Quote Originally Posted by Klara Meison View Post
That's racist and you know it.
Smite power!

Finally someone will fix that mess.
It's a long time coming, huh?

I thought they were exactly the same for all intents and purposes, but if someone(for whatever reason) explicitly wrote "requirements:being able to cast spells" instead of "requirements:being able to magic away problems", well, SLAs won't work since them's not spells. Incidentally, I thought that D20L will have "magic away problems" as the default requirement for things like CWI (should it be Enchant Nonmagical Item now?), talents or wherever else you may need spellcasting as a requirement.

TL;DR they are effectively one and the same, until someone specifically says they are not. Way I understood it.
They actually work differently than spells in quite a few ways.

What are your thoughts on using puzzles in dnd? Either as whole encounters (your classic "solve this block puzzle to open the door" room), additions to combat encounters (same room, but monsters spawn at set intervals forcing you to solve faster/making bypassing tactics like "break the door down" less viable), ways to accquire more treasure (same room, but it's now a sort of optional side passage with extra treasure at the end if you solve the puzzle, and you can just skip it if you don't feel like solving it) or clues (same thing, except now treasure is clues telling you who really is the BBEG)?
It's a complex issue actually, because there are a lot of hiccups that go with puzzles. I think there's a place for puzzles, but I think that place should generally be sparingly at most. Puzzles by the large are in the hands of the GM to make great, as the system largely cannot do much other than make some suggestions for how rewarding a puzzle maybe should be for a given level range or something. There's effectively no way to write a system for making puzzles since by their nature they tend to involve either audio/visual ques or abstract thinking, which isn't particularly easy to codify into the mechanics.

I tend to shy away from using puzzles often for the following reasons...
  1. Puzzles are hard to estimate. How well your party solves puzzles, or how well you made them, could literally be tied to something as inconsequential as if you had a good night's sleep before playing.
  2. It's often immersion breaking. Most people don't want puzzles that you can solve with checks (they often lament it somehow cheapens the experience), but when you're playing a character that's so intelligent that they could solve a rubic's cube that was 20x20 lines (instead of 3), in their sleep, blindfolded, and starting upside down, it's quite shocking when the character can't do it 'cause their player tried to force the square peg in the round hole as a child.
  3. The reverse is also true. When your dumb as bricks illiterate goblin is the one who keeps solving all the puzzles. Admittedly, the best way I've seen to deal with these issues is to let the group out of game try to solve it and then vote a member of the team to solve it in game, so maybe the goblin's player solved it, but the party rogue is the one who carries it out in game.
  4. It can easily grind the game to a halt, fast. Especially if the party must solve the puzzle to succeed at their task. You can quickly end up in a situation where players become disinterested, or annoyed, rather than captivated, and nothing is a buzzkill as much as having to have the GM explain the answer to the puzzle so the game can continue.


These are the pitfalls of puzzles. Which isn't to say that they shouldn't ever be used, but used carefully. Many things that might seem simple to the creator, or would be simple in person handling objects and/or observing your surroundings, do not translate very well to players. For example, I ran the sample game from the Eberron Campaign setting lots of times for different groups. I liked the adventure a lot. At one point during the adventure...
Spoiler: Puzzle Spoiler
Show
There's a safe you have to open, and it's got three buttons, a square, a triangle, and a pentacle. You're supposed to press them in order of how many points they have (triangle = 3, square = 4, star = 5), simply counting up 3, 4, 5.

Out of like 10 different sessions I ran that adventure in (I used to do a lot of tabletop games, demos, and parties as a teenager/young adult), ONE group actually figured it out without flubbing it up, because out of all the people who played it, one person noticed that the shapes were a very simple math question. It simply didn't occur to anyone else.