Puzzles and how they work

Nirrum builds puzzles that only affect people that try to cheat

I, on the other hand, build puzzles that can't be cheated on... technically

This is actually a repost of a reddit post I wrote a while back, but I feel it belongs here.

So I've been doing a lot of research on this lately and there's not really a clear cut answer on how puzzles should be done.

Puzzles in videogames or in real life revolve around a few different concepts that apply differently to D&D  than a lot of people expect. The mindset you approach these aspects with will determine how successful and fun the puzzle is. Those Factors are:

• Key Mechanics
• Can and Can't
• The Catch
• The Reasons for being

So let's start off with Key mechanics by nature of it being the least helpful and most complex one. In videogames, you always get a set of things you can do to interact with the world and expanding this allows you to expand and recontextualize that world. See a ladder? Maybe you can climb it, maybe you can't. Do you have a sword? You can probably swing it and it can probably cut things. Does the door have a big blue A over it? You can probably press that button to open or at least learn about the door. In Dungeons & Dragons this isn't the case. The key mechanic is "You're at least roughly human" and all the context that goes with it, followed troublingly by "Magic exists." Your puzzles are built of things that are by necessity malleable, destructible and shapeable, unless the universe was created in such a way that these things always existed. By extension, with time and effort, they can be undone. What happens when the PC tunnels into the throne room through the wall, the full army in tow behind him? Puzzles interacting with the PCs run the problem that the key mechanic is hello, person, you can do person things, like break things or climb things or set things on fire. Unlike Zelda games where you unlock the ability to make fire, PCs just walk in with a flint and some tinder and set one themselves, or worse, they use magic. Consider the following spells:

• Detect thoughts
• Knock
• Identify
• Nystul's Magic Aura
• Prestidigitation
• Mending
• Feather fall
• Find Traps
• Locate Literally anything
• Gaseous form
• Banishment
• Fabricate

and many more. All of these spells are spells that undo puzzles in ways that you don't really realize until you try to DM a game with a puzzle that's undone by this.


One of these two people only tells lies while the other only tells the tru- I cast detect thoughts

or


Bars block your way down the hall and the leader of the cult esca- gaseous form, Drop it, run after him, Fucker's not getting away

With nearly any spell that's not a regular combat spell, a caster is able to recontextualize their space at all times. Building around this is hard to say the least. The problem is that Magic as a key mechanic allows for a lot of weird shit at early levels. This leads into our second factor

Can and Can't are related to Key mechanics in that a key mechanic tells you what you can and can't do in terms of interactability, but it's far from the whole story. Can and Can't are the largest pillars of puzzle design because once you know the cans, you can figure out the can'ts. Normally you can't walk through walls, you can't open locked doors, and you can't survive fiery-pit-death. You can use keys, you can figure out mechanisms and you can probably just not go into the pit. Puzzles take this to the extreme. To be able to do something, you need to do something else to turn can't into can. The scope of abilities your players have however is usually only limited to their capability and your ability to plan. As a DM of over five years now, it is only rarely worth your time to invest in that plan. The only real answer is to know your player's capabilities by heart and unfortunately, that's an extreme task. An obstacle that, by any means other than your puzzle or planned mechanics, should be impossible, becomes trivial in the face of say, teleport. Constantly denying such ability to remove the challenge means you are punishing player choice, infinitely robbing those players of their spotlight. I play in a campaign where recently, I had to retcon Identify out of my spellbook because the DM would not let it function, having used it ten times, it worked fully once. My can was turned into a can't and I was punished for trying. So when building your puzzle, make sure that you actually know everything that your players are capable of, or at least don't be surprised when five people turn out to be more creative than one.
Moving into our third category we reach actual puzzle making philosophy. The catch, as --> Mark brown <-- defines it in his gamemaker's toolkit and bosskeys series, Is when two or more goals directly conflict with each other. Opening a door hides the treasure, Keeping the treasure visible keeps the door locked, as an example. This is the true heart of a puzzle and what makes it fun. A jigsaw is just "I have a picture, BUT it's in pieces, and when I try to put the pieces together they aren't in the right order or shape! The goal of putting pieces together is at odds with the goal of having the complete picture unless you solve the puzzle by doing it in the right order, that is, putting the right pieces together. In a Dungeon, that might be that the water that's holding a boulder against the exit and flooding the room is also what's stopping the same room from filling with snakes. Move the boulder first, then drown the snakes, provided your players can't just teleport through a wall as with Dimension door. A good way to design this is through basic logic gates, with AND being the simplest one.

Switch 1	Switch 2	Result
On	Off	IMPASSIBILITY
Off	On	DENIAL
Off	Off	REJECTION
On	On	Victory

Switching victory around for any of these states constitutes a different logic gate, and these are only the ones you get with two switches. Minecraft's redstone logic has an excellent tutorial on it, and douglas hoffstatder's GEB gives you some clever ideas for self-referencing and self-changing puzzles. This is a clever way to make a catch but not the only one, Definitely check out that video for a better idea. But once you have a puzzle, even before you have a puzzle, you should probably think about the next aspect.

All things have a Reason for Being, and let me tell you, as a professional

Mad Wizard, or bard, at least,

if I wish for you to not enter my tower, I'm using traps. You will be a mess of astrally oriented ash. Not puzzles. Puzzles in terms of intentional design are matters of communication. You are communicating that you wish to proceed and they are testing or asking for an evaluation of your ability to solve that puzzle, for one reason or another. Puzzles are not about slowing people down. That's what traps are for. Puzzles that occur naturally are harder to make but if you're clever enough to make them, then understand that most natural puzzles get defeated with say, flight. Or fire. Having a reason for being is what creates verisimilitude and ultimately ties the others together. If you build a room whose purpose is to test the player's ability to figure out portal puzzles, then ask, did the wizard really fortify every wall with lead, inlayed with gold anti-teleportation runes, made of adamantine covered in a wall of force that has Eighty nine layers of "counterspell" glyphs of warding triggered for "dispel magic" in this room when they could have, Iunno, just used detect thoughts?

I'm not saying there aren't ways to make puzzles work, I'm working on one right now. But do not go into it with the idea that they must be solved a certain way. In my experience, that never happens.

And never use riddles. They're either horrendously easy or misconstrued and the players will have said the right answer half an hour ago but still debate about using it.

Lirano
 -Nirrum