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<blockquote data-quote="Psion" data-source="post: 3228219" data-attributes="member: 172"><p>Indeed it does, since you quoted me out of context and hacked off the preceding sentence in your quote. Which taken in context I am trying to spell out that challenges without painfully specific solutions are not, for the most part, what I perceive anyone talking about.</p><p></p><p>Pretending that the other side is only arguing the extreme position does nothing to advance the discussion.</p><p></p><p> </p><p></p><p>I think those are excellent puzzles, with the caveat that I've learned that often players cannot be expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game world. I think the 3e take on knowledge and bardic abilities help bridge the gap in this regard.</p><p></p><p>I am suddenly reminded of two puzzles that I ran in my own game world. While I won't claim they are the height of puzzle challenges, I think they both avoid the "pixelbitchy" nature that I refer to as being the problem here.</p><p></p><p>The first puzzle involved putting statues of deities in an array of 5 depressions in a pedestal. The statues had to be selected from a collection of statues of the whole pantheon. The combinations that could be had here was immense.</p><p></p><p>The clue here involved a title that each deity had which belonged on the pedestal. The players weren't that familiar with their formal titles, but were able to suss out all but one of them. Only having to fill one slot, the players were able to proceed by trial and error.</p><p></p><p>A second puzzle I ran was a logic puzzle of the sort you find in one of those logic puzzle magazines (in fact that's where I got it.) A dragon who had challenged the PCs told them certain known facts about some turned over cards which, though logic and deduction, could be used to tell them where ALL the cards were. The catch? The cards were all <em>deck of many things</em> cards. Turning over the wrong card had bad results.</p><p></p><p>I TOTALLY overestimated my players' ability to solve a puzzle like this. But they managed by "taking the hit", and flipping over a few cards until they had enough knowledge that they could suss out the rest without too much brain sweat.</p><p></p><p>In short, the point here is that I think if you bank too much on the players being able to solve a problem requiring a very specific and obscure solution, you are asking for trouble in the form of a log-jammed adventure. But if you allow gradiated levels of success, more and less optimal solutions, or don't make solving the most difficult puzzles mandatory for progress (just helpful), you can have these puzzles but not bowl your players over with them.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I really had no idea what WG4 (the original) involved as I never owned, ran, or played in it. I only had to go on what I was told here. It sounds like, from what you are saying, Piratecat had it right... it needed a better update.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Psion, post: 3228219, member: 172"] Indeed it does, since you quoted me out of context and hacked off the preceding sentence in your quote. Which taken in context I am trying to spell out that challenges without painfully specific solutions are not, for the most part, what I perceive anyone talking about. Pretending that the other side is only arguing the extreme position does nothing to advance the discussion. I think those are excellent puzzles, with the caveat that I've learned that often players cannot be expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game world. I think the 3e take on knowledge and bardic abilities help bridge the gap in this regard. I am suddenly reminded of two puzzles that I ran in my own game world. While I won't claim they are the height of puzzle challenges, I think they both avoid the "pixelbitchy" nature that I refer to as being the problem here. The first puzzle involved putting statues of deities in an array of 5 depressions in a pedestal. The statues had to be selected from a collection of statues of the whole pantheon. The combinations that could be had here was immense. The clue here involved a title that each deity had which belonged on the pedestal. The players weren't that familiar with their formal titles, but were able to suss out all but one of them. Only having to fill one slot, the players were able to proceed by trial and error. A second puzzle I ran was a logic puzzle of the sort you find in one of those logic puzzle magazines (in fact that's where I got it.) A dragon who had challenged the PCs told them certain known facts about some turned over cards which, though logic and deduction, could be used to tell them where ALL the cards were. The catch? The cards were all [i]deck of many things[/i] cards. Turning over the wrong card had bad results. I TOTALLY overestimated my players' ability to solve a puzzle like this. But they managed by "taking the hit", and flipping over a few cards until they had enough knowledge that they could suss out the rest without too much brain sweat. In short, the point here is that I think if you bank too much on the players being able to solve a problem requiring a very specific and obscure solution, you are asking for trouble in the form of a log-jammed adventure. But if you allow gradiated levels of success, more and less optimal solutions, or don't make solving the most difficult puzzles mandatory for progress (just helpful), you can have these puzzles but not bowl your players over with them. I really had no idea what WG4 (the original) involved as I never owned, ran, or played in it. I only had to go on what I was told here. It sounds like, from what you are saying, Piratecat had it right... it needed a better update. [/QUOTE]
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