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<blockquote data-quote="5ekyu" data-source="post: 7612534" data-attributes="member: 6919838">[MENTION=6786839]Riley37[/MENTION]&quot;When did that idea or value emerge? The idea that using my knowledge of prime numbers would be “bad form”? It wasn’t the guiding principle of that puzzle in White Plume Mountain.&quot;You followed this up in other posts but to add my thoughts and recollections...Others have noted back in ye olde days when Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine put forth guidelines for submissions and the like, they had at times expressed preference to having the modules, segments etc that &quot;challenged the character&quot; as opposed to &quot;challenge the player.&quot; It emphasize putting the charspacter abilities at the heart of the chsllenge over the player's knowledge of real world things. So, unless the classes and chargen involved some charscters having &quot;math theory&quot; and others not, an example where the key to success was a simple &quot;prime numbers&quot; derived answer would not be preferred. Another type of example would be the following &quot; puzzleTiles with pairs of numbers carved in - indications three fails is bad, very bad.First tile (6,3)Second Tile (12,6)Third tile (9, 4)Mystery/puzzle tile (7,?)The correct answer would be 5! But 9nly if you knew how to &quot;read modern english&quot; would that be obvious as the second number is the number of letter in the modern English spelling of the first number. That puzzle makes little sense &quot; in character&quot; in a fantasy world not set in times using modern english - or even regions where today modern English is not the language.If the puzzle had been for a campaign instead it could use names of historical dwarven leaders and numbers equating to the pips on their rank insignia... then that can combine character knowledge of dwarven history and/or player- knowledge of such lore that had been previously introduced. As for White Plume mountain iirc it was a convention competition thing firdt ... it bears noting that the &quot;convention&quot; contests modules were designed to be scored &quot;competitive play&quot; between groups and so they tend to be structured into series of quick scorable tests loosely tied together with zero expectation of prior lore or play history - often with pre-gens for PCs. As such, &quot;player tests and puzzles&quot; fit that set of &quot;design intents&quot; for the quite well. Obviously, those were not exclusively used there - but it did fit the bill far more than it did the more &quot;part of an actual ongoing csmpaign&quot; design goals for the non-convention-competition modules and dungeons.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="5ekyu, post: 7612534, member: 6919838"] [MENTION=6786839]Riley37[/MENTION] "When did that idea or value emerge? The idea that using my knowledge of prime numbers would be “bad form”? It wasn’t the guiding principle of that puzzle in White Plume Mountain." You followed this up in other posts but to add my thoughts and recollections... Others have noted back in ye olde days when Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine put forth guidelines for submissions and the like, they had at times expressed preference to having the modules, segments etc that "challenged the character" as opposed to "challenge the player." It emphasize putting the charspacter abilities at the heart of the chsllenge over the player's knowledge of real world things. So, unless the classes and chargen involved some charscters having "math theory" and others not, an example where the key to success was a simple "prime numbers" derived answer would not be preferred. Another type of example would be the following " puzzle Tiles with pairs of numbers carved in - indications three fails is bad, very bad. First tile (6,3) Second Tile (12,6) Third tile (9, 4) Mystery/puzzle tile (7,?) The correct answer would be 5! But 9nly if you knew how to "read modern english" would that be obvious as the second number is the number of letter in the modern English spelling of the first number. That puzzle makes little sense " in character" in a fantasy world not set in times using modern english - or even regions where today modern English is not the language. If the puzzle had been for a campaign instead it could use names of historical dwarven leaders and numbers equating to the pips on their rank insignia... then that can combine character knowledge of dwarven history and/or player- knowledge of such lore that had been previously introduced. As for White Plume mountain iirc it was a convention competition thing firdt ... it bears noting that the "convention" contests modules were designed to be scored "competitive play" between groups and so they tend to be structured into series of quick scorable tests loosely tied together with zero expectation of prior lore or play history - often with pre-gens for PCs. As such, "player tests and puzzles" fit that set of "design intents" for the quite well. Obviously, those were not exclusively used there - but it did fit the bill far more than it did the more "part of an actual ongoing csmpaign" design goals for the non-convention-competition modules and dungeons. [/QUOTE]

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