Simple Puzzle
It’s been a few months since our spooky PCs officially joined forces, and it only just occurred to me that we never announced their party name. High time we changed that! Thanks to a deadlocked Patreon poll, the trio of Occultist, Necromancer, and Van Helscion have been dubbed The Requiem Belles: Hexterminators for Hire™. And I must say, as a relatively new party, it’s nice to see them engaged in team-building activities. Of course, group problem solving can have the opposite of its intended effect.
We talked about a similar principle way back in “Riddle Me Not,” but I think the key to a good puzzle is flexibility. Logic puzzles with specific answers have their place, but the feels-bad of getting stuck is a sure fire way to kill a session’s momentum. That’s why all my favorites puzzles are open-ended problems with multiple possible solutions.
To illustrate the principle, check out this biz from my mini-dungeon, “Feud at the Falls.” The scenario features an impassable bridge between two watchtowers, meaning the PCs have to find another way to reach their objective on the river’s far side. Happily, the have plenty of tools to do so.
2. A Cobbled Crossing
Like the rest of the watchtower, this storeroom hasn’t been used in years. It does contain a number of useful items though, particularly for anyone looking to cobble together a river crossing. The list of available assets includes two empty barrels, block and tackle, 10 feet of chain, a spare door off its hinges, a ladder, a 10-foot pole, 50 ft of hempen rope, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and several empty sacks. This tower is 30’ high.
I confess to being curious how you guys would manage the crossing. But more than that, I’m curious to hear about your own favorite puzzles. Are you into substitution ciphers? Physical props and spatial relations? Quirky sentient doors that must be reasoned with? Whatever your favorite flavor of puzzle, let’s hear all about it down in the comments!
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I have to say, I love that team name. 🙂
😀
How wide is the river/how far apart are the towers?
River is 50′ wide, towers are 80′ apart.
Towers, as in one on each side?
Pick up the tower, carry it to the riverside, lay it on its side while my buddy jumps the river and does the same with the tower on the other side. 30′ + 30′ > 50′, so you’ve got a river-spanning bridge so long as the towers are stable.
Granted, not all parties have the strength required for this solution.
One puzzle I’ve used from time to time is basically a modified game of Mastermind: You’ve got a set of symbols (could be colours, elements, or anything flavourful), and you need to use trial and error to find the right combination to proceed. Every time you guess, you get indicators showing how many symbols you had in the correct places (though not which ones they were) and how many correct symbols you had in the wrong places, but if you take too many tries, you set off a minor trap and it resets to a new combination.
I always appreciate “minor penalty but keep guessing” as a puzzle component. Makes brute force viable, but non-optimal. And that’s as it should be.
“Some things were meant to stay buried.”
Says the necromancer.
Hyuck hyuck.
Obviously, they all go in the Square hole
Best meme of 2021. 😀
For the river crossing puzzle (and this may be due to spellcaster bias), I’d just use a Fly spell and go across the river a bit of a ways down from the towers once everyone else found a way across so I wouldn’t be in the way – although I don’t know what level this is run at so that may not work at all.
As for favourite puzzles, I like clue based logic puzzles or escape room style stuff. Unfortunately, I don’t get to use them to their full potential very often since the group I DM for has a habit of trying to get around everything I throw at them by any means possible, including trying to break or harness the laws of physics depending on which suits them more.
Simple navigation puzzles like this one only work at low level. It’s a 2nd level dungeon, so you’ve got access to levitate but not fly.
Obstacles like broken bridges happen in my games, through I tend to not think of them as a “puzzle” as such.
That’s an interesting lens to look at them through, I’ll have to noodle around with it in the old nogging a bit.
As for how I’d solve the watch-tower bridge. It’d be dependent on the characters. For instance in a similar situation a wizard of mine summoned some flying minions to carry over some ropes to make a quick rope bridge. (two ropes, one to stand on and one higher to hold on to).
That’d normally be rope we carried with us too. I’d be unlikely to look at the pile of “junk” [affectionate] in the watchtower for a solution – through I do think that it’s a good inclusion for a published adventure, for the sake of not stranding other groups who are less well supplied.
Doesn’t every party carry block and tackle + a broken door?
I like going for the Last Crusade, the floor trap, not necccesarilly following in name of but something similar. Also old James Bond comic had this chess board floor where only specific path was safe.
I like floor traps, only if the whole team can levitate some one will set them off, but what kind of trap it is oh boy do I have ideas.
Is there a traditional method for figuring out the “safe path” beyond guess and check?
Varies, the traps to BBEG lair rarely come with instructions, the tomb of a ancient might have riddles to quide. Usually I let them roll some kind of locic equivalency in figuring out a safe path, or just good perception. I do try to kill my players but I am fair about it… except when playing paranoia, and the old warhammer RPGs from Fantasy Flight just were one hitkill wonders anyway.
My favorite puzzle was one that required the party to split between two towers. On the top floor of each was a sliding puzzle made of 8 colored tiles. Throughout the dungeon that connected the two towers there were clues as how the tiles should be moved. The fun part? The two puzzles were actually halves of a larger puzzle. The tiles of one tower had to be moved in conjunction with the tiles of the other. There were large windows in both facing the other tower, but the party had no magical way to communicate. They ended up striping some beds in the guard barracks and writing the color they had just moved on them. They would then hang the sheet out the window. Took them several tries and a LOT of cursing, but they finally got it.
Dungeon semaphore! Very nice. 😀
I appreciate that this one combines “traditional logic puzzle” with “creative problem solving puzzle.” You manage to scratch all itches in that way.
After seeing the puzzle, all I could think was “That’s right! It goes in the square hole!”
SAME! Occultist is definitely driving Aristocrat crazy with that “solution”.
Oh, she’s not Aristocrat. I’m sleepy.
I thought about including that gag in the comic somehow, but I was afraid my memes were old. Turns out I was mistaken.
I cast fly
fuck puzzles
😉
You’re at second level. No skipping the puzzle!
Because “the feels-bad of getting stuck is a sure fire way to kill a session’s momentum,” I only use puzzles (or any form of effective security, really) in games when I’m working with a player group that really values thinking things through, and it willing to actually engage with the environment. If I’m running a pick-up game, and sense that players are looking for an easy feeling of competence, I simply don’t bother. When players don’t want to be thoughtful, it’s pointless to force it on them.
The river crossing “puzzle” is pretty simple, especially if the PCs have equipment of their own. I’m not sure that I would even count this as a puzzle. The first thing that occurs to me is to make a raft out of the door, using the ladder and the barrels for pontoons. Presuming the rope is longer than the river is wide, use it to anchor the raft on the starting side (in case the current is strong), then use the shovel as a paddle and the pole to brace against the current.
I will refer you to the puzzle in the comic. Never underestimate the players’ ability to over-complicate things!
I sometimes (with some preparation) convert a player’s Decipher Script roll to a percentile, then (having counted how many unique words there are in the secret message and numbered them) take a big, black marker behind my DM screen and redact the random words they couldn’t “translate” from the PCs’ copy of the text.
I discovered that it’s faster than the old “Crypto-quotes” method of forcing an indecipherable text on players who may not have great codebreaking skills or the luxury of pouring over an invented language between sessions. (I’m looking at you, 1987’s “Desert of Desolation”.) I’ve caught more than one player trying to hold the page up to the light to see if he can peek at the missing words in what looks like a leaked CIA dossier. For flavor, I can always give them a page of the real text or even just some lorem ipsum converted to a hieroglyphic font or runic alphabet or whatnot, just to say “Here’s your illustration of what the original document looks like.”
I’ve done this often enough that one group began to get suspicious any time they saw a note in plain English, and they’d immediately analyze it to see if there was any sort of hidden acrostic or double meaning.
My publisher over at AAW Games tells his own story about a substitution cipher. Apparently he had some military intelligence types in his game.
https://adventureaweek.com/shop/5th-edition/limited-print-books/rultmoork/
They cracked the “secret language” in under an hour first time out. XD
Depending on how turbulent the river is, the simplest solution would be to use the barrels and the door to make a raft, and if it’s shallow enough you can use the pole to push yourself along. Which is to say, this is the point where I’d start asking the DM all kinds of nitpicky detail questions.
Incidentally, the druid with the raptor I mentioned before bypassed a few obstacles by just turning into a pteranodon and carrying people places. No idea how we were supposed to deal with these things. Why puzzle when you can just fly?
Then there was the time, with a different character, where we were all stranded on a levitating rock and needed to get off of it, but directly under us was the river Styx and on its banks were active Blood War battles. I rigged up some gliders for the party and we managed to glide right over everything and land safely some distance away. Still proud of that one.
The adventure is called Feud at the Falls. Going over the edge in a barrel is half the fun. 😀
To which I say: the answer to the puzzle is “do something that I can’t contrive a good reason to say NO to.”
Or one that makes me laugh, whichever is easier.
You might recall the tale of the masterwork snorkel:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/upcycle
😀
“Barbarian pushes the 80′ tall tower over to create a bridge across the 50′ wide river…”
I hate puzzles. They are either super-easy, barely an inconvenience, or they end the game because no one can figure out what the GM intends to be the solution and thus creates an insurmountable plot locked door.
Now, I do things like your “cross the river” thing, but that’s not a puzzle, that’s an environmental hazard to be surmounted. By swimming, floating, flying, climbing, t-porting, or going the very, very, very long way around.
To me a “puzzle” means something more like: The room has statues in it, each statue can be manipulated, once manipulated exactly the right way, a door somewhere else opens.
And the door has to be either somewhere else, or hidden cleverly enough that it cannot be found, or Barbarian proofed (all three preferably). Anything less and it’s just “an environmental hazard/terrain blockage the group barbarians through”.
The player: Well that IS a great list of items. Unfortunately, I didn’t take Carpentry, but THAT’S OK! My REAL Profession skill will work great here!
The GM: Ok, what skill is that?
The Player: Profession skill is Siege Engine Construction!
The GM: I don’t see how that’s going to help you, you don’t have enough materials to launch a medium sized creature.
The Player: **Grins looking at the Halfling Player who has been playing Thief a little bit too party thiefy**
Once I created a puzzle. Six pillars were arranged two by three. Each one glowed with blue, orange, or pink light, and the door also glowed with blue light. Touch a pillar, and it switches to the next color in sequence, but so do all the adjacent ones.
The solution was simple: Make the pillars all glow blue, same as the door. The players quickly figured out how to get them all the same color, but for some reason decided that they absolutely couldn’t let the pillars all be the same color as the door. So they made them all orange.
Making them all glow one of the two colors not on the door–orange or pink–is what would set off the trap.
> If you find yourself stumped, I recommend the brute force method for logic puzzles, as do most Barbarians
As my Paladin who ended the campaign with 18 Intelligence would say… (Read in a ~~Noo Yawk~~ Dwarven accent) “Idiots think only of smashing. Pretentious idiots think smashing is beneath them.”
I’m actually not a fan of “Explicit puzzles” because they feel artificial and game-y. I like “Organic puzzles” like how to get past the door guard who requires documentation and a password.
I hate puzzles for players and not characters. My character has skills for a reason. It means there’s no arguments over *how* something was accomplished.
If *I* have to solve something, I will solve it my way. And I am a licensed engineer. Oddly, 99.99% of GMs aren’t engineers and make puzzles that can only be solved by ignoring real world physics. GMs don’t like it when I bring up things like tensile vs compressive strength of common stone, slenderness ratios, or just the weight of rope reducing a very long rope’s working load. I can pull out my engineering & physics texts and show how all their assumptions with how the world works are wrong and therefore its impossible for me to solve them because in our universe your puzzle is crap that should have collapsed under its own poorly designed weight.
And if the answer is “magic”, *I* don’t know magic. My *character* knows magic. Let me roll a die for them.
I will, at most, defeat puzzles more than solve them. Collapse the tower to dam the river long enough to cross it. Summon a spectral undead to pass through an indestructible wall, scry them, then teleport to their location.
Is this puzzle the only way to defeat an enemy? Guess what, the campaign just became a quest to find (and possibly kidnap) the greatest puzzle-solvers in the land. Time to pack up up and head out.
Just going to comment on a well known adventure path that has a ship that is partially filled with water suspended by a chain from a simple single-arm crane.
I had to walk outside and loundly denigrate the designers for several minutes to get it all out.
By far the most valuable treasure in this whole city was the chain able to suspend a 50 ton ship plus the 30 tons of water, not to mention the dead and live load of dozens of creatures on board or wind sway.
It could clealy be used to hold down a dragon. The value of the chain was closely followed by the material the crane arm was made of as well as the deck plate that supported the ship.
The GM dreads the day we pull that chain out of our bag of holding.
Reminds me of a meme I saw awhile back. Two people being interviewed, the first looks extremely flustered and is labeled “the party, spending an entire session on a single puzzle”, and the second laughing his ass off.
His label?
“DM, who googled ‘puzzle for 5-year-olds’ before the session”.
It is a meme for a reason, lol
During a one-shot, I gave the players a simple puzzle where they had to enter a code that would open a door by moving a small stone statue on a series of pressure plates. They’d just found a note on a dead body with the code.
Opening the door took much longer than it should have, because the thing was rigged to spray a fire hose blast of water if the code was entered wrong. The PCs got sidetracked by blocking up the spigot with some rags they’d found, undoubtedly causing horrible plumbing issues elsewhere in the dungeon.
Could you float in the barrels and push the poles against the riverbed to steer
What, float a dwarf in a barrel? Impossible without the use of CGI!