knows the answer? If he fails his check, he's not allowed to use his personal knowledge to solve the puzzle? I mean if his Wizard fails a check & doesn't know the answer, surely a Starbucks Cashier wouldn't know it

 

[DonTadow]

That's all very well, but what about the Player who's lousy at solving puzzles and such? Then, too, there are those times when everyone at the table has a brain fart. At one time, with a group of intelligent/smart players, we spent hours trying to work out a puzzle that we knew we had all the clues to figure out (including a few extra hints that the GM threw in after the first hour), but we finally all gave up in utter frustration. It nearly ended the campain. (Especially after the GM told us what the answer was and we all slapped our heads and chorused "Of course!")

The easy way to do this is to treat a puzzle that goes unsolved like a monster that goes undefeated. the party doesnt get whatever he the prize is. But what you also brought up was puzzle management. Depending on the situation and puzzle, I might throw in some sort of knowledge check to a subject related to the puzzle to determine a clue for the players if i sense that we've spent too much time on it. But a dm also has to pick puzzles that he thinks the party can solve. I never put in a puzzle I can't solve. The cloud Kingdom products do a good job of giving dms enough clues to give their players , even providing suggestive checks to issue out the clues.

 

[swrushing]

Several things...

First, if your players are taking the time to give you feedback and tell you what they like and don't like, that is NOT the time to argue with them. thats valuable feedback, listen, ponder and consider it carefully. it sounds like they aren't telling you to "do no puzzles" or to "do nothing but combat" but to not center and entrie run around a puzzle and provide some combat.

if that will help them enjoy the run... why not do it? it doesn't have to be a big combat, maybe they interrupt a mugging o a rape in order to meet the important NPC. Maybe the NPC then brings them to his/her home for a reward or to stay as guests of honor or to be the guests at a grand party.

A little 20 minute combat can spur an entire series of role playing moments without taking an entire session.

Second, i tend to view puzzles as something to be used in great moderation and **never**
as the center of a plot. I have just found that they only produce lots of fun once in a great while and never if they run on long, like say requiring multiple gathering of info and such.

as for the smarts vs int and such, sounds like not a definition parsing i would take. make the puzzles relative to the campaign world, not the real world.

here is the key... i think... if you want the puzzle to be represented by more than just a die roll, then craft a puzzle that requires more than just a die roll but which is still solvable by CHARACTERS. maybe a knowledge nobility check is required to recognize the play off the name of a noble house known for hosting a pumpkin festival and that leads to the pumpkin carving which in turn leads to a knowledge religion check to recognize the sacred symbol which leads to... ideally, all these "clues" (or most of them) have already been introduced, so a player who recalls the significance of the noble house-pumpkin-religion-etc can solve it without rolling but the CHARACTERS might also be able to without one-die-rolling it.

Using your combat resolution analogy, you don't require your players to know swordplay to resolve a combayt encounter, neither should you expect your players to be gifted at puzzles to solve your puzzles.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I. Hate. Puzzles.

That's not totally true. But, here's the catch. If I can't solve a puzzle in 10 minutes, I'm done. And, that's a long time. If there were multiple puzzles in game, and I'm spending the majority of the session wracking my brain trying to figure out puzzles, then that's just frustrating. I can do that on my own with a puzzle book. Figuring out puzzles generally involves the players sitting around thinking, not interacting with anyone. If I'm spending even 25% of your session doing this, I'm not having fun. It's called being bored.

Add to this that most DMs can't write good puzzles. I can't. I can write decent mysteries. I can make decent traps. I can't write decent puzzles, and most people can't. And, bad puzzles arn't fun.

Also, it is a Player challenge, not a PC challenge. Bob the barbarian with 5 Int/8 Wis is wracking his brain with Wally the Wizard with 20 Int/14 Wis, and all that matters is whether Bob or Wally is good at puzzles. I don't want the DM to challenge me. I want the DM to challenge my PC.

Out of D&D, I don't like puzzles, generally. I find them to be a waste of time and boring to boot. I prefer other intellectual pursuits. The occasional riddle is fun. The occasional crossword puzzle is fun. I loathe word finds, though. And those "code" things, I hate those. Put three puzzles back to back, and I'm liable to just fall asleep out of boredom.

I think Puzzle solving, though, is more Wisdom than Intelligence. Or more precisely, a mixture of the two. You can't solve a puzzle unless you can remember things and have a decent understanding of a few things. You also can't solve it unless you can combine different things learned to come up with your own clonclusion. These two aspects, I believe, are Int and Wis respectively.

 

[Stalker0]

I think Umbran is right, I don't like just using roles to say you got the puzzle, I like giving those with good int rolls clues to the puzzles to let the players figure them out easier.

 

[wedgeski]

I'm quite surprised at the amount of folks who don't like puzzles in their game - to me, they've always been a part of D&D. The disconnect between player smarts and character smarts is an interesting one, but it's not something that's ever been a factor for us.

We once spent two full sessions playing through SKR's "The Crypt of Lyzandred the Mad", which for those who don't know is basically a maze full of maths puzzles and brain teasers. Not one Intelligence check was rolled. If we didn't know the answer, we guessed and likely got it wrong. We had great fun on that. Part of it was the context; we had all just been killed and this was our 'test' to return as champions of the Gods. Everyone got their moment in that adventure, and we came back to the Prime really thinking we'd earned another shot at life.

I think my point, if I have one, is that puzzles have their place but like anything in the game, you've got to choose your moment.

 

[Brian Gibbons]

I'm always surprised at the dichotomy between puzzle-solving and character skills/stats. Far too many GMs/modules seem to use the "Alright, I'm going to step out of the game, hand the players a puzzle, and sit back and let them solve it as players; after we're done with that obstacle, we'll go back to playing D&D" system.

Simply rolling for a puzzle is unsatisfying to some, but that's far from the only possible way to make a puzzle an actual part of the game, related to the character's skills/stats.

- When you ask the players riddles, allow each character a number of wrong answers equal to their Wisdom bonus;
- If the players have to do a crossword or other language-based puzzle, have the amount of time each player receives dependent on their Intelligence bonus;
- Have different levels of puzzles--the smarter characters (or those able to make a relevant Knowledge skill check) receive easier puzzles or ones with more clues already filled in;
- When asking riddles, go around the table in Intelligence bonus order (or an initiative based on Int). The player first in line gets to hear the riddle and either answer it or pass it on to the next, and so on down the table (meaning that the most intelligent has the most options in picking what to answer; the least intelligent the least options).

Yes, the above options generally assume that PCs are solving puzzles independently (as otherwise it becomes tougher to tailor it individually to each PC). That's deliberate. If puzzles in general are player-based non-D&D challenges, group puzzles are even worse, usually degenerating into the one or two players who like puzzles interacting with the GM while the players who just came to play D&D sitting there bored.

Personal worse puzzle ever encountered: A module which attempted to have one of those classic three-variable matrix logic puzzles ("The fortuneteller lives in a purple tent", "All red tents are occupied by men", "The butcher does not have a blue tent") in which the idea was you were supposed to puzzle out where everyone lived, in order to determine where to go to meet your target. It nonetheless utterly failed to account for the simple obvious solution of the PCs walking over to the area in question and just asking around for the information rather than puzzling it out.

Characters have skills and abilities in D&D. If those skills and abilities are not able to be used in solving a puzzle, you're not playing D&D.

--
Brian Gibbons.

 

[Zappo]

I hate puzzles - but not because of them being boring, or because they are OOC challenges. Well, maybe a bit because of that, but the main reason is another.

I hate puzzles because, 90% of times, they simply don't make sense. They have no IC reason to be there. Their only purpose is to serve as a challenge, but realistically how many people would make something like a puzzle? The Moria door is a particularly bad example; realistically, that puzzle would be very poor at stopping bad guys. When there is no answer to the question, "Why?", my suspension of disbelief is badly hurt.

 

[LostSoul]

I'm with ya here, except...

I don't want the DM to challenge me. I want the DM to challenge my PC.

The way I see it, the DM challenges me through my PC. When a troll jumps out of the shadows, that's a challenge to me, but I use my PC to smack it down. I have to figure out how to beat the troll into a red paste using my PC's abilities, but I'm still the one being challenged there.

I suspect it's just semantics I'm arguing, so I'll shut it.

 

[Umbran]

Actually, reasoning is (according to webster) the ability to come to a logical conclusion. It has little to do with speed of processing.

I don't have a Webster's handy, but I expect it says more than that.

Computers are fast data processors, right? Well, all they ever do is apply specific rules of logic to data. By your definition, a comupter "reasons", and the faster it does so the better.

My conclusion is coming also from studies in which some kids do well on standardized tests but horrible in school.

The occasional disjoin between test scores and school performance is highly complicated, andrequires a whole lot more than "some kids are faster thinkers than others" to explain.

With no skill associated to being smart it has to be assumed that being smart is up to the character. Especially since smart has nothing to do with intelligent.

Again, I feel that premise is flawed. You are applying your personal definitions to game stats that you did not define.

The game is intended to model the character's innate personal traits in six stats. It is designed to model everything in those six stats. In the real world, full body coordination and grace, manual dexterity, and hand-eye coordination are three different things, but they are all covered by one stat - Dexterity.

Philosophically, you don't require that any player match his character's physical abilities. Why, then do you require that his mental abilities must be strongly tied to the player's?

I find it odd that people hate puzzles because they figure that their intelligent wizard should automatially be able to figure them out when having a great understanding of magic has little to do with figuring out a riddle. It would be the equivelent of saying, my character is intelligent he should automatically know how the weak spot of a Bodak.

Puzzles are things one can solve by thinking. The weak spot of a Bodak is not a puzzle - it is a fact or datum about a creature. One cannot be expected to reason out that a bodak is vulnerable to sunlight or cold iron just by looking at it. But, if one has studied bodaks, one should know this, just as if one has studied human medicine, one knows that a kidney-punch is nasty. It'll be covered by a Knowledge skill, which is Intelligence-based.

But that's neither here nor there. This is a role playing game, which means that the player should be able to take on a role that is not himself. Which means he shoudl not be limited to playing with his own "smarts", as you put it. You allow players to play people unlike themselves in other ways. Why not in this way?