I am looking for a little bit of assistance after my last DnD session as I ran a puzzle that didn't go too well and I'm looking for advise on how to improve for the next puzzle should there be one.
Whenever I create puzzles for my players I go into it and plan out the ideal 'answer' to the puzzle. I then expand on this and think of a few alternate ways in which the party could solve the puzzle and then when running the puzzle, if the players come up with something interesting, creative and/or clever which I had not thought of, I'll let it work (maybe with a roll or two).
My question for you guys though is with taking the above into account, what do you do if the party just doesn't get the puzzle or can't work out a way to solve it?
The first step towards making better puzzles is to understand what makes a good puzzle.
Then make sure your players have all the info they need. If your players have to know or notice something to complete the puzzle, follow the three clue rule. Make it as hard as possible for them to overlook whatever they need. What's obvious to you isn't obvious to them at all.
Finally, sometimes they'll get stuck anyways. Allow them to make an Intelligence checks to get hints or automatically make some progress. Often players are roleplaying a character that's smarter (or more charismatic, or stronger, or wiser...) than themselves. If the wizard has 20 intelligence, they should be able to work out the solution eventually. If they can't solve it, who can?
This is a first attempt for me and I tried to include everything they would need and not lock essential information behind any skill checks but it seems I failed a little bit so I want to work on it as I like to include things which are diverse and can keep my players interested!
Did the players not engage with the puzzle? Were they able to solve the puzzle too easily? Did the players simply tell you that they didn't like the puzzle?
When you think about the puzzle and how the situation played out, what do you feel was the most successful part of the puzzle? What do you feel was the least liked part of the puzzle? This is from your point of view, not the players.
As for me, when I do puzzles, I try to look at them from an in game point of view. When we do puzzles in real life there are limitations on what we can do, whether they be natural boundaries such as being able to bend steel, or imposed such as "you can't use your smartphone to find the answer to this riddle". In D&D there are a ton of tools available that we simply do not have in real life that can circumvent almost all classic puzzles that we're familiar with. So, when I make puzzles I build them to incorporate those abilities rather than exclude them, this way the players can use their characters to solve the puzzle even if they aren't good at solving a rubick's cube in real life.
The last puzzle I put to my players was so simple that they stumbled over it for almost 20 minutes before solving it. A dead end room with twelve statues on the East and West walls, six columns carved with ancient heiroglyphs, two large ox statues with brass braziers held by their horns on the north side of the room. They couldn't return the way they came as the hallway they'd used to get here caved in and they were easily a quarter mile underground. They asked about the statues, which were humanoid statues each with heads of various animals, hawk, jackal, jaguar, etc. They investigated the oxen statues, the statues were made of a black marble, one of the braziers had what appeared to be ancient wood blocks in it. Moving about the room they investigated everything, a good twenty minutes trying to figure it out. Eventually one of them gave up and said they were going to set the wood on fire, one of the players suggested putting wood in both braziers just to see if lighting up the room this way might show something. Nothing happened, so they decided to take a short rest and recover some HPs and spell slots. Eventually, while resting, the wood burned enough that the group recognized it as incense, the cloud filled the room as there was no strong air flow. Once the room was mostly filled with the cloud, a secret door opened and all was good.
To me, it was a simple puzzle, to my players that wasn't the case. I also recognize that only a couple of my players really do enjoy puzzles. Due to this the puzzles I put together don't require a lot of creative thinking. I build the puzzles to my players, if they're all about the crazy ways to solve things, I'll make them complex, if they just want to smash through a wall rather than answer a riddle, I'll give them simple puzzles.
A bit of a side issue ( and a pet peeve of mine ) - but why does the puzzle even exist?
I think that puzzles get way over used for the sole reason that they're "traditional" - but from within the game world, they don't have a rationale to exist.
Think about the actual world around you? See many puzzle rooms ( outside of escape rooms and other explicit entertainments )? Do you see puzzle rooms build into security systems? You do not. Why do they exist in the game world?
The best rationalization I've ever heard is that a puzzle might be a type of security device, which allows you passage to a kind of person, even if they lack knowledge of how to get past a blockage. I can think of an example in the novel The Mote in God's Eye where there is a cache of technology guarded by a combination lock which requires a certain level of precision of astronomical knowledge to decipher - your culture can't get a technological boost, unless you've already achieved a certain level of technology. That is - however - a narrow use case.
For the most part, I can't see someone bothering to put in complex puzzles to hide a secret door, or a treasure cache. You put in a secret door, with a hidden catch. Period. Either someone knows the catch is there - or can find it - or they can't. Want an extra layer of security? Have a second secret button that they have to know about, to disable the poison trap, before they push the open catch. And if someone doesn't know enough to disable the poison, they probably shouldn't be trying to open the door - so odds are the poison will be lethal, or at least knock them out and set off an alarm so security can pick them up.
I think Players often have problems with puzzles because they don't often fit in with the world. They are abstract puzzles, dropped in, with little or no in-world reason to exist. Players have to suddenly shift gears from "in world role playing" mode to "abstract puzzle solving" mode, and then back.
If your question is "how to run puzzles", maybe the answer probably should be - in most cases - "don't".
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Think about the actual world around you? See many puzzle rooms ( outside of escape rooms and other explicit entertainments )? Do you see puzzle rooms build into security systems? You do not. Why do they exist in the game world?
That is a very good point, something that I guess a DM learns over time: puzzles must serve a purpose, or tell a story, otherwise don't use them.
We look at movies like Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, National Treasure, The Da Vinci Code, and others and feel like those are influential and integral parts to a good story. The problem is that they don't translate well into a TTRPG, there's something missing.
Let's put a puzzle together: The players are in a room, there's script on the walls that is, for all attempts, just a jumble of letters that mean nothing by themselves. There's a crystal in the room on a pedestal, it looks like a 20 sided die. There are various platforms around the room at varied heights, each with a mirror on them facing different directions. Around the room, near the platforms are wheels which are affixed to the wall which look like the wheel of a ship. Finally there is a large glass dome in the ceiling which allows light into the room .
Now, in a basic D&D game we'd give the players all this information and just sit back while they stumbled around the room trying to figure out how to solve this puzzle. They'd fool around with each of the components you've given them. As the DM you'd describe what happens each time they try something, and eventually they party may learn the trick to this puzzle. If they tried to roll an Intelligence or other skill they'd acquire information, potentially, and that information may or may not help them solve the puzzle. It's a trial and error way of advancing through this scenario. Depending on the combined brain power and creativity of the players, they could solve the puzzle easily, or they could stumble around for an hour before figuring it out.
In a movie, after about five minutes of being in the room, one of the actors will have a revelation that will bring them one step closer to the solution. Then, they'll act on this and something happens, usually something that causes them to be in mortal danger. They turn a wheel and part of the ceiling starts to collapse, the floor falls away, darts fire from hidden holes in the wall, something dangerous. While all this dramatic tension happens one, or more, of the actors will figure out that the light from the dome must be reflected off of the mirrors into the crystal so that it lights up the letters on the wall to get the secret word they need to say out loud to stop the catastrophe.
How do you apply that to a D&D game? When the players manipulate the wheel you can have the same dangers occur. However they don't have a script that says "After Player A initiates the collapse of the floor Player C will figure out the solution in 3 turns". No, the players are still left to their own devices, there is no magic moment that you, the DM, must look at one of them and give them the solution. We are stuck in the mind frame that the players must figure it out on their own or they fail. Puzzles in D&D do not work the way we see in movies or in books, D&D is not scripted, so most puzzles fall flat.
Instead, at least for me, when I put a puzzle together, I try to have the solution use intuitive thinking, not outside the box thinking. I try to have the puzzle fit a theme, and tell a story. The incense with the oxen statues tells a story, though the players may not realize it, there was an intuitive reaction to it anyhow. The room has a religious connotation, the players don't realize it yet, but intuitively they figured out the solution. Religious ceremonies use incense, wood burns, braziers are used to burn things in. Whether they realized what they were doing or not, the answer was obtainable by making a decision out of frustration or specifically decided. I also didn't layer obscurities on the puzzle simply to make it difficult, I kept it simple so that even the players who don't like puzzles could figure it out with relative ease.
Vedexent makes a good point about justifying the use of puzzles from a narrative point of view, the few I have used so far have included attempts at in world reasons for the puzzles. Outside of some sort of test or trial these justifications can be a bit tenuous though.
If you are already running a puzzle and the party are struggling then an intelligence or perception roll (or just an intelligent or perceptive character having spent some time around the puzzle) can be used to provide additional hints.
There is some justification for puzzles from history, or at least myth. The Labyrinth at Knossos, for example--stick a minotaur in it, send people to their doom, hours of fun. Then if some tragedy befalls your kingdom, the labyrinth is still there to trap adventurers.
The Gordion Knot is another example. A knot of rope (tying a historic and valuable cart to a post) that was incredibly intricate (so the cart wouldn't be stolen). Then an oracle declares that anyone who unties the knot becomes the next king. So now you have a puzzle. Sword in the Stone would be a similar thing (if you built in a way to solve it other than 'be the next god-annointed king).
There's actually I suspect less real-world evidence (or just as little) for traps in tombs and dungeons than there is for puzzles. People build traps to catch animals and protect themselves, not in the middle of well-traveled hallways in their basements :)
The idea that Pharaohs had elaborate puzzles and traps is really just myth. And after centuries, all the rope and stuff would have rotten away. But I don't know that it doesn't make sense, to the point that you can't put them in your game and breathe easy.
The rich dying king thinks he can keep his stuff in the afterlife. But thinks that maybe he'll come back (some good evidence for that in D&D), so he needs to make sure he can get out of his tomb later if that happens. He needs a way to keep his treasure in, but let himself get out later if he needs to. So, puzzle room, and trap.
I'm not saying that puzzles in a realistic setting are impossible - just waaaaaaaaay more rare than one appearing in every session/adventure.
The Money Pit isn't a puzzle; it's meant to be a security barrier. The Labyrinth wasn't a puzzle; it was a means of executing prisoners while keeping the executioner trapped. The Gordian Knot? Well a) that's a legend and b) remember how Alexander eventually solved it? ;)
I think we can confuse puzzles, with barriers.
The former tends to be abstract and not related to the context. They might be tests of intelligence, or a quality of person - but the reason for the test to exist must make some soft of rational sense from an in-world perspective, or they shouldn't be there. There's usually only a single way past them - you need to solve the puzzle.The example of the Sword in the Stone is a good example of a test of quality ( kingliness? ) which actually does makes narrative sense, so puzzles are not categorically wrong, if they fit the narrative context.
The latter ( a barrier ) is a concrete feature of the world - with an in-world context - which the Party needs to bypass, but they can do it any way that works. An example would be the Party is trapped in a ravine. There is a river flowing through the ravine, which flows out of a cleft in the rocks, and into a cave at the end of the dead-end ravine. There are are few empty barrels in a once-buried bandits cache. The Players have The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Solution? Use the hand grenade, collapse the rivers egress cave, lash the barrels together, have a short rest on the raft as the ravine fills with water, profit! Or the Players can fly. Or travel as mist. or .. or .. or .. There isn't a right way out. Any creative solution that bypasses the barrier can work.
And I think that's why I dislike most Puzzles - abstract, single solution, usually out of context - but I don't mind stretching the Players' creativity by presenting barriers - which are concrete, in context, and allow for a variety of creative Player solutions.
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
I'm not saying that puzzles in a realistic setting are impossible - just waaaaaaaaay more rare than one appearing in every session/adventure.
Totally, I wasn't trying to contradict, just expand. The way I see it, so much of any RPG is naturally going to be a massive exaggeration of reality. Honestly, only people in actual war in the real world fight as much as RPG characters fight. And while we can find interesting ruins of long lost civilizations, they aren't around every corner. And when they are, they aren't nearly as exciting. I don't know what I'd find of use to my adventuring if I ransacked Maeshowe, but it wouldn't likely be helpful, or anything I could sell down the road in Kirkwall :)
RPGs are the exciting things in normal life, dialed up to 11 in both intensity and frequency. However, that doesn't mean you don't have a significant point about puzzles.
The Money Pit isn't a puzzle; it's meant to be a security barrier. The Labyrinth wasn't a puzzle; it was a means of executing prisoners while keeping the executioner trapped. The Gordian Knot? Well a) that's a legend and b) remember how Alexander eventually solved it? ;)
Which legend of Alexander? One says he cut it, the other says he removed the yoke from the middle and was able to unravel it easier. But...I'd say either one would be perfectly fine for my players to do, depending on the trap. Sometimes I 'awwwww shucks' when they find a creative way around my puzzle/trap, but I'm fine with that. Alexander would have gotten full EXP from me :)
But here's the thing about the Money Pit. If it really was a place where Templar Mayans were storing their ancient Biblical golden copies of Shakespeare's lost manuscripts...a big 'if'...then presumably they had a way to get in there, right? If it was a place they used repeatedly, as the 'authors and experts' on the show claim :) then they were coming in and out. That tells me that there was a way to get in. And it clearly was not an obvious way.
What more is a puzzle room in D&D than a barrier to someone's progress that has a 'trick' to getting past it safely (or at all)? "The hallway ends in a room. The floor is covered in a checkerboard, four statues stand in the corners. There is another doorway across the hall." That's more or less the same thing as "<long description of the money pit>, the gold lies at the bottom." If there's a way to 'get past it' that's not just 'tough' but needs to be 'solved', it's a puzzle, right?
If there was a way into the Money Pit, I doubt it was just Templars being really good at digging. All the water shafts and such. That's a puzzle :)
For the Labyrinth, I'm counting it as a puzzle because of the function it would play in the game if you put the players in it. Minos captures the players, they awake in the Labyrinth, they hear the stomping of feet in the distance. Oh no! :) What the players are going to do is figure out the labyrinth--figure out the pattern, find the exit, etc. It's a puzzle. And I would consider the real world one (or the myth world one) a puzzle for the same reason--the people placed in it were going to try to figure it out. Theseus approached it as a puzzle, solved it, and lived. Regardless of why Minos had it made, it was a puzzle for the people thrown in there.
The sword in the stone as in the myth wasn't a puzzle as I'd call it, but would be a puzzle if there was some other way to remove it other than just 'being a particular person'. If the sword in the stone in a D&D world could be removed with a certain combo of spells, or by grasping it in a certain way, solving a riddle, etc, it would be a puzzle. In the myth, or at least in a lot of stories about the myth, it was treated that way. People trying different ways to remove it and failing.
So, I think you're right that puzzles probably get used non-thematically way too much. But I'd want to say that, because RPG worlds, and fantasy worlds maybe in particular, are dialing to 11 so much of what the real world is like (or dialing to 111 maybe), they do fit thematically in a lot of places in D&D. If our world had Egyptian kings who were jealous of their treasure, and we can imagine (and make up) stories of them protecting their riches with 'clever puzzles', then a world populated by tens of thousands of years of layer cakes of ancient civilizations could easily have a lot of people who thought the same way.
But yeah, a puzzle room in the basement of the modern ruler's castle, on the way to the store rooms, doesn't make a lot of sense.
Good morning ladies and gents,
I am looking for a little bit of assistance after my last DnD session as I ran a puzzle that didn't go too well and I'm looking for advise on how to improve for the next puzzle should there be one.
Whenever I create puzzles for my players I go into it and plan out the ideal 'answer' to the puzzle. I then expand on this and think of a few alternate ways in which the party could solve the puzzle and then when running the puzzle, if the players come up with something interesting, creative and/or clever which I had not thought of, I'll let it work (maybe with a roll or two).
My question for you guys though is with taking the above into account, what do you do if the party just doesn't get the puzzle or can't work out a way to solve it?
The first step towards making better puzzles is to understand what makes a good puzzle.
Then make sure your players have all the info they need. If your players have to know or notice something to complete the puzzle, follow the three clue rule. Make it as hard as possible for them to overlook whatever they need. What's obvious to you isn't obvious to them at all.
Finally, sometimes they'll get stuck anyways. Allow them to make an Intelligence checks to get hints or automatically make some progress. Often players are roleplaying a character that's smarter (or more charismatic, or stronger, or wiser...) than themselves. If the wizard has 20 intelligence, they should be able to work out the solution eventually. If they can't solve it, who can?
The Forum Infestation (TM)
Hi InquisitiveCoder, thanks for the feedback.
This is a first attempt for me and I tried to include everything they would need and not lock essential information behind any skill checks but it seems I failed a little bit so I want to work on it as I like to include things which are diverse and can keep my players interested!
What do you mean by "failed"?
Did the players not engage with the puzzle? Were they able to solve the puzzle too easily? Did the players simply tell you that they didn't like the puzzle?
When you think about the puzzle and how the situation played out, what do you feel was the most successful part of the puzzle? What do you feel was the least liked part of the puzzle? This is from your point of view, not the players.
As for me, when I do puzzles, I try to look at them from an in game point of view. When we do puzzles in real life there are limitations on what we can do, whether they be natural boundaries such as being able to bend steel, or imposed such as "you can't use your smartphone to find the answer to this riddle". In D&D there are a ton of tools available that we simply do not have in real life that can circumvent almost all classic puzzles that we're familiar with. So, when I make puzzles I build them to incorporate those abilities rather than exclude them, this way the players can use their characters to solve the puzzle even if they aren't good at solving a rubick's cube in real life.
The last puzzle I put to my players was so simple that they stumbled over it for almost 20 minutes before solving it. A dead end room with twelve statues on the East and West walls, six columns carved with ancient heiroglyphs, two large ox statues with brass braziers held by their horns on the north side of the room. They couldn't return the way they came as the hallway they'd used to get here caved in and they were easily a quarter mile underground. They asked about the statues, which were humanoid statues each with heads of various animals, hawk, jackal, jaguar, etc. They investigated the oxen statues, the statues were made of a black marble, one of the braziers had what appeared to be ancient wood blocks in it. Moving about the room they investigated everything, a good twenty minutes trying to figure it out. Eventually one of them gave up and said they were going to set the wood on fire, one of the players suggested putting wood in both braziers just to see if lighting up the room this way might show something. Nothing happened, so they decided to take a short rest and recover some HPs and spell slots. Eventually, while resting, the wood burned enough that the group recognized it as incense, the cloud filled the room as there was no strong air flow. Once the room was mostly filled with the cloud, a secret door opened and all was good.
To me, it was a simple puzzle, to my players that wasn't the case. I also recognize that only a couple of my players really do enjoy puzzles. Due to this the puzzles I put together don't require a lot of creative thinking. I build the puzzles to my players, if they're all about the crazy ways to solve things, I'll make them complex, if they just want to smash through a wall rather than answer a riddle, I'll give them simple puzzles.
A bit of a side issue ( and a pet peeve of mine ) - but why does the puzzle even exist?
I think that puzzles get way over used for the sole reason that they're "traditional" - but from within the game world, they don't have a rationale to exist.
Think about the actual world around you? See many puzzle rooms ( outside of escape rooms and other explicit entertainments )? Do you see puzzle rooms build into security systems? You do not. Why do they exist in the game world?
The best rationalization I've ever heard is that a puzzle might be a type of security device, which allows you passage to a kind of person, even if they lack knowledge of how to get past a blockage. I can think of an example in the novel The Mote in God's Eye where there is a cache of technology guarded by a combination lock which requires a certain level of precision of astronomical knowledge to decipher - your culture can't get a technological boost, unless you've already achieved a certain level of technology. That is - however - a narrow use case.
For the most part, I can't see someone bothering to put in complex puzzles to hide a secret door, or a treasure cache. You put in a secret door, with a hidden catch. Period. Either someone knows the catch is there - or can find it - or they can't. Want an extra layer of security? Have a second secret button that they have to know about, to disable the poison trap, before they push the open catch. And if someone doesn't know enough to disable the poison, they probably shouldn't be trying to open the door - so odds are the poison will be lethal, or at least knock them out and set off an alarm so security can pick them up.
I think Players often have problems with puzzles because they don't often fit in with the world. They are abstract puzzles, dropped in, with little or no in-world reason to exist. Players have to suddenly shift gears from "in world role playing" mode to "abstract puzzle solving" mode, and then back.
If your question is "how to run puzzles", maybe the answer probably should be - in most cases - "don't".
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Looking for new subclasses, spells, magic items, feats, and races? Opinions welcome :)
That is a very good point, something that I guess a DM learns over time: puzzles must serve a purpose, or tell a story, otherwise don't use them.
We look at movies like Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, National Treasure, The Da Vinci Code, and others and feel like those are influential and integral parts to a good story. The problem is that they don't translate well into a TTRPG, there's something missing.
Let's put a puzzle together: The players are in a room, there's script on the walls that is, for all attempts, just a jumble of letters that mean nothing by themselves. There's a crystal in the room on a pedestal, it looks like a 20 sided die. There are various platforms around the room at varied heights, each with a mirror on them facing different directions. Around the room, near the platforms are wheels which are affixed to the wall which look like the wheel of a ship. Finally there is a large glass dome in the ceiling which allows light into the room .
Now, in a basic D&D game we'd give the players all this information and just sit back while they stumbled around the room trying to figure out how to solve this puzzle. They'd fool around with each of the components you've given them. As the DM you'd describe what happens each time they try something, and eventually they party may learn the trick to this puzzle. If they tried to roll an Intelligence or other skill they'd acquire information, potentially, and that information may or may not help them solve the puzzle. It's a trial and error way of advancing through this scenario. Depending on the combined brain power and creativity of the players, they could solve the puzzle easily, or they could stumble around for an hour before figuring it out.
In a movie, after about five minutes of being in the room, one of the actors will have a revelation that will bring them one step closer to the solution. Then, they'll act on this and something happens, usually something that causes them to be in mortal danger. They turn a wheel and part of the ceiling starts to collapse, the floor falls away, darts fire from hidden holes in the wall, something dangerous. While all this dramatic tension happens one, or more, of the actors will figure out that the light from the dome must be reflected off of the mirrors into the crystal so that it lights up the letters on the wall to get the secret word they need to say out loud to stop the catastrophe.
How do you apply that to a D&D game? When the players manipulate the wheel you can have the same dangers occur. However they don't have a script that says "After Player A initiates the collapse of the floor Player C will figure out the solution in 3 turns". No, the players are still left to their own devices, there is no magic moment that you, the DM, must look at one of them and give them the solution. We are stuck in the mind frame that the players must figure it out on their own or they fail. Puzzles in D&D do not work the way we see in movies or in books, D&D is not scripted, so most puzzles fall flat.
Instead, at least for me, when I put a puzzle together, I try to have the solution use intuitive thinking, not outside the box thinking. I try to have the puzzle fit a theme, and tell a story. The incense with the oxen statues tells a story, though the players may not realize it, there was an intuitive reaction to it anyhow. The room has a religious connotation, the players don't realize it yet, but intuitively they figured out the solution. Religious ceremonies use incense, wood burns, braziers are used to burn things in. Whether they realized what they were doing or not, the answer was obtainable by making a decision out of frustration or specifically decided. I also didn't layer obscurities on the puzzle simply to make it difficult, I kept it simple so that even the players who don't like puzzles could figure it out with relative ease.
Vedexent makes a good point about justifying the use of puzzles from a narrative point of view, the few I have used so far have included attempts at in world reasons for the puzzles. Outside of some sort of test or trial these justifications can be a bit tenuous though.
If you are already running a puzzle and the party are struggling then an intelligence or perception roll (or just an intelligent or perceptive character having spent some time around the puzzle) can be used to provide additional hints.
There is some justification for puzzles from history, or at least myth. The Labyrinth at Knossos, for example--stick a minotaur in it, send people to their doom, hours of fun. Then if some tragedy befalls your kingdom, the labyrinth is still there to trap adventurers.
The Gordion Knot is another example. A knot of rope (tying a historic and valuable cart to a post) that was incredibly intricate (so the cart wouldn't be stolen). Then an oracle declares that anyone who unties the knot becomes the next king. So now you have a puzzle. Sword in the Stone would be a similar thing (if you built in a way to solve it other than 'be the next god-annointed king).
There's actually I suspect less real-world evidence (or just as little) for traps in tombs and dungeons than there is for puzzles. People build traps to catch animals and protect themselves, not in the middle of well-traveled hallways in their basements :)
The idea that Pharaohs had elaborate puzzles and traps is really just myth. And after centuries, all the rope and stuff would have rotten away. But I don't know that it doesn't make sense, to the point that you can't put them in your game and breathe easy.
The rich dying king thinks he can keep his stuff in the afterlife. But thinks that maybe he'll come back (some good evidence for that in D&D), so he needs to make sure he can get out of his tomb later if that happens. He needs a way to keep his treasure in, but let himself get out later if he needs to. So, puzzle room, and trap.
Looking for new subclasses, spells, magic items, feats, and races? Opinions welcome :)
I'm not saying that puzzles in a realistic setting are impossible - just waaaaaaaaay more rare than one appearing in every session/adventure.
The Money Pit isn't a puzzle; it's meant to be a security barrier. The Labyrinth wasn't a puzzle; it was a means of executing prisoners while keeping the executioner trapped. The Gordian Knot? Well a) that's a legend and b) remember how Alexander eventually solved it? ;)
I think we can confuse puzzles, with barriers.
The former tends to be abstract and not related to the context. They might be tests of intelligence, or a quality of person - but the reason for the test to exist must make some soft of rational sense from an in-world perspective, or they shouldn't be there. There's usually only a single way past them - you need to solve the puzzle.The example of the Sword in the Stone is a good example of a test of quality ( kingliness? ) which actually does makes narrative sense, so puzzles are not categorically wrong, if they fit the narrative context.
The latter ( a barrier ) is a concrete feature of the world - with an in-world context - which the Party needs to bypass, but they can do it any way that works. An example would be the Party is trapped in a ravine. There is a river flowing through the ravine, which flows out of a cleft in the rocks, and into a cave at the end of the dead-end ravine. There are are few empty barrels in a once-buried bandits cache. The Players have The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. Solution? Use the hand grenade, collapse the rivers egress cave, lash the barrels together, have a short rest on the raft as the ravine fills with water, profit! Or the Players can fly. Or travel as mist. or .. or .. or .. There isn't a right way out. Any creative solution that bypasses the barrier can work.
And I think that's why I dislike most Puzzles - abstract, single solution, usually out of context - but I don't mind stretching the Players' creativity by presenting barriers - which are concrete, in context, and allow for a variety of creative Player solutions.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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Totally, I wasn't trying to contradict, just expand. The way I see it, so much of any RPG is naturally going to be a massive exaggeration of reality. Honestly, only people in actual war in the real world fight as much as RPG characters fight. And while we can find interesting ruins of long lost civilizations, they aren't around every corner. And when they are, they aren't nearly as exciting. I don't know what I'd find of use to my adventuring if I ransacked Maeshowe, but it wouldn't likely be helpful, or anything I could sell down the road in Kirkwall :)
RPGs are the exciting things in normal life, dialed up to 11 in both intensity and frequency. However, that doesn't mean you don't have a significant point about puzzles.
Which legend of Alexander? One says he cut it, the other says he removed the yoke from the middle and was able to unravel it easier. But...I'd say either one would be perfectly fine for my players to do, depending on the trap. Sometimes I 'awwwww shucks' when they find a creative way around my puzzle/trap, but I'm fine with that. Alexander would have gotten full EXP from me :)
But here's the thing about the Money Pit. If it really was a place where Templar Mayans were storing their ancient Biblical golden copies of Shakespeare's lost manuscripts...a big 'if'...then presumably they had a way to get in there, right? If it was a place they used repeatedly, as the 'authors and experts' on the show claim :) then they were coming in and out. That tells me that there was a way to get in. And it clearly was not an obvious way.
What more is a puzzle room in D&D than a barrier to someone's progress that has a 'trick' to getting past it safely (or at all)? "The hallway ends in a room. The floor is covered in a checkerboard, four statues stand in the corners. There is another doorway across the hall." That's more or less the same thing as "<long description of the money pit>, the gold lies at the bottom." If there's a way to 'get past it' that's not just 'tough' but needs to be 'solved', it's a puzzle, right?
If there was a way into the Money Pit, I doubt it was just Templars being really good at digging. All the water shafts and such. That's a puzzle :)
For the Labyrinth, I'm counting it as a puzzle because of the function it would play in the game if you put the players in it. Minos captures the players, they awake in the Labyrinth, they hear the stomping of feet in the distance. Oh no! :) What the players are going to do is figure out the labyrinth--figure out the pattern, find the exit, etc. It's a puzzle. And I would consider the real world one (or the myth world one) a puzzle for the same reason--the people placed in it were going to try to figure it out. Theseus approached it as a puzzle, solved it, and lived. Regardless of why Minos had it made, it was a puzzle for the people thrown in there.
The sword in the stone as in the myth wasn't a puzzle as I'd call it, but would be a puzzle if there was some other way to remove it other than just 'being a particular person'. If the sword in the stone in a D&D world could be removed with a certain combo of spells, or by grasping it in a certain way, solving a riddle, etc, it would be a puzzle. In the myth, or at least in a lot of stories about the myth, it was treated that way. People trying different ways to remove it and failing.
So, I think you're right that puzzles probably get used non-thematically way too much. But I'd want to say that, because RPG worlds, and fantasy worlds maybe in particular, are dialing to 11 so much of what the real world is like (or dialing to 111 maybe), they do fit thematically in a lot of places in D&D. If our world had Egyptian kings who were jealous of their treasure, and we can imagine (and make up) stories of them protecting their riches with 'clever puzzles', then a world populated by tens of thousands of years of layer cakes of ancient civilizations could easily have a lot of people who thought the same way.
But yeah, a puzzle room in the basement of the modern ruler's castle, on the way to the store rooms, doesn't make a lot of sense.
Looking for new subclasses, spells, magic items, feats, and races? Opinions welcome :)