What were some of your most successful puzzles?

[badash56]

Hey guys, I'm one of those DMs who loves a good puzzle in a dungeon. A problem I've had once or twice was I made the puzzle a little too difficult and the party got VERY frustrated to the point they wanted to stop playing. I find it challenging to come up with something that is fun, interesting, and at the same time difficult enough to challenge them yet not take up 3 hours.

Probably the most successful puzzle I had was one from a cooperative dungeon pdf. I forget which one, but it had to deal with 6 statues, each with a riddle, and each holding a weapon with a word on it (an answer to one of the 6 riddles). You had to place the weapon on the statue with the correct answer. It was straightforward, fun, and it took the party a little bit to figure it out, but not too long. I thought it was a good balance.

So anyone have some good (or bad) puzzle stories? My worst as I said was the one riddle I had that was just toooooo cryptic. The group wanted to kill me!

 

[Whimsical]

I find that the best RPG puzzles are mysteries and challenging tactical/strategic scenarios. The typical "puzzle" in an RPG tends to be nonsensical in purpose.

In the Shadowrun game that I have been playing, planning out successful break ins into corporate strongholds has the players in a puzzle-solving mode about how to circumvent security, barriers, do what we intend to do, then be able to get away and get away with it. Now that's an RPG puzzle.

 

[badash56]

I find that the best RPG puzzles are mysteries and challenging tactical/strategic scenarios. The typical "puzzle" in an RPG tends to be nonsensical in purpose.

In the Shadowrun game that I have been playing, planning out successful break ins into corporate strongholds has the players in a puzzle-solving mode about how to circumvent security, barriers, do what we intend to do, then be able to get away and get away with it. Now that's an RPG puzzle.

You know what, now that I think about it that is a very good point. I recently played a game where the PCs had to do something similiar, but in a fantasy setting. I basically just provided the set up and they went to town with it, and it ended up being one of the most enjoyable sessions we've had in awhile.

 

[Chunklets]

I find that the best RPG puzzles are mysteries and challenging tactical/strategic scenarios. The typical "puzzle" in an RPG tends to be nonsensical in purpose.

I don't disagree with you, but, nonsensical as they may be, riddle-type puzzles in fantasy RPGs are kind of a genre staple, and it's fun to hurl one in every once in awhile. I ran one that revolved around prime numbers once, and it seemed to go over well with the players.

In general, though, my favourite RPG puzzles are the ones that deal with figuring out what NPCs' agendas are, and how the party fits in to them. I'm a big fan of political and social intrigue in RPGs (again, within reason - ya gotta have a dungeon crawl every so often for balance!).

 

[Crothian]

We had a series of 36 room spaces, but there was just 35 rooms. Each room had a leveer so if it was next to the empty space the room could move. The rooms all had doors in different areas so the trick was to figure out what rooms to move to get to a hallway on the other side and at the same time not trap yourself. This was the pinnacle puzzle at the end of a long campaign plot and the DM thought it would take 27 moves to solve, but we found a way he missed to do it in 8. It was fun even though it was a bit easier then expected.

 

[Ravilah]

As a DM I'm a HUGE fan of puzzles--of all the types mentioned thus far.

In terms of the traditional riddle/puzzle type, my first dungeon ever (a wizard's tower actually) the PCs were sealed in a room with eight statues. Touching each statue made it speak one piece of a four-line poem. The players had to figure out that it was a poem, and they also needed to have a general understanding of the psychology of the wizard who built the tower to get the metaphors in the right order. (The statues come to life and attack them afterwards, of course).

My favorite political intrigue puzzle was in a kingdom of city-states ruled by nobles in varying degrees of corruption. The PCs were members of The Brotherhood of the Cord: a secret society of assassins, thieves, and spies who work to keep the government honest (despite itself). Well, one of the nobles was secretly building an army and researching dark magic; the PCs had to steal records, infiltrate a charity ball, interogate a noble and wipe his memory, and finally break into a high security mansion (filled with Clerics of Vecna as it turned out. Eh. Go figure).

But the hardest puzzle (so they tell me) was figuring out how to kill the "Final Boss" in one campaign who could summon loads of foul creatures AND could simply teleport (or plane shift) away if things got tough. They had to figure out how to get into her lair without her Diviner fortelling their coming, get close enough to kill her, and keep her from plane shifting. It took hours of planning, and even a mini-quest to get the things they needed.

I love this game.

R

 

[Bront]

One of the best ones I had was a coordinate/order puzzle, where I wasn't consistant in the instructions. It was solvable, and they got it, but it took the entire party to interact with it.

I like a few good riddles or logic puzzles, but they need to be set up right. I used them in a spot designed to test men to weed out the unworthy.

Ultimately though, my favorite puzzles are plot puzzles, making the players connect the dots with the plot and trying to find out what the link is.

 

[RangerWickett]

A simple one recently that went over well:

The group was exploring an Egyptian temple on Gaia (the magical world that exists in parallel with our own world, Terra). The temple was in a vast cave, and in the cave was a dry riverbed they had to cross. They could sense magic in the distance, and they knew the thing they were looking for was where the energy was coming from. So they went into the riverbed, torches and magical light held high, and they traveled.

For, like, an hour.

They never got close, and were getting confused as hell. When they turned around, they couldn't get back to where they came from. They had a clear directional guide -- the magical energy was powerful enough that all the spellcasters could sense it like magnetic north -- but it took them a while to realize the energy actually moved slightly to make them travel in circles. The light from their torches was not bright enough to see all the way across the dry underground riverbed, but they kept thinking they could see gems glinting on the ceiling of the cave, forty feet up.

One PC levitated and saw there were actual gems in the ceiling. When he was that high up, though, away from the light sources of the rest of the PCs, he thought he could see, in the distance, stars in the darkness. He extinguished his own light source, and for a moment, floating near the ceiling, the stone vanished, and instead he could see up to the night sky, full of constellations.

A bit of discussion later, the group turned off their lights and used a bit of Egyptian mythology to know that they wanted to follow the direction Osiris pointed. Eventually, by following that instead of following the fake magical energy beacon, they got where they were headed.

There was also a tiny stream in the middle of the riverbed that they ran across once or twice, filled with lotus petals, but the stream, they figured out much later, actually took a slow, graceful arc around the location they were trying to get to, so that following the stream would also get you nowhere. However, anyone who took a lotus from the stream would not be attacked by the mummies.

I quite enjoyed it, and so did the players.

 

[nameless]

My best puzzle wasn't so much a riddle as an easy route/hard route. It came to me when I was rolling treasure for the encounter and my result was 80,000 or so copper pieces. Who stockpiles multiple tons of copper coins, anyways? This was the result.

The party was in a long abandoned cave/temple complex, which seemed uninhabited. They came to a large open room with a central theater that was about 2 steps lower than the surrounding room. In the center was a golem that looked inactive, but detect magic revealed was still animated. Filling the depression in the floor were thousands of venomous snakes. The golem was immune to their bites and venom, obviously. The party would have simply avoided the entire area if not for the three very large chests among the snakes.

They used a little magic and a lot of planning to move the chests away from the snakes, and were confused as to why the golem didn't attack. They excitedly opened the chests and found half a dozen tons of copper coins. They were underwhelmed. Out of spite, one player took a handful of the coins, which was worth noting.

As they went through the dungeon, they kept referring back to the room full of snakes and no treasure. After a very tough fight against a mind flayer fighter, they were wounded and limping back through the cleared temple, when a very angry golem cam rampaging down the hall and mercilessly attacked the cleric to the exclusion of all else. They won, but only by a hair.

Here's the setup: the theater room was where the temple had its sermons, and the parishioners were supposed to leave their donations after mass. As commoners, they left mostly copper coins. The golem was originally a guardian, but when danger passed, it was just instructed to collect copper coins lying around and put them in the chests. Naturally, it would be disruptive if the golem walked around during the service, so it was instructed to gather all the coins 10 minutes after everybody left the room. Since they took the coins from the chest, it had to go find them and put them back in the chest.

The worst part was that the golem has dragged the chests back to the snake pit after the party left, so they couldn't even bring their reward back. After that, the party was a lot more careful about what they disturbed in strange places.