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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6355090" data-attributes="member: 8835">This is both true and untrue.  it depends on the game.  Sadly, it was more true for text adventures, where every item was effectively hard-coded to perform its operation when used at the right time.  You had to get the right combination at the right moment it was needed.For other games, the puzzle situation is an inherent function of the engine. Portal is an example of this.  The game looks like an FPS, but the player gets a gun that shoots portals instead.  The portals only work on walls made of the right material.  The result is, the mechanics work to create puzzles by nature of the map level.  It is both smart, elegant, and allows for multiple solutions as the map creator may have unwittingly enabled them when the player thinks of new angles to place the portals to navigate the map.However, using almost the same engine, Portal 2 fails and becomes one of the hard-coded style.  They give a few more gadgets, and in doing so, the map builders focussed on requiring the right gadget at the right time.  Which meant there were fewer actual solution possibilities for any given level.It's a case, where like Go, the simpler game mechanic enabled more options beyond what the creator envisioned.I agree on the the old text adventures.  or even most video games. You didn't beat them naturally in one pass.  You learned by death.  Repeatedly playing the old sequences to get to the part where you died, to figure out what the programmer expected you to do.  This in turn, is the sort of opposite of modern tRPG play, where you don't die and respawn to retry, you are expected to "solve it" on the scene in one take.  Now some might take that as an expectation of no failure, but what I take out of it is that the challenge or puzzle must be of a nature that a reasonably thinking party should be able to figure out in a reasonable amount of time.  Any groups that fail this, enter the failure path as expected.  Design-wise, it means picking the right size puzzle/problem.  Not too big, not too small.</blockquote>

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