NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Patryn of Elvenshae" data-source="post: 5601151" data-attributes="member: 23094">Reading through the comments on this module, especially the above statements, reminds me of a late-night riddle / game that was posed to me by two former Girl Scouts who had learned it at camp.  Maybe the group here is familiar with it.  And keep your mind out of the gutter!Essentially, it involves picking up two sticks (or pencils, etc.), and handing them around either crossed, one over the other, or not.  When doing so, the person doing the handing off says, "I hand these to you [crossed / uncrossed]."  The person receiving holds them in their hands, either taking them in the state that they were offered or switching it, and then says, "I take them [crossed / uncrossed]."  Then, the person who knows the game's rules (in this case, they both knew the rules and I was ignorant) indicates whether the hand-off was done correctly.  Play proceeds until everyone figures out the rules.The trick, of course, is that the status claimed when handing or receiving does not necessarily match what the sticks look like - holding them separately (not crossed), handing them over while saying "I hand these to you crossed," the recipient taking them, crossing them, and saying "I receive them crossed," could be[/b] a valid play.  The goal, then, is to figure out what the real rules are.About 5 minutes in, one of them looked at me and said, "You're a D&D player, aren't you?"In my head I'd started simple, and when that rule didn't work, I'd been moving towards more and more complex rules - starting with things like, "The first passes can be whatever, subsequent passes are done with the sticks in the position they were last claimed to be in but are claimed as whatever you want," to "crossed = true; not crossed = false; every pass must be XOR true and every reception must be XOR false" to "the passer makes a two-character binary number from the claim (crossed = 0, uncrossed = 1, or maybe reversed) and actual pass (or maybe in reverse order), and the receiver has to switch odd-vs-even using the same logic."  Etc.The rules are actually ...[sblock]... that the position of the sticks doesn't matter at all.  Your claim - crossed or uncrossed - has to do with the position of your legs; whether you are sitting Indian style or not.[/sblock]In short, a lifetime of D&D-style riddles had ingrained in me a kind of tricksy, three-levels deep thinking that was nigh-immediately apparent to one of the referees, and it seems to be a hallmark of this particular dungeon that you shouldn't be thinking like that - except when you should, of course. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />EDIT:  The fact that the rules are supposed to figured out by 7-to-10-year-olds should have also clued me in to the fact that I was getting way too complicatd in my rules. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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