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<blockquote data-quote="sniffles" data-source="post: 3933563" data-attributes="member: 30035">Just some general venting here, but hopefully it will give some DMs food for thought when designing challenges.Currently in two games I'm involved in our parties are facing puzzles of one sort or another. One of them involves following prophetic writings to locate an artifact. The other entails interpreting some writings to find a way to open some secret doors. I personally dislike puzzles of these types because they both rely on the ability of the players, not the characters, to solve the challenge. My GMs could have the PCs roll numerous Intelligence or Knowledge checks to try to work their way to the answer, but that would quickly become tedious. And how do you decide what DC to set each check at? If the rolls consistently fail, how do you progress the plot?Puzzles can also drive characters away from the plot. I've tried a little GMing myself, using an adventure that included a puzzle. The players roleplayed that their characters were frightened by what happened when they failed to understand the puzzle solution, and they gave up trying to solve it, which meant that they couldn't progress in the adventure. I didn't know what to do to help them out of their predicament aside from telling the players what the puzzle solution really was. How can a GM help characters solve puzzles without running into any of the pitfalls I've described above?&nbsp; What if you've given what you think are adequate hints and the players still don't get it?Yes, D_K, I'm looking at you.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue&nbsp; &nbsp; :p"&nbsp; data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="sniffles, post: 3933563, member: 30035"] Just some general venting here, but hopefully it will give some DMs food for thought when designing challenges. Currently in two games I'm involved in our parties are facing puzzles of one sort or another. One of them involves following prophetic writings to locate an artifact. The other entails interpreting some writings to find a way to open some secret doors. I personally dislike puzzles of these types because they both rely on the ability of the [B]players[/B], not the characters, to solve the challenge. My GMs could have the PCs roll numerous Intelligence or Knowledge checks to try to work their way to the answer, but that would quickly become tedious. And how do you decide what DC to set each check at? If the rolls consistently fail, how do you progress the plot? Puzzles can also drive characters away from the plot. I've tried a little GMing myself, using an adventure that included a puzzle. The players roleplayed that their characters were frightened by what happened when they failed to understand the puzzle solution, and they gave up trying to solve it, which meant that they couldn't progress in the adventure. I didn't know what to do to help them out of their predicament aside from telling the players what the puzzle solution really was. How can a GM help characters solve puzzles without running into any of the pitfalls I've described above? What if you've given what you think are adequate hints and the players still don't get it? [SIZE=1]Yes, D_K, I'm looking at you.[/SIZE] :p [/QUOTE]

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