Riddle Me Not
You guys ever play Monkey Island? What about Sam and Max? Day of the Tentacle? Grim Fandango? All of those point and click adventure games share a similar structure of barrier, investigation, frustration, and eventual progress. You’ve got to figure out what the game designers were thinking in order to beat the game, and that can be a little like peering inside a madman’s skull. There was one puzzle in Curse of Monkey Island that I remember struggling with for hours. Apparently you’re supposed to spot some dandruff on a coat, which turns out to be lice, which needs to be planted on a comb, which causes the weirdly Scottish hairdresser over at the Barbery Coast to take off a well-coiffed antagonist’s hair. This was by no means intuitive. I got stuck on the “frustration” part of the experience, and I wound up resorting to my very first video game walkthrough in order to make a little progress.
I bring up Monkey Island because, even with its bright animation and cheerful Caribbean soundtrack and amusing script, it still wound up being too much for me as a player. I damn near hurled the game disk across the room like a Frisbee. This is not the sort of emotion you want to introduce to your tabletop.
Riddles don’t change too much when they cross over from the computer screen to the gaming table. Players still have to guess what the riddler is thinking. But where a point and click adventure game is crafted to convert frustration into cathartic eureka moments, TRPG riddles are a little less reliable. Players don’t have the choice to give up and come back a few days later. It took everyone two weeks to schedule game night! That means you’re obliged to sit there, wandering what the hell the talking door or the animated painting or the floating head of Jambi the Genie wants you to say.
Now despite all of the above, I still happen to like player-challenging riddles in my games. The key is to make them optional. Answering the riddle will get you a nice bonus, but it should never be the only solution. This particular tactic came up in a deliciously meta moment in my megadungeon campaign last week. STAN! had put an imposing fire elemental in the party’s path, and it demanded that they answer THE RIDDLE OF FIRE to progress. This turned out to be nothing more than a game of 20 questions, and the elemental was freaking terrible at it. He bumbled his way through the game, forgetting to explain that only yes/no questions were allowed, giving contradictory answers, and generally frustrating the players by smacking them for fire damage whenever they guessed wrong. The answer is either A) you’re thinking of yourself you big flaming jerk, or B) I attack the fire elemental. My players went with the latter, and were supremely satisfied when the dude’s dying words were, “Best two out of three?”
So riddle me this: Have any of you guys used riddles in your games? Was it successful? Let’s hear your stories (and your riddles!) down in the comments.
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While its not really a riddle, as part of the tomb of annhilation, theres a cryptic message on each floor that gives hints for waht to do that me and my party have done a decent job with. Only problem is Asherak, the lich who created the dungeon, is a asshole and thus while none of the messages have been false, some have led us to do some things that hurt more then helped.
That’s an interesting take on the idea. Riddle-as-hint rather than riddle-as-puzzle. You get the riddle flavor without the frustration of needing to find that one perfect answer.
That also works in harmony with the Rule of Three also. If they don’t get the riddle, there will always be two more clues for them to fall back on.
Love me some Alexandrian:
http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule
How close has the party come to just ignoring the riddles? I feel like that’s an option that a lot of players would at least consider.
We have just ignored a few we didnt understand at all. We have also ignored a couple due to our parties various eccentricities causing a member or two to just try and charge into the problem instead, or skip through it in zooks case for the first of my 2 sessions with him.
I’m getting the impression that Tomb of Annihilation has gathered something of a reputation for frustrating riddles.
I also use alot of riddles and puzzles in my games, but I rarely make answering them required to progress the story-line. However, if players take the time to solve the riddle or puzzle, 1st they gain bonus XP, and 2nd they gain either bonus treasure or a short-cut to a specific location. Ofcourse most, if not all of my players are highly intelligent and usually have no issue solving the puzzles or riddles (which I am completely fine with).
Ofcourse, when it comes to riddles in particular, I prefer to use in-world information (players keep alot of notes on the world’s history, mythology, etc), make use of Kennings, and allow each player a Knowledge check to gain a hint.
An interesting addition to our XP vs. Milestone leveling discussion from the other week.
The Knowledge check for hints is a good solution to the old “my character is smarter than me” debate.
Well done that man!
Exploring a red dragon’s lair one time and we came across a waterfall with magical healing properties. After drinking some of the water and bathing our wounds in it, we noticed a strange word carved into the wall behind it. I wrote it down just in case but the rest of the crew forgot about it quickly after. When we came across a huge iron golem later on who demanded the password to get past I quickly popped up with the word we’d found behind the wall. That got us through unscathed to fight the dragon. As a DM for my own kids I looked up some children’s riddles and used those in a similar situation. Simple riddles like “What follows you all day, but can not be seen at night?” but they chose option 2. Turned into an epic fight with a magical suit of armor being kicked down a staircase, so still fun.
I bet the noise from that armor was spectacular.
Passwords are tough because they tend to be so “you know it or you don’t.” Making them the gate to an easy fight vs. a locked door is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.
My current campaign is Tomb of Annihilation. It’s 5E’s spiritual successor to Tomb of Horrors. We’re not up to the tomb itself yet, (We’re like 3-4 sessions away) but I skimmed the original tomb back in the day for funzies. It’s big on riddles and puzzles that are full of impossible moon-logic unless you follow the hints provided by Acererak. I believe the modern tomb will do the same but with less “10 foot pole” design.
I never played the LucasArts Point&Clicks, but I did play Putt Putt a lot as a kid.
Using skills honed in the forge of childhood Putt Putt, I suggest shooting directly at Acererak’s mouth.
Killing him isn’t the issue, it’s making sure he doesn’t get back up. I’ve put some thought into it.
The best plan I can think of is to find a way to petrify him. The problem is that he has Legendary resistances, and most player-accessible petrification is multi-turn/multi-save, uses a high level spell-slot, and specifies flesh.
The simple answer is to befriend a creature that can petrify, (Medusae and Beholders are the only sentient ones I can think of) but we killed the Medusa we met because our characters didn’t know aboot him at the time, and we didn’t want to metagame the knowledge that he’s on the cover.
The alternative plan is find a way to contain him. Magic items that could theoretically do that are a Mirror of Life Trapping and an Iron Flask. We have neither, but maybe one will show up.
I haven’t played, but I assume there’s some reason that looking for his phylactery wouldn’t work…?
I assume if you’re capable of casting plane shift/demiplane you would never leave it on the plane you’re operating on, and things like Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum would make it relatively unfindable.
Also, they seem to be building him up as the big-bad of an overarching metaplot, so having his phylactery be findable might throw a wrench in that.
So you’re not looking for his phylactery because it would ruin the metaplot, but you are looking for a way to KO him? If you’re worried about the metaplot then I suggest working on exit strategies rather than offense. Wait for the plot to tell you how you’re “supposed” to beat him. Just concentrate on survival and escape in the meantime. Maybe some divination magic so that you can piece together his weaknesses.
When I say “The Metaplot” I mean that I think Wizards has him planned as a recurring antagonist in future published adventures, not that it’s this adventure’s or my table’s metaplot.
Acererack’s phylactery is probably at the bottom of an ocean, or somewhere else equally as much of a pain. He is a demilich and seems to be able to eat souls directly, so it is questionable whether even he needs to know about his phylactery.
While running a campaign based on a random dungeon generator, I decided to embellish a bit on a scenery description which included a statue that gave cryptic whispers. When the players came up to it, I had the statue give somewhat morbid riddles which would reward the players with cryptic hints about what was further in the dungeon, locations of secrets, etc. My players LOVED it and spent over half the session going back and forth with the statue until I had to cut it off by having the statue’s last reward warn them of an impending attack, as I had fully run out of appropriate riddles/rewards by then.
Even many sessions later, the cryptic hints gotten by the statue were slowly being ticked off by the players as they continued to explore. They had recorded the hints in a document they labeled “Inspiration Phrases from a Statue” after the first comment they received from it was “…all of you will die in a fire…” They even got an NPC from a different adventuring party to come into the dungeon with them one session to help them pick some locks and consult with regarding a particularly annoying hint that seemed to point towards a secret room they just couldn’t locate. (Hint: “…beyond the iron…between up and down… a room with no door waits for one who will find it…”)
My favorite riddle from the session was as follows:
“Ripped from my mother’s womb,
Beaten and burned,
I become a blood thirsty killer.
What am I?”
I shall answer in the form of a song.
Assassin of Black?
A forged sword.
In one game I was in the session ended with us discovering a box at the end of a dungeon inscribed with a riddle that zapped anyone who tried to brute-force it open. Session was wrapping up so everyone else was packing up, preparing to go, talking about cool and dumb things they did. During that time I was still obsessed with the riddle, and solved it after half the people had gone. It was satisfying for me, but for everyone else it was just waiting for that guy who enjoys riddles to do his thing.
One of the biggest problem with riddles and puzzles in general is that it usually it ends with 1-2 players solving it and everyone else just sitting around frustrated and waiting for the game to resume. One way I’d like to use riddles in a future game is to set up a mystery or something terrible the party doesnt know about and have a sphinx or fey or something give a riddle that’s a big hint in solving it. Not mandatory, and can work on between sessions, but if they solve it they get the feeling of satisfaction and the horrifying realization of “oh crap, that’s whats going on!” and if they don’t when they find out what’s going on there’s the great “crap, why didn’t we see it before?” I may even do something where the sphinx or fey will just tell them the answer…for a price. I think that would make the riddle interesting without being pull-out-your-hair frustrating.
Any idea what that riddle might be? Sounds like it would take a lot of craft to make it do all that heavy narrative lifting!
One idea I was considering was using multiple riddles that together gives the hint. For example, the sphinx gives three riddles:
1) Relaxed, I sit upon my perch,
till suddenly I give a lurch
And off I speed on wingtips three
Before my prey can think to flee
I make its flesh and tendons part
And claw my way into its heart
2) I forge bonds with strength of hardest steel,
And place kings upon their thrones.
You wil find me on the battlefied,
And in the heart of every soul.
3) The man who made it didn’t need it
The man who bought it didn’t want it
The man who used it didn’t know it
Answers
1) Arrow
2) Blood
3) Coffin
Together, they hint that Duke Arrowood, who has been one of the party’s primary benefactors, is secretly a vampire.
Hmm, this makes me think of a potential way of doing riddles that isn’t as frustrating: Deliberately giving them at the end of a session, with the DM explicitly telling the players to hold all answers until the next session.
That way people who enjoy riddles can mull it over until the next session while the rest of the party can get on with their lives, and by a week the players should already have the correct answer… otherwise that’s probably a riddle they wouldn’t have been able to answer no matter how long they took.
Seems like a reasonable approach to me.
It wasn’t a “riddle” of sorts…
Our party was split up at one point, and the DM came up with a puzzle that looked decently brain-bender-y involving two jugs, a fountain, and a scale. He had been looking around for something a little obscure since the player who would be using it was also a DM and he wanted something they might not have seen.
“So there’s a scale and these two jugs, and-”
“Oh! You mean like in Diehard?”
“What?”
“Wait you never saw that movie? I thought that’s where you got this from”
I proceed to explain how to solve the puzzle “maybe he hasn’t seen it yet either?”
It turned out he hadn’t seen the movie either, so all’s well that ends well.
So wait… Your player tricked you into explaining the answer to the riddle? Sounds like a pretty good solution to me.
No I was one of the players not having to do the puzzle, so he was ok with telling me about it.
And as it turns out the only person who had to do the puzzle was also the only one who hadn’t seen that movie.
So he lucked out big time there.
Gotta love it when you luck in to a best-possible-scenario situation like that. What was at stake with the riddle? Forward progress? Loot?
It was the only way out of the room that his character woke up in.
Now see, that’s the sort of setup that gives me pause. If dude can’t get it then the rest of the table sits there staring at him while he feels like a jerk for holding up the game.
Ah well this had been a special circumstance though. The party was split due to attendance conflicts IRL so this was a one-on-one session.
There MAY have been another way out of the situation also as a fallback if the puzzle was too confusing, but I don’t remember…
One of the most interesting (if occasionally frustrating) parts of talking TRPGs is the diversity of underlying assumptions. I assumed there were 4-6 dudes clustered around a table. The calculus changes when it’s a 1:1 scenario. Good call. 🙂
I found I liked Day9’s comment about riddles and why they seem so mleh. Most riddles, while having a correct answer, do not have incorrect answers. So long as you do not violate stated rules, you have any number of options to get the answer.
You ever see Mirror Mask? Here’s the scene.
THE ANSWER TO MINE IS STILL A SECRET!
I aspire to be a very important man one day. I need me a flying tower.
I would like to use riddles but I’m aware of myself enough that I am not that clever. As a player it can be cool to encounter and solve them but when it can’t be solved because no one can think of the answer or it’s some oddball monkey-bar hoops to go through it’s not fun. The former because no one likes to feel stupid and the latter because people aren’t you and don’t know the reasoning for the puzzle.
I think that it’s OK to stump your players, but not at the expense of the adventure. I’m imagining a puzzle box with treasure inside. Think about it as long as you need. The treasure will be waiting when you finally figure out the riddle, but you can continue with the adventure in the meantime.
I will just say:
Writen on a door:
“To open my, you must destroy me,
no answers is key, only the key is answer,
in time trapped the key, in dissolution opening.”
The answer as reward to anyone who responds right.
I… I do not know. 🙁
The first, final and only clue:
“What it says on the tin”
The answer tomorrow… for “enjoyment” of the readers.
The door doesn’t open and must be hacked down like in “The Shining”
Well, well, well. I salute you clever one for answer the riddle right. YES in fact the answer is smash down the damn F***ing door.
For anyone who dosent understand here is the answer:
“you are in a room. Make a spot check.”
“I got a one.”
“You walk across the room and hit your head with something.”
“I got a twenty! Yes!”
“Now you see the door you just hit with your head. There is a inscription in it”
“To open my, you must destroy me,
no answers is key, only the key is answer,
in time trapped the key, in dissolution opening.”
To open my, you must destroy me: Literal, as the clue say: “What it says on the tin”. You cant open the door in any other way than destroing it.
no answers is key, only the key is answer: There is no correct answer, there is no key or password. The only key is an axe… or hammer… or desintegrate… empowered fireball is also accepted.
in time trapped the key, in dissolution opening: Why is “in time trapped the key”? Because people would read the riddle and try to answer it instead of smashing the door. The time they expend in a useless task traps the key. “in dissolution opening” because… Well. ¿At this point i need to explain it?
See this riddle, that i make in two minutes, is a trap. when people get a riddle they think the brute force answer is the erroneous one. It is so obvious that is not the answer. With that in mind i created a riddle counter intuitive. The only right answer is the erroneous one. There is no other answer. Meanwhile the poor pc and their player will smash their brains instead of smashing the door. Up and bellow this post people discus how riddle and be barriers and that, this riddle has only one solution that rewards the erroneous approach to riddles and obfuscates the ones who try to use the right path. Feel free to torment any player with it, and if you are thinking: “I am glad this guy dosent advise Aceverak in trolling” you understand the fun of this little game of mine.
So greeting to Bohandas for answering the riddle. Here is your treasure.
“The next room is full of gold and gems. Alas when you try to grab them you dissapear in a flash of light and you encounter yourself standing in a street of some city… without equipment… or clothes. Just with a piece of paper that say: “The answer is the only reward.” and in the other side: “Yes i am trolling with you.”
Just kidding, have a good day. 🙂
“to open me, you must-”
“I cast shatter!”
“Oh wait does wizard have knock?”
“Ok wizard casts knock!”
“Is the door open now?”
Sorry Bohandas has already answering the riddle, by hacking it down like in “The Shining”. Good answer anyways. Shatter is a good answer, along with empowered fireball, maximized fireball, feel free to cast middle finger of death. It is an inorganic door but anyways the spell is fun.
GM: Congratulations, the chest is now unlocked! You can hear the crunch of glass from within, and the fluids of half a dozen different magical elixirs run out over your fingers as you open the ruined lid.
PLAYERS: (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Another good answer.
I’ve used riddles before for a dungeon. For a bit of backstory, one of my characters has a fair bit of dragon in a lineage, and was going to an ancient tomb housing the body, and artifact, of an ancient dracolich.
The riddles were not, I feel, terribly difficult, though the second acted almost as a series of mini-riddles wrapped up in one big one, but they were, and I think this was key, completely relevant to the thematic of the place. They were all focused on the concepts of dragons, life, death, and undeath. My players got through them with relative ease (about 28 minutes in total, not counting time spent in the fight at the end, which was about an hour and a half because they were going about it very… inefficiently).
If you want to see what the riddles/puzzles were, I’ve copy-pasted my notes for them below. Also, bear in mind, second stage never had initiative or turns rolled. That was done entirely in real time, with me telling people every six seconds that they took damage if an enemy was out. For reference when reading below, Dorvikarion is a sphynx, Falazure is a dragon god of Undeath, and Deimos is the dragon-descended party member seeking this particular item.
First Stage: The party enters a mausoleum. In this first room, it is almost totally empty, except for a small altar in the center of the room, with script that reads “Our nature is of opposition. As we live, foes oppose us. As we die, foes oppose us. As we rise once again, foes oppose us. At every stage, we combat them. At every stage, we fell them. At every stage, the rivers flow about us. To proceed, the sands of time mingle with the rivers of life. The rivers of their lives, and the rivers of our’s.”
In order to proceed, Deimos must mingle his blood with the blood of another in a bowl of sand on the altar. Both take 30 points of damage as blood gushes from them, feeding the altar. With no sound made, the altar moves and reveals a stairway. The stairs proceed for what feels an almost endless time, eventually leading to a new chamber.
Second Stage: The second room is an unlit dome. It is covered with images of life, death, and undeath. A dragon egg marks the beginning of life, a skeleton marks the end of life, and the impressive form of a skeletal dragon in flight marks undeath. Script, written in draconic, rings around the dome-like structure. The scrip reads: “With a spark, comes life. The sands turn, and fall. Civilizations rise, and civilizations fall, and civilizations rise again. Then come our enemies. and with them comes decay, and as fell civilizations, so do we. Between the spark and the decay, we thrive. Between the decay and the spark, we rest. But when the spark meets the decay, we rise until both are snuffed once more. Therein, do I lie.”
In order to proceed, radiant damage must first be dealt to the egg. The walls then turn and shift, and sand begins to fall. A fifteen minute timer begins. The murals change. The murals now show civilizations, rising and bustling, traders, and mortals being birthed. The floor changes, and now seems like a miniature city. When >70 damage is dealt to the city, the next stage begins. The murals shift once again, and show the image of a dragon being felled. A clay dragon rises from the ground, and engages the group in combat. It lives until it takes necrotic damage and has two claw attacks (+10, 1d8+6). When the dragon falls, the sands stop for a moment. A search of the sand-filled chamber will reveal a sparkling black gem where the sands poured from. Upon hitting the gem with radiant damage, the sands fall once again. The gem splits, and moves to the walls as the murals change one final time to an image of a great skeletal dragon head, with a black onyx for one eye and a white onyx for the other. Once necrotic damage is dealt to the white onyx, and radiant to the black onyx, the sands finally stop for good, the floor drops away, and the group falls into a third chamber.
Third Stage: The group falls into the lair of the Dorvikarion. The room is a large square. In one corner of the room, there is a statue holding a massive white onyx. In the other, a statue holding a massive black onyx. In the center is the tomb of Nyllakkarit. The statues face towards an adjacent corner. Dorvikarion looks over the group for a brief moment before saying, “The spark met decay, and thus he rose. Both were snuffed, and thus he fell. Throughout it all, he met opposition. So too, must you.” With this, the combat begins. Dorvikarion is nigh immortal. Whenever the lair action occurs, both statues emit a beam of their respective energies in a straight line across from where they face, dealing 8d8 damage, dex save DC 15. If the statues are positioned to both hit the tomb, or if they both hit Deimos, the fight ends. When the beams meet at the appropriate area, a panel on the tomb moves, and the Eye of Falazure is revealed.
I’m glad your group got through, but that seems a lot like the Monkey Island stuff to me. Don’t get me wrong: it’s all kinds of cool and thematic. But that’s a whole lot of trial and error guesswork on the part of the players.
Did you allow Intelligence checks or anything for hints?
I think Magus might be a stupid person.
I think it is more politically correct to say, “She is Charisma-based.”
Hey, my Paladin is “Charisma based” and he has 13 intelligence. It’s gonna be 14 next level.
Dude, I would hardly call an Int of 13 “Charisma-based.” Sure you’re not a genius, but there’s no reason to beat yourself up like that. 😛
If we assume that your IQ is 10xCha, then 14 Intelligence is by definition Genius.
Next level my Paladin will have 14 intelligence and 18 Charisma.
I’d call that plenty Charisma based.
So way back when, I was playing King’s Quest 6: To Heir is Human. My siblings and I had gotten as far as the labyrinth section, and finally figured out what the floor pattern was, and eventually, I made it to the actual minotaur’s lair. I saved, quickly, and started trying stuff.
Now for entry into the labyrinth, the game gives you a freebie. If you haven’t collected all the things needed to successfully pass through, it’ll send you back out to collect them, once. If you enter again, well, that’s on you. But if you already have everything, your character will say “Nah, I think I’m prepared” and they’ll toss you in without further ado.
I had done such a thing in this playthrough, so I -knew!- that the answer was somewhere in my inventory. I started clicking everything I could, and clicking the minotaur who was mere seconds from charging me in from the save game. The ink bottle didn’t work, the stone didn’t work, the rope didn’t work, didn’t work, didn’t work. But I knew it had to be something.
The moment when I moused over the Red Queen’s scarf…that’s when it hit me. “This is it! How could I not see this?” And lo and behold, my dude shook it out like a matador and played bullfighting with the minotaur, who ran right into a little lava pit he’d been ostensibly using as a garbage/corpse disposal.
The levels of HELL YEAH were elevated to the level of a triumphant march around the house, bragging that I’d beaten the minotaur to all my siblings.
Kings Quest had good puzzles.
Fuck Nikstlitslepmur, though.
This is exactly why riddles are tempting, despite the drawbacks. Watching players feel like geniuses for figuring it out is all kinds of cool.
Haven’t used riddles in a game because neither of the games I was in lasted very long.
That said, I’ve got a good one from Monty Python:
“What’s brown and sounds like a bell”
“duuuuung!”
As for riddles holding up the game, if it comes to it, just let the wizard roll for intelligence, or the cleric roll for wisdom or the bard roll for lore
I think you’re right that, if the riddle is holding up the game and there is no opportunity for progress, it’s best to handwave a bit, allow some dice rolls, and move on. However, at that point it becomes a skill challenge rather than a riddle. You lose the integrity of the riddle game, and the challenge becomes that little bit cheaper. That’s why I favor “optional but honest” rather than “open-ended” when it comes to riddles. Both can be fun, but I think the latter flavor of puzzle is a slightly different animal.
I should really do a bit more research on this whole “challenge the players” vs. “challenge the characters” question. It comes up in a number of contexts, and I never feel prepared to properly debate the issue. My feeling is that it’s OK to create situations that challenge players, but I know that some people hate the ever-loving shit out of the idea. I’m interested in exploring that disconnect, but it deserves a thorough treatment rather than the old standby of “it comes down to a matter of taste.”
I like using riddles in my changeling games, cause changelings are entities of dreams and fate and prophetic dreams are specifically something that was mentioned and has systematic rules for identifying them. It can be fun to give a player a hit of what is going to happen with a strange bit of iconography and cryptic language and watch him slowly piece things together as they happen and finally arrive at the “Oh, god, this is what’s going to happen” moment.
My player that also enjoyed running changeling tried to do it for me, but he actually laughed and said I ended up circumventing the entire circumstances that lead to the prophecy with what was effectively a bit of rp.
So it’s “riddle as prophecy” for you rather than “riddle as barrier?” That’s an interesting way to keep the flavor and dispense with the drama. Well done you!
I think so. It has all the benefits of riddles, such as watching the player have that “Oh! That’s it!” moment without the problem of watching him beat his head against the wall because he can’t progress. Sometimes it works awesome and allows the player to circumvent the BB because he figured out the riddle. Sometimes it doesn’t and he only figures it out as the BB reveals his master stroke. And occasionally, the player ignores all prior advice and something bad happens and he feels terrible for ruining an NPC’s existance because he failed to pay attention to the signs. But it’s always been dramatic and narratively fulfilling.
Ah, riddles and puzzles. I like to put some set up into it. Here’s an example.
The night starts off with a freshly opened bag of dorito holding, a full potiom of stay-up-past-midnight Dew, and I as the DM playing music. The song, going in the backround as I open the game, is a song I aways play when a certain villain is mentioned or seen, known for his love of birds. We open on a scene with the baron of the town hiring our adventurers. A crow sits on the sill as he explains from his bed that a magical plague haunts the town. Moving on.
We now approach the first fight – during the fight, a crow caws each time a villain is felled. I make sure to describe it in detail, and mention the cawing in a more “passing detail” sense. No player seems to have caught on yet… Moving on.
They are traveling, and hear a whistling-like birdsong, from a crow flying high, and I play another rendition of the villains song softly in the background. They get it now, and want to kill the stupid thing. They make a knowledge check and figure out this is actually exactly from a popular, local fairytail. It’s the tale of the half-man, who sends his crows after wicked children. They all look around, and ask each other if anyone has been particularly wicked. Moving on.
Eventually, we come to the “dungeon” as it were. The first door is locked, magically of course. It holds a simple logic problem, easy to solve but takes time. I hand the alchemist the logic problem, and as soon as he starts I ask everyone ELSE to roll initiative. The magical guardians are endless, and the fight stops when he solves the puzzle and hands it back to me. Moving on……
We get deep into the dungeon, and there is a small safe with a magic mouth. The mouth says:
“If you would like me to open, you’ll need to solve my riddle.”
The say yes, we accept, and the mouth begins:
“I come on inky darkness and I rest on sickly beds.
I feast of fallen soldiers, and fill your ears with dread.
If something wicked this way comes, I’ll take off with just their head.
Amd when he blows the torches out, I’ll feast on all the red.”
They took a while, thinking until someone put it together (within a minute) and then took a while again, remarking to each other how “it was a raven” and “no, crow, always a crow” and finally stepping up to say;
“A Crow.”
The torches went out.
A little prep goes a looong way.
Foreshadowing like a boss. This seems like a good example of “riddles as prophecy” like I mentioned elsewhere in the comments.
What song did you use?
Any idea what you would have done if they hadn’t solved the riddle?
Halfmans song, a game of thrones themed song you can find on youtube, and if they hadn’t? Well, who knows. I’m sure the alchemist would’ve blown a hole in the wall with bombs. Otherwise, if there was something they needed on the other side, I would have simply moved it elsewhere and left the treasures and xp locked away.
I remain appalled at my own lack of Game of Thrones viewing. I’ve yet to see so much as the pilot. 🙁
I am personally not a fan of riddles in tabletop rpgs, because I think more often than not it devolves into “what can the player think of” instead of “what can the character think of”.
On the other hand, one of my favorite video games uses riddles amazingly well and in a way I want to use in a tabletop rpg. If you’ve ever played Legend of Grimrock, you know what I mean, but if you haven’t, here it is:
The riddles of the game are given in cryptic notes, and you have to solve them in physical challenges. So, for an easy example, one puzzle involves five switches on the wall and five nearby pillars. There’s a note on the ground that the guy that came before thinks you need to match the pillars with the switches, but you aren’t told if they need to be up or down. So you fiddle with them and get the right order and the door opens up.
A harder puzzle involves having to press a button to launch a damaging orb out of a statue’s mouth. You then have to move quickly enough to open the doors to let it pass you, but the switches to open the doors are in the path of the orb. You have to have quick enough timing, but when you succeed, the doors open just the right way, the orb is fired into a receptacle statue, and a further door opens.
The whole game is filled with puzzles that may or may not translate well to D&D, but makes me really want to do it anyway, just to try it out.
That a fair cop. There always a bit of ludonarrative dissonance when it comes to challenging players. It’s a game! But it’s a story! But I want to be challenged! But my character is smarter than me! That mess comes down to a matter of taste, which is one of the reasons why the “make it optional” aspect is my go-to in terms or riddling. Players can engage or not as they prefer, but the session moves on regardless.
Oh boy am I terrible at riddles and puzzles.
I like your position of “always optional” since I’ve certainly encountered a few non-optional or “that wasn’t SUPPOSED to be optional” type of situations. It’s fun if you know trying and failing to figure it out isn’t a big deal since if you fail you lose nothing, if you succeed you feel clever (really the in-game prize is actually unnecessary). But if it’s a plot door, then I’m just going to be slamming my head into it well past the point I’ve given up and the GM should realize I’m not going to get whatever it is and eventually I’ll resort to whatever the least destructive method to the game I can figure to go around it. But there’s no upper limits on that since hey, if I have to blow up the plane of existence we’re on to get past the door… I can still manage to play that game somehow. But I can’t play the game where I can’t play the game anymore because I’m never going to figure out the one correct combination of words or actions the GM is looking for among infinite possible responses.
Frustration can lead to some pretty cool moments of catharsis, but the risk is terrible indeed! I aspire to never turn my players into Ender Wiggin. Because the giant’s eye is intangible, mine is not, and players have sharp fingernails.
This has nothing to do with anything, just a random piece of Ramsus trivia you reminded me of. For no particular reason at all, back in my middle school years I think, I spent basically the entirety of a day reading Ender’s Game from start to finish.
Really, the advice in the blog is just an extrapolation of the much pithier “plan problems, not solutions” school of encounter design. Riddles have that wonderful fantasy feel, and I like to slot them into my game every once in a while. The problem is that they’re a bit weird since, by their nature, they only have one correct solution. You can futz with that and allow bizarre solutions (see the Mirror Mask link elsewhere in this thread) but at that point you’ve given up the integrity of the riddle game. Sometimes that’s a trade worth making, but as a matter of taste I prefer the strict-but-optional approach rather than the anything-goes school of RPG riddling.
There are other solutions. For example, I once made a riddle. It was suuuuper easy. However, it was written in dwarven, so they had to translate it. This can be any language, try to make it one only one person speaks so they have a chance to shine and feel like that language choice wasn’t worthless. Then, they had to contend with the fact some of the runes were missing. So here’s what they got;
“When I rise I see the world,
When ……
If I fall it all ends,
Until I …. Again, and it begins.”
Now maybe you can get it from this, but there are options.
A. Find another route.
B. Shape stone or similar spells to go through the wall.
C. Mend to repair the stone and read the whole riddle, making it painfully obvious what the answer is.
D. Insert player ideas here
Nice. Sounds like the sun to me. What was the full riddle?
One way I’ve seen riddles done well was in an episode of Foreververse (the system they were playing at the time was Werewolf: The Apocalypse I think). The players are given a riddle by faces coming out of a door. They answer the riddle, the door opens and they move on through. They come to another similar door. This time they answer, the door opens, but as they walk through the tooth covered walls attack them, dealing a hefty amount of damage.
It turns out that when the doors are given an answer they always open, but only the correct answer allows them to proceed unharmed. I like that that keeps the story moving but gives a real reward for guessing the riddle. It’s also fun to watch their trepidation between answering the riddle and taking that first step down the corridor.
I’ve not had to play many riddles in games. Our Zeitgeist game has a lot of prophetic dreams, but I don’t think we’ve correctly worked one out yet prior to the event it prophesies coming to pass. I’m equally not sure that if we had it would have helped us very much.
Perfect example! The riddle is there to provide a bonus, not to shut down the adventure by blocking progress.
A couple of weeks ago, the party got split up in a dungeon we were traveling through. (The GM’s fault, not ours.) Fighter and Rogue ended up in a room where they had to put together one of those Tetris-like jigsaw puzzles together to get out. An hour later, even after the GM had given them a hint and put one of the pieces into place, they still hadn’t solved it. Luckily we play online, so the GM just let them work on it when they could during the week.
Some say they are still down there today. On a still night, you can hear The Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN8Cq5HEBug
I can see Rogue twitching with PTSD now. “No! Not more blocks! Not more blocks!!!!”
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa.
I enjoy a riddle, a puzzle, a tricky conundrum. I would run half my campaign as a point-and-click style problem solving adventure, if I could get away with it. But in deference to player enjoyment I tone it down to just the odd puzzle here and there.
But yes, I still put in a few riddles, typically disguised in flavour text and verse when they arise. Often, much player frustration ensues, thouh I hope – I really hope – there is still a carthartic sense of achievement when it is solved.
But sometimes…
Well.
Actually, last session of my current campaign illustrates a problem I have. The party, having entirely against my expectations and planning stranded themselves in the Big Bad’s own lower plane prison, had to be given a chance to escape. So I concocted a little “welcome to hell” sort of verse that contained in it clues of the key they would need to aquire to open the portal back out of this place. Therein was the riddle, and it was a fairly simple one; it was a moonstone, which this lunar-themed fiend referred to as the “shattered bones of traitrous kin”. The party managed to pick that up quickly enough when they saw the scattered rocks.
But the verse was padded with a lot of “come pay me homage / serve me / do my bidding” stuff, because I couldn’t believe the fiend would just let people who blundered in just wander out again unless they were helping it in some way.
What I hadn’t considered is that though the players immediately recognised a riddle being put into play, they weren’t sure how much of the verse was the riddle. So, faced with this towering fienish abomination, they chose to take it as literally as possible. They started worshipping the bugger. One even built a little effigy. They forced the upright goodly godly NPC who had accompanied them to shut up, get on his knees and grovel. They stayed doing that until I realised they were waiting for a cue to go, and I had one of the fiend’s servitors place a geass on each of them to bind them to service, and shoo them off.
So now they could leave, but the party are bound to aid the very being I was setting them up to fight, all because I was a bit too vague in my “how to escape” instructions. Though also because the one party member who would refuse to submit to the fiend had also refused to follow them onto the fiendish demiplane.
How had I expected it to go? Well, I’d expected them to pluck a moonstone and run. I had set up a deliciously hard encounter against those very servitors (fallen angels, using the deva profile but evil themed) who rather bemusedly anointed them. Even if they had considered the whole “serve me” schitck literally, it had never crossed my mind that the party would so eagerly do so!
I’m not saying this is a bad outcome from a storytelling perspective (once I’ve had time to process it at least and decide where to go next), but it does hilight the very real dangers of a tricky DM outsmarting himself.
The best way to do a puzzle or a riddle is to pose it and then choose from one of the guesses you really like of your players. Oh, and making the puzzle optional of course, because otherwise a group could get stuck for hours without going forward in the guessing game.