GIVE ME YOUR PUZZLES PLEASE I'M BEGGING!!!

Hullo, new DM here. I have never ran puzzles (since this is my first campaign) and I am GREATLY struggling. I'm not good at puzzles, and neither are my players, but I would really like to put some in! The most difficult puzzles any of us have ever done are (I'm going to be so real with you) Deltarune and Undertale puzzles, and those are not difficult in the slightest. I want something challenging, but not too challenging that they get frustrated. I AM BEGGING YOU. GIVE ME YOUR PUZZLES. I HAVE BEEN PROCRASTINATING AND I'M SUPPOSED TO BE RUNNING THE NEXT SESSION TOMORROW.

I’m not trying to be difficult here, but if neither you nor your players are good at them, why do them? Instead focus efforts on the kinds of things you both enjoy; it will be time better spent.

Also, I’ll get on my soapbox a little here and say I really don’t like puzzles in D&D. They challenge the players, not the characters. You can often run into the situation where your 8 int barbarian is bring run by a clever player, and solves a puzzle their character never would be able to. Or the opposite where you characters with a 20 in int or wis have players who don’t like puzzles, and something that should be trivially easy for the character leaves the player frustrated. It’s a fine line to walk to keep the interesting, and it gets too meta for my tastes.

Especially for a new DM, I’d say focus on the things you’re good at and lock down those fundamentals before you start exploring your less strong areas.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with the user above and I'll explain why. Sure, your players are being challenged more than their characters, but I've been DMing recreationally for friends and at my job hosting youth-young adult tabletop sessions for years. I've also been a player for much longer. In my personal time, I couldn't care less about puzzles, to be honest. However, when I'm deep into a session and it's just hours of roleplay, combat, rinse, repeat over and over again, I find it to be painfully uncreative after awhile. It doesn't take a genius DM to initiate combat 18 million times over. But a DM that can initiate combat and hold your attention by challenging you in ways you didn't expect? Infinitely more successful.

The key to making puzzles fun for the players *and character relevant* is balancing the solutions between something your players could deduce and something their character would know and/or could roll for. I have found this strategy to be wildly successful for players as young as 13 and adults in their late 20s. Combat is fun, but it isn't feasible to be the only sort of event you ever run. Doing puzzles- even easy ones- can spice the gameplay up in a unique way while fostering teamwork!!

I've attached a pdf that gets floated around in the D&D subreddits. It's a huge compilation of some super fun and unique puzzles and includes the users of the people who made the puzzles. I've used some of these puzzles outright, and I've made different versions of them to better suit my campaigns or my players. It has 30 puzzles and their solutions!! I think this will be exactly what you're looking for. You got this! Good luck!!!!

Dungeon puzzle masterlist

The first thing to consider is whether you and your players actually find puzzles fun. If not (and there's a pretty strong correlation between liking puzzles and being good at them), you should just avoid using puzzles. If you do, there are a tremendous number of puzzle resources out there (there's no reason to limit yourself to D&D puzzles, any book of puzzles will do), typically sorted by difficulty.

In addition, regardless of fondness for puzzles, you should avoid making a puzzle plot-essential, because there's always a risk that the players won't figure it out and if they don't the game risks grinding to a halt. Instead, make solving the problem beneficial (you get an extra reward, or bypass a hazard) or open up an optional path.