first things first, our characters are children and the puzzle was meant as punishment for their mother. the context is fine but the puzzle itslef was lame.
the DM gave us a whole bunch of construction equipment: 6 poles with 3 inch diameters, 10 3ft long logs, a hatchet, screws, hammer, 3 pieces of string of various lengths and a 150 ft rope.
we were expected to use these in some way to move 300lb cuboid slabs of rock and build little columns out of them.
the rocks came in 3 sizes:
Large- 18 x 12x 10
medium- 13 x 10 x 11
small - 14 x 10 x 5
each column was supposed to be 50 x 50 x 45.
now what ****** me off about this puzzle ended up being this long drawn out thing with nothing happening except us sitting there for over an hour drawing diagrams with the dm there grinning from ear to ear as if she seriously thought we were having the time of our lives.
what sucks even worse was that the way it was solved was totally metagame. turns out the puzzle was based on how to stack cardboard boxes of like dimensions on a pallets at her workplace. eventually one person in the group realized what was up and asked the dm for her work notes who just gave them up and thus the thing was solved. on top of that. it was the very first thing she threw at us that day.
any other horror stories anyone?
The main thing that most people forget is that you can't just dump a complex puzzle on people as a set-piece. You have to train them in the elements first. If you're going to do something that requires pushing six statues onto six buttons to represent six ancient gods in the order in which they died, you have to build up to that.
You have to have an early lock that opens by pushing a statue onto a button, to establish that cause-and-effect. You have to have a lock with two statues and buttons that have to be the right way around, to establish that statues correspond to particular buttons. And then you have to have a section that makes players learn who these gods are and when their eras were.
Plus DMs rarely playtest their own puzzles and often fail to realise that important clues are missing, multiple solutions are possible, or the entire puzzle can be bypassed by lateral thinking and clever use of rituals. Or just that their players can't stand ****ing puzzles.
Plus DMs rarely playtest their own puzzles and often fail to realise that important clues are missing, multiple solutions are possible, or the entire puzzle can be bypassed by lateral thinking and clever use of rituals. Or just that their players can't stand ****ing puzzles.
true true. when in-game my character who is the least obedient suggested we chip off an inch here and there with the axe and hammer to even things up. she wouldn't allow it. i guess she preferred having us waste the first 60 to 90 minutes of our gaming session doing nothing.
I'm not sure what my worst was, but I know the one that took me the longest to get the PC's through was the one where I put my PC's through a "groundhog day" situation, where the item used to resolve it was carried by a character who was already keeping the item a secret.
The party enters a small 30'x30' room. In the center of the room is a mahogany bedside table with two levers installed on each side, for a total of eight differently-colored levers. At the center of the table, enshrined in a near-unbreakable glass dome, is a wild rose with a note tied to it. Pulling a lever deals 1d6 lightning damage. And that's it.
There is no combination or secret. It exists solely to mess with the players, and they'll likely shock themselves silly for as long as you can keep a straight face. If someone gets impatient and actually manages to shatter the dome, the rose is perfectly unharmed, as is the note. The note reads thusly:
"Hello, adventurer. I prepared Explosive Runes this morning."
Boom.
The party enters a small 30'x30' room. In the center of the room is a mahogany bedside table with two levers installed on each side, for a total of eight differently-colored levers. At the center of the table, enshrined in a near-unbreakable glass dome, is a wild rose with a note tied to it. Pulling a lever deals 1d6 lightning damage. And that's it.
The problem with this puzzle is you can do it once, and then you're done with puzzles. Your party may have a good laugh about this one, but that's the last time they'll interact with a puzzle in one of your games, ever. You've burned them on it, and the next time you give them a lock that needs a key, or a statue that asks a riddle, or whatever, they're just going to fireball the sucker and march to victory over its smoking remains.
The problem with this puzzle is you can do it once, and then you're done with puzzles. Your party may have a good laugh about this one, but that's the last time they'll interact with a puzzle in one of your games, ever. You've burned them on it, and the next time you give them a lock that needs a key, or a statue that asks a riddle, or whatever, they're just going to fireball the sucker and march to victory over its smoking remains.
Hence why it's my worst puzzle.
Of course, you could always consider that I play with close friends and can always promise not to do it again.
after a hour and 2 hot pockets and 10 mountain dew later I finally figured it out. we had to hit him but could only talk... So I said "Nice armor, what would it take to get you out of it?" and blew it a kiss and he died.
I hit him, well I hit on him.
I never forgave that DM, for this puzzle.
Here was one I used
I once threw the 5 switch puzzle at my players, you know the one where one person has to pull the switch and it opens 2-3 doors but you can only get to one of them because the other is behind another door so you pull the next switch but it resets the others and opens another set of doors, so you have to leave people behind to pull switches to get to the end, and finally when you get to the end you get to pull a switch that unlocks everything....
WOW I suck at explaining that trap, trust me its a good waster of 20 mins.
You want to accomplish something that the characters, in game, can solve. I hate puzzles that are solved by player knowledge of the player's world, like chemistry puzzles, or science puzzles. It's a world with magic and gods. Who knows if chemistry and science work there the way they do here, and, even if they do, how do you know where the sciences have progressed?
On the other hand, the knowledge also has to be something the players know. The character might know what owlbear poop looks like, but the player won't know unless you've told him, and then it makes them suspicious. "Why did the DM describe that? It must be important!"
You also want a puzzle that is physically plausible for the game world. In many game worlds, that rules out complex mechanical puzzles, or puzzles with machined parts.
You also want a puzzle that makes sense in the context of the adventure. This is my biggest pet peeve. If NO ONE is supposed to go into the room but the wizard who made the trap, why even have a puzzle? Just have a spell that detects his presence and lets him go through. There should be an in-game reason why there is a security system which is designed to be able to be circumvented by unauthorized users. There's a reason why you have passwords on a computer, rather than a logic problem to solve.
When you can achieve this, it is great. The puzzle almost uniformly is fun and rocks. If you can't hit all four things, I'd just put in a trap.
you put your right foot in
you put left foot out
you left foot in
and you shake it all about
you do the hoki pokey and you turn your shelf about
that's what it's all about!.
At this point every one else is in disbelief as the guy get's up and actually dances ,but the hoki pokey was the only way to solve the puzzle to go on.
I laughed my but off when my dad told me man that DM got them stumped.
Then to be lead to a extremely strange solution.:D
http://www.logicmazes.com/dungeon.html is something that i've been tempted to use
Hah! I used his "first" maze last gaming session. I replaced the "Exit #" w/ letters and told them, "You're not in a maze, but you're lost in the answer." To which they had to follow the letters above the doorways to spell LABYRINTH. although, unfortunately the player who solved it couldn't spell the word correctly... yes, it has a "Y" in it.
That being said, being an English major, I do enjoy coming up with a good riddle, and simple--but interesting--puzzles are fine by me.
But yeah... if my DM gave me a puzzle like the OP had, I'd pretty much spend every effort to avoid it. And, if that's impossible, I'd just say 'screw it, we're doing a new quest now!' or play Tetris on my phone.
As soon as your players need to pull out a piece of paper to try to work out your puzzle you have failed. The only good puzzles are those that can be worked out in-game, in-character, through clues and information the PCs already possess. If a visual is necessary, the DM should provide one.
"Speak friend and enter" is a good puzzle, "you must push a 20 foot rock through a 10 foot hole using only a bucket of soapy water, three frogs, and a wetsuit with the bottom cut out" is not.
And mazes are just total ****. The idea sounds good, but actually going through the arduous process of working their way through the maze is worse than work. The only good way to do a maze is as background. Essentially, do a flowchart of core potential paths with planned encounters. The players' choices at key points decides what paths and sub-paths they follow., but you definitely do not play out every damned turn, corner and dead-end.
...dam crappy internet.
On the door to the room is a plak that reads :Abstinence. The room is 50' x 50'. Inside the room is a tight steel mesh catwalk that goes from the door to the opposite wall. The catwalk is only 2' wide and has a handrail. At the opposite end of the catwalk from the door is a stone pillar with a large bar of gold on top of it. The floor below the catwalk (which seems to be made of oil slicked glass) angles sharply towards the far wall where there are large, metal, poison dripping spikes.
The trick is that once any member of the party gets half way down the catwalk it folds flat with the glass floor plunging the adventurers towards the spikes. They could try to grab the handrail but "oops" that's an illusion and their hand passes right through.
This "puzzle" is part of a gauntlet that I make new players run so that they know what to expect in the future. Each of the rooms has a plak that gives them a clue about how to solve the puzzle within.
Solving the puzzle is simple: Follow the advice of the plak and abstain from even entering the room.
Anyway this qualifies as a "worst" puzzle because my latest adventuring party, after spending over an hour of game time trying MANY different way to get the "gold" without dying, is still obsessing about the "gold brick".
Eventually, they came to a dwarven lockto the Underdark, but in order to open it, the ones opening it had to not be pirates--that is, they had to completely violate all the pirate codes. And they only had a short time to do it all, before they were slaughtered by real pirates.
One of the pirate codes was you can't have sex aboard the ship (modified from "no women or children allowed" to allow for female pirates). The PCs had cleared out all of the requirements except for that one, when the changeling rogue said "I'll be right back," went on board the boat (full of men). A few minutes later, the gates to the lock swung open.
The changeling walked back in a different set of clothes, and announced to the party that he would be receiving all of the next level's worth of loot, and the party sailed forward in silence towards the Underdark.
(Incidentally, it was not my intention to design this puzzle in this manner. I had laid out the pirate code weeks IRL before, and when I was improvising the party's escape from pirates, I thought"Hey, let's make this door only openable to violaters of the pirate code!" and we were halfway through the puzzle before we realized that particular rule)
One of the pirate codes was you can't have sex aboard the ship (modified from "no women or children allowed" to allow for female pirates).
That's a good one!
...unfortunately my players would all probably start masturbating furiously until that part of the code was broken.
That's a good one!
...unfortunately my players would all probably start masturbating furiously until that part of the code was broken.
Your players would do this? Eww!
Anyway this qualifies as a "worst" puzzle because my latest adventuring party, after spending over an hour of game time trying MANY different way to get the "gold" without dying, is still obsessing about the "gold brick".
That's going right on my list of reasons why Mage Hand is a DM's worst enemy.
That's going right on my list of reasons why Mage Hand is a DM's worst enemy.
...the "gold brick" is magically cemented to the pillar (sovern glue?). The weirdest part is that the players set the trap off once and saw that the pillar/brick/catwalk all move as one unit. They get a dagger later on in the gauntlet that magically cuts through gold like butter...
...and ten seconds later a player wondered if it could be used to go back and get the "gold brick". :D
an XP penalty for brute forcing the lock.
Huh? Your DM penalises people for not using the solution he expects? Ask him how much tickets are, because he's blatantly railroading you...
Huh? Your DM penalises people for not using the solution he expects? Ask him how much tickets are, because he's blatantly railroading you...
Trust me, I'm glad everyone got fed up of that campaign, though I loved my character.