You probably use puzzles in your dungeons. I have advice for that.
DON'T Use Video Game Puzzles
Video game puzzles are highly visual, quickly communicate geometry and orientation, and often let you pack a lot of information onto the screen at one time.
DMs mostly communicate things verbally. The bandwidth is a lot less.
I love the puzzles in Zelda, The Witness, and Portal, but none of them translate well to tabletop. The puzzles in the Witness would require you to give your players a lot of handouts (which is fine, in moderation), and Zelda-style block pushing puzzles often require you to have a grid where you track stone placement, open doors, etc.
A good example of a good Zelda puzzle is one where you maneuver a bunch of mirrors to bounce a ray of light through three crystals.
It's almost as bad as when the DM hands you a sudoku when you walk in the room. Or math problems. Ew.
DO Use Escape Room Puzzles
Escape room puzzles are usually about pattern recognition, and/or searching an environment until you find a pattern. (The pattern recognition puzzles in Breath of the Wild, such as the three tree puzzles, are an example of this.)
Another concept: encoding patterns in sounds. (In Lair of the Lamb, there water that drips off a fish statue with a drip-dripdrip-drip-dripdrip pattern. Another fish statue holds a tumbler where the players can open a door by inputting 1-2-1-2.)
Escape rooms also go wild with shadow casting, or spotlights illuminating significant objects, etc.
Some examples here.
MAYBE Use Riddles
I enjoy them, but most of the time the players either figure it out in 3 seconds or they never figure it out. Neither is satisfying.
DO Puzzle Dungeons Rather Than Puzzle Rooms
I realize that some people will chime in with "but puzzle rooms break up the monotony of the combat rooms and social challenge rooms".
To them I reply "combat, conversation, and exploration are already puzzles in a well-designed OSR game. You don't need puzzle rooms to break up the monotony, because the puzzles never really stop. How do we get past this chained-up basilisk? Are these goblins lying to us? How do we open this sealed door?"
A dedicated puzzle dungeon (or at least, a few puzzle rooms linked together) has these advantages.
1. You can build upon an existing knowledge base. I you look closely at a game like Portal, you'll realize that most of the game is just a tutorial. Each level teaches you one more thing about how to use your portal gun. You build upon the previous knowledge and expand your knowledge base gradually.
2. It allows you to create linked puzzles, such as requiring you to use knowledge or tools from an earlier room.
3. Puzzles can be arranged by difficulty, with the harder ones in the back.
4. It allows you to set it aside from the rest of the dungeon, so the players don't feel like the puzzle is something that they need to get through. Instead, they can choose to go to the puzzle section where they already know to pay extra attention to tiny details and slake their thirst of puzzles. If they don't want puzzles, they can leave.
DON'T Use Puzzles if You Need Players to Solve Them
Puzzles are unreliable. Sometimes players get frustrated and walk away. Sometimes people don't want to do puzzles. Sometimes the answer is simply outside of their reach.
If you need the players to get to the final boss room, don't put the boss room behind a puzzle.
DO Follow Principles of Good OSR Challenge Design
I wrote about this here. For example, don't have solutions that require a specific class ability or specific spell.
DO Encode Lore/Flavor/Story in Your Puzzles
When possible, anyway. It's nice when puzzles match the theme, tell a story, or reveal bits of setting lore.
It's also possible to have lore actual be the solution to the puzzle. Like knowing that dwarves consider birds to be evil allows you to solve a puzzle but this only works if it's something that the players definitely remember--and never trust your players to remember anything. They'll forget their names if you let them. If you want to go ahead with lore-based solutions, best practice is to have the "birds are evil" thing 1 or 2 rooms earlier.
DO Use Multi-step Puzzles
Even if the first step is just looking around the room for clues.
It pads out the puzzle to make it feel more substantial (especially if it is an easy puzzle).
Additionally, it allows you to feed the players clues one by one, instead of info-dumping everything on them as they enter the room.
DO Have an Alternative if Players Get Stuck
My favorite is to just let them smash it open. They get the key, I get to dose them with the acidic gas that was inside the puzzle box.
Having a place to get hints also works.
The important part is to make sure that there's a cost.
MAYBE Have Extraneous Details
Players tend to get distracted by stuff. They'll spend a lot of time discussing false paths and red herrings, even when you thought you did a good job creating a puzzle without any red herrings.
Like if you need to match the keys with the keyholes to solve the puzzle, an extraneous detail would be a cube covered in numbers. Good chance that the players will spend too much time fucking with the cube and forget about matching keys entirely.
Having said that, puzzle rooms tend to feel pretty inorganic if every item in there is related to the puzzle. And a lot of escape-room puzzles rely on the players finding the signal among the noise, so those puzzles definitely require extraneous details.
DO Consider an Overclue
Not just a theme, an overclue is a clue that applies to the whole dungeon.
A good example would be telling the players that each room is solved by one of the elements. So if they had solved an air puzzle, a water puzzle, and a fire puzzle, they would then start searching the next puzzle for earth clues. Maybe they would start digging in the dirt.
Another good example is the riddle at the start of Tomb of Horrors. The riddle contains about half a dozen clues about the upcoming rooms--the challenge then is just figuring out which room(s) the riddle is talking about.
DON'T Follow All the Rules Above
They're just guidelines. Sometimes a puzzle is improved when you break one of the rules above.
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| Spiked Ball Trap Skyrim Concept Art by Adam Adamawicz |
Putting This Into Practice
I think my next Dungeon23 effort might be a dwarven puzzle-tomb.
The Overclue is the fact that the tomb tells you "this place is designed to be safe for dwarves, but to totally fuck up humans". Players pay attention to that sort of thing.
(Sidenote: I don't usually allow players to start as dwarves. I'm super not-fun like that. This means that it will probably be a group of mostly-humans who has to navigate a bunch of puzzles that are "easy for dwarves")
Basic dwarf knowledge that will be explicitly told to the players when they enter this dungeon:
- Dwarves are short, stout, and not very creative.
- Dwarves value labor above all else.
- Dwarves think that humans spend too much time thinking and not enough time working.
"Easy for Dwarves" Puzzle 1
A hallway that reads "stand tall and be proud" but when you walk down it, horizontal blades swing high enough to avoid a dwarf, but low enough to decapitate a human.
I guess this is more of a trap than a puzzle, huh?
"Easy for Dwarves" Puzzle 2
A room that reads "humans will overthink this one, but it will be obvious to any dwarf". The room is a long rectangle. On one end of it is a stack of about 400 stone cubes, each one weighing about 100 lbs. Each cube is covered with a different carving, showing a dwarf of a different profession.
Solution: just carry all of the stone cubes to the other side of the room. The room is on a pivot, and once the weight has been shifted, the door opens.
Stop thinking; just do work.
Dwarven Racial Abilities as Part of the Overclue
I'll also remind the players of dwarven racial abilities. This is also part of the overclue.
Racial Ability Puzzle 1
Dwarves have mild infravision, and can "see" the temperature of objects.
Puzzle: Different metals might look the same to a human, but look very different to a dwarf who passes a flame over them.
Human Solution: a human can just pass a flame over the metals and then touch them. Even I can tell the difference between iron and aluminum if they've been plucked out of a fire.
Racial Ability Puzzle 2
Dwarves can tell if the ground is sloping, even slightly.
Puzzle: Find the low spot in this room. Easy for a dwarf.
Human solution: pour water on the ground. Spill marbles.
Racial Ability Puzzle 3
Dwarves can sense magnetism, including which direction is north.
Puzzle: Figure out which object is magnetic.
Human solution: It's still pretty easy to figure out which object is magnetic, unless it's too far away to touch iron to. Hmm, maybe they don't know that they're looking for a magnet?
Some General Puzzles
Not every puzzle will be about dwarf lore, or dwarven racial abilities. There will be some regular puzzles in there, too.
Example 1 - Find Numbers
A locked door requires the players to input a three digit number, then pull a lever.
The only clue is a painting:
A picture depicts dwarves bringing animals into the Underworld to save them before the Great Tornado destroyed everything on the surface. A dwarf is leading a goat, a pig, and an elephant down the ramp, in that order. A dozen birds of different types fly through the air, being stripped of their feathers by the righteous winds. Further back, armed dwarves are turning away a band of disheveled, primitive humans. Scattered on the field are a couple of cows, half a dozen pigs, a wolf, a goat, and a snail.
Incredible stuff as always, how do you do it?
ReplyDeleteAs a whole, I agree that a lot of video game puzzles are too complex to use in a dnd game. There are some that I've used successfully (like block puzzles). It's pretty easy on a VTT or even a gridded dry erase mat. It doesn't just have to be verbal.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment of riddles. If neither outcome is satisfying, there's no "maybe" for me.
I'm not a big fan of escape room puzzles. A lot of the time the "pattern recognition" isn't a pattern as much as an arbitrary solution with little meaning. The botw trees and dripping water seem fine. But it's SUPER easy to veer off into mind-reading territory. For example, with the painting of animals on the ramp: why is the ramp important? There are tons of other animals described. If I was a player trying to solve it, I'd be really frustrated and confused. There's a million other solutions the players might come up with, all with equal merit.
I do escape rooms occasionally, and these "the clues are the number of X in the paintings" type of solutions are very common.
DeleteIf you wanted a variation on this theme, I sometimes design similar puzzles based on the theme of the dungeon: carvings above the entrance, murals in every other room with the same 5/6 creatures.
Excerpts carved into commemorative plaques that tell micro stories about the event/deity/myth this place was built to represent. Then I just make sure the bit of text outside my puzzle room states; half the pigs died and the deer were decimated by a plague. So long as that text is unmissable (ie; I damn well read it as they pass, because it's in common and lit by a glowing rock,) the tale of the pigs and the deer and the echidna or whatever is firmly marked as "the theme," meaning they look at the frescoes on the wall and just have to halve the pigs and take 1-in-10 of the deer out to get the solution.
Or you could make your players do an escape room to prep for your campaign. If they are like mine, they probably need some fresh air anyway, and they might even touch some grass.