Making Puzzles Work In Your Game
Puzzles in roleplaying games are a tricky subject. Too often players will notice the sharp turn into puzzle mode, pulling them out of the game. I’ve got a few thoughts on what to do to make puzzles fit into your game.
1. Puzzles should be rare. If you’ve got a puzzle every week, or even every couple of weeks, your players could get burned out. Forcing the players to shift focus from being in an in-RPG state to a puzzle-state can throw players off, and if they’re just waiting for the moment you pull out a paper with wierd symbols on it for them to solve, they’ll get bored easily. Make the puzzles rare and unique.
2. Puzzles should be important. If it doesn’t matter whether or not they solve the puzzle, there’s no reason to do it. Don’t let the puzzle just be another room. It should have consequences for the rest of the adventure or dungeon. Perhaps the puzzle allows access to the final boss, or gives access to a weapon that will allow you to kill the boss easier. They could also be used to access the dungeon to begin with, like the entrance to the Mines of Moria.
3. Puzzles should be solvable. You don’t want players stuck there for an hour, unable to move on. Keep your eye eye on how interested the players are in the puzzle. If they’re super bored, and seem frustrated that they’re not solving the puzzle, you need to move on. I’ve found the best way to do this is to have a back-door to the puzzle. If the players do something that SEEMS like it should solve the problem, change things; make that the solution, so long as you have a way to provide you the answer to it yourself without the players knowing you’ve sidestepped things. For example: I had a game where the players had to get through some pillars that fried anyone who tried to step between them. They were able to toss inanimate objects through, but they themselves could not pass. After some problemsolving, one player asked if they could try to ice the columns with magic to block the electricity. I let them do it and move on. They felt like they had solved the puzzle satisfactorally. They had no idea that that wasn’t my planned solution, but it let them move forward.
4. Puzzles should be integrated into the world. Players will get pulled right out of the game if they suddenly realize they’re just playing a game of Sudoku. I bring that example up BECAUSE I ran a Sudoku puzzle back in 3e. Tiles scattered on the floor, pulled out of the tilework. The players had to rearrange them back into place, while not having the same symbols repeating. Here, it actually worked, because Sudoku wasn’t a very well known thing here in the States by most people. However, I couldn’t pull it off now, because players are going to recognize it, and it will immediately pull them from the world. Going back to the door to Moria, that puzzle was part of the world. They gave a lot of backstory to explain why that puzzle was there and in what way. If your puzzles aren’t a part of the world, they’re going to completely throw the players off and make them realize they’re just solving a puzzle, not being a part of a world.
I think that’s all I have for ideas. This document has some really fantastic puzzles you should check out and try. It’s by GelatinousDude on Reddit. Enjoy!
Well done, good article.
Something that I did a while back was a small “GM how to” with 6-7 GM&DMs at a convention was “building a dungeon”. The overall topic was a mash up of your 2nd and 4th points. Dungeons don’t ‘just exist’ they were created for a reason, They are a place to store something, imprison something or a base of operations, amongst others.
Unless the expectation is that no-one is to come and go, in which case why even have an entrance at all, there is a reason the tunnels exist. So if a Trap or Puzzle exist, its there for a reason. Priests or Minions would know a way to bypass these things, OR navigate them. This information is written down, or in the heads of those who still use the path.
The Only reason I have puzzles & traps, is to block gung ho players who rush in without research. They are there specifically to stop people not proceeding, not to be solved.
When players understand that, this isn’t a computer game, with each puzzle as a means to entertain, but as a legitimate way to thwart the players from going any further, then they change their tact, and either attempt to get that information (as they should have) brute force (and die trying) or end the session there so the smart guy can figure it out between sessions, and roll an encounter while the group waits.