Help me create a couple puzzles?

[Maximum Carnage]

Greeting Pixies and Ettins alike!

I was just wondering if I could beg some assistance in creating a few puzzles for a dungeon delve I'm going to create. I would like perhaps one or two "simple" puzzles, such as manipulating the environment, riddles, word problems, math problems, etc.. Simple is a relative turn, and I'm still looking for something engaging. The third I'm thinking I want to incorporate combat and some sort of time effect, like rising water in a room, or a bomb that goes off after a certain time.

I have not started making the dungeon yet, as I want to see some ideas before it starts to take shape.

If you have any ideas that you've run in your games successfully, please share it with the class! Once again, thanks again for your time, and I hope to get some good ideas from the community.

Thanks,
MC

P.S. A bit of information about the party
1. 3 Players
2. level 3
3. Knight, Dread Necromancer, and Warmage is the composition
4. They tend to like kick in the door play style, but we're trying to make them flex their RP muscles a bit.

[Venger]

Greeting Pixies and Ettins alike!

I was just wondering if I could beg some assistance in creating a few puzzles for a dungeon delve I'm going to create. I would like perhaps one or two "simple" puzzles, such as manipulating the environment, riddles, word problems, math problems, etc.. Simple is a relative turn, and I'm still looking for something engaging. The third I'm thinking I want to incorporate combat and some sort of time effect, like rising water in a room, or a bomb that goes off after a certain time.

I have not started making the dungeon yet, as I want to see some ideas before it starts to take shape.

If you have any ideas that you've run in your games successfully, please share it with the class! Once again, thanks again for your time, and I hope to get some good ideas from the community.

Thanks,
MC

P.S. A bit of information about the party
1. 3 Players
2. level 3
3. Knight, Dread Necromancer, and Warmage is the composition
4. They tend to like kick in the door play style, but we're trying to make them flex their RP muscles a bit.

Welcome!

if you and your party want to change it up from just killing monsters and would like an encounter bypassed through environmental manipulation or similar, that's a great idea. it'll really help vary play.

I must discourage "riddles," or word or math problems. they invariably turn into a game of "guess what the gm's thinking" which is fun for only one person instead of the party.

rising water with some kind of shutoff is a good example as long as you keep one central thing in mind:

if your party thinks of some kind of solution that makes sense that isn't the one you had in mind, let it work. if you design with that philosophy in mind, they'll have fun.

tell us more about the water trap. how do you envision them getting out of it? if you want it to be rp based, make sure their solving the problem doesn't rely on a single skill check it's possible for them to fail (e.g. "dc 25 search will tell them the stone on this wall is a different color so that's the drain button") because if that doesn't happen, gameplay effectively stops

[Maximum Carnage]

tell us more about the water trap. how do you envision them getting out of it? if you want it to be rp based, make sure their solving the problem doesn't rely on a single skill check it's possible for them to fail (e.g. "dc 25 search will tell them the stone on this wall is a different color so that's the drain button") because if that doesn't happen, gameplay effectively stops

I was just using that as an example, as I've done rising water before, I was hoping for something along those lines, but was reaching out to the community, because I'm coming up short.

[EvulOne]

YOu can always use the old puzzle of the three jugs of water. 1 gallon, 3 gallon and 5 gallon I believe you have to have exactly 4 gallons or something like that.

[JonathanPDX]

I've been designing puzzles for a semi-beginner group lately and found a few concepts that worked well:

1. Something dangerous that's not really what it seems. Example: A fire that feels hot to the touch, and will set unliving matter on fire, but can't harm flesh. Put the door-opening button on the other side and see how long the players spend poking a 10-foot-pole into it before someone says "I give up" and shoves their arm in.

2. Things high up or otherwise out of reach. Put the button 30' up a wall and let the party puzzle out how to push it. They could use climb, jump, magic items, shoot it with an arrow, throw rocks at it, etc. You can have an "out" prepared if they are truly stumped but usually they will find a creative way to at least try to reach it. If you really want to make it exciting put it over a pit, across a chasm, or in some otherwise dangerous environment. My players got really creative trying to "high five" a glowing hand print 20' up on a wall with a big electrified pool below.

3. Combine simple traps with combat. "Find 3 levers spread throughout the room and pull them to unlock the door" is lame until Burning Skeletons animate every round. Who fights? Who climbs the rope ladder up to pull the lever on the ceiling? What if one lever has a big flame painted on it, does that mean we should pull it to kill the skeletons, or will pulling it summon more of them?

4. 20 questions can be more engaging than math or word puzzles. Put some limits, triggers, or time restrictions on the party and watch them sweat it out trying to guess what spell a Magic Mouth is thinking of, especially if every wrong guess gets them blasted with the named spell! It also lets you fudge the answer if the players are really stuck, or perhaps they can change tactics and barter their way through instead.

5. Mirrors are fun. I gave my beginner party a simple puzzle that required a little problem solving and experimentation: The room has a big mirror on one side and on the other are 4 wooden chests, each with a hook and white robe hanging on the wall above it. The solution to the puzzle is to take off everything, put it in the chest, put on the robe, and then walk through the mirror. The room is mirrored on the other side (get it?) and hanging up the robe unlocks the duplicate chest containing all their stuff. But how do you lead them to that solution? The mirror can either reflect only the white robes and not the players / equipment, or you can reverse it and have the robes as the only thing that doesn't show in the mirror. To be honest I forget which way I went with, but it went totally against the players instinct to strip naked and put on a strange robe in the middle of a scary dungeon.

[IIzak]

Hey, I actually am currently running my players through a pretty large dungeon that I had designed and I think I may have a couple that you'd find interesting:

1 - (I love this one, and it works especially well if your players have played D&D before and are familiar with some of the more iconic monster and such. Especially great if you have figures). Have a chest at the end of a hallway guarded by a Spectator (Spectators are in the book Lord's of Madness(Pg140) if you aren't familiar with them). The Spectator has been contracted by a Wizard to guard the treasure for a really long time and he wants to leave but can't because that would break his contract. However, he mentions to the players that if they could somehow steal his treasure without him noticing, then he'd be free to go, and basically have them work out how to get to the treasure and not get attacked by a mini-beholder.

2 - The potion puzzle from the 1st harry potter book is really fun, I ran that, but then just made the fire Illusions that could have been walked through and all of the vials held poison in them.

3 - Put a button in the middle of the room. When the players press it, get out a timer and set it for an arbitrary amount of time (1-3 minutes is usually plenty). Show it to your players and let them know that they're is also a timer in the game (Maybe an hourglass flips over or something). Sit back as your players panic trying to not die, then when the timer runs out, you open a spiral staircase into the floor.

4 - Sword forging puzzle: Players are given access to several ingots from several different types of metals. They have to forge a sword using a specific combination of ingots, and place the sword into the hands of some statue (I used a statue of Heironious which worked well I believe). Give them some kind of story that they can read that has clues to which metals they need to use (Also lets you throw in some of that lore you worked super hard on), and when they get it right, the statue sinks into the floor and the next door opens. If they get it wrong, *insert guardians here* rise up to protect the area from people who forged an incorrect sword.

5 - (Works if you play with figures) Set the map up so that the players have to walk across a floor of however long you want it to be. Color code it with like 5-6 different colors all strewn across the map, then play it how you want. It could be Indiana Jones style where players can only step on certain tiles and if they step on the wrong ones, pit trap. They could also make it so that whatever color is the first one you step on, that's the only color you can be on for the entire way across, and you have to pick your path at the beginning. Of course, you can also jump to tiles of the same color but only if they're within 3 squares of wherever you are.

[Rijan_Sai]

I've always been a big fan of the Tower of Hanoi* (even when I didn't know them by that name.)

Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic used a variation on this (4 disks), with the catch that if you moved the wrong piece into the wrong position, the whole thing would explode and you would get a Game Over (IIRC... never actually lost there...). It doesn't have to be quite so drastic for your players: have a "fail" trigger some sort of trap; activating a Symbol of Pain would be a pretty good "dangerous but not lethal" option. Introduced at a higher level, you could use other Symbols or Explosive Runes (centered on the puzzle solver); something like that!

*This link goes to an online, playable version for reference. You can test out however any disks you want to use. I find 3-5 is usually a good amount; no more than 7, depending on how your players are with it...

[icefractal]

Something I'd suggest is preserving the freedom of action TTRPGs are notable for. In CRPGs, there's often arbitrary limits on how you can interact with the puzzle - like if you're measuring out water with buckets of different sizes, you just can't use your own water-skins or a measuring stick or anything else ... for some reason. That comes off feeling pretty cheap and immersion-breaking in a TTRPG, so puzzles that exist as situations in the world and can be solved by whatever actions would logically work are a better fit.

Stuff like this is good, for example:

2. Things high up or otherwise out of reach. Put the button 30' up a wall and let the party puzzle out how to push it. They could use climb, jump, magic items, shoot it with an arrow, throw rocks at it, etc. You can have an "out" prepared if they are truly stumped but usually they will find a creative way to at least try to reach it. If you really want to make it exciting put it over a pit, across a chasm, or in some otherwise dangerous environment. My players got really creative trying to "high five" a glowing hand print 20' up on a wall with a big electrified pool below.

3. Combine simple traps with combat. "Find 3 levers spread throughout the room and pull them to unlock the door" is lame until Burning Skeletons animate every round. Who fights? Who climbs the rope ladder up to pull the lever on the ceiling? What if one lever has a big flame painted on it, does that mean we should pull it to kill the skeletons, or will pulling it summon more of them?

Some more ideas - they enter a "T" shaped room, at the intersection point. The central hallway is obviously trapped (floor open to a pit of acid, arcs of electricity across the hallways, spinning blades, whatever) and also the door at the end of it is sealed shut. At the end of the right and left hallways, around a corner, there are buttons that turn on and off various defenses and locks on the center hallway. Ideally, you need three people to operate it, with one standing in the center so they can relay what's happening when the other two press buttons. Maybe some of the options are mutually exclusive, so they end up with a couple defenses they have to bypass even after using the controls, but they can pick which ones.

For something more elaborate (this may be time-consuming to solve, so I wouldn't use more than one), you could have some kind of large device that works on similar principles to the GROW games. To summarize them, you pick an order to activate things in, and those things have interactions with each-other depending on the order they were activated. It usually takes a number of tries (and observing what happens) to figure out the correct order. Probably harder without visual feedback, so I'd make the puzzle simpler than the actual games are. Also, keeping in mind the freedom of interaction thing, the PCs could interfere by other methods than the standard one, maybe forcing an imperfect sequence of events to work if they can handle some danger.


Oh, and it's entirely possible that the players will come up with a shortcut that bypasses one or more traps much more easily than you'd planned. That's not a bad thing - most players love that kind of knot-cutting to happen sometimes. Maybe prep a couple extra puzzles, or an optional fight, so you have enough material for the day.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

A door with a combination lock on it, leading to a philosopher-wizard's treasury: getting the combination wrong gives you a suitable shock (whatever is nasty, but not lethal for your player party).

The door has a hemisphere of brass, hinged on one side, mounted right in the middle of the door. Next to the hemisphere is a small brass lever. Opening the hemisphere reveals the combination spinner - see below - and also starts three tumblers above the door rolling. They stop at any combination of these shapes: Triangle, Square, Pentagon (roll a d3 to choose). (Nothing happens to the system until the hemisphere is opened, and the combination is reset if it is closed and opened again).

The combination spinner is inside the hemisphere - it is an icosahedron (d20 shape) that can rotate freely in a sort of recess. Each face of the "d20" is marked with a number 1-20. You select a number by rotating to it, and pulling the lever next to the hemisphere. Then you pick the next number, until you have all three right, and the door opens.

The puzzle is that the number you're looking for isn't 3, 4, 5 in whichever order the shapes come up (the sides of the shapes), but 4, 6, 12 (in which ever order) - the number of faces on the solid formed from that shape.
A tetrahedron (d4) has four triangular faces, a cube (d6) has six square faces, a dodecahedron (d12) has twelve pentagonal faces.

Example: if the shapes on the tumblers come up Square, Triangle, Pentagon, then the combination is 6, 4, 12.

Clues to give out - the "d20" may be slightly worn or tarnished, allowing perceptive character to see which numbers are used.

[Maximum Carnage]

Wow guys, just wow. Thanks for all the outpouring of help, it's greatly appreciated. I hope we can get a few more ideas flowing, as I keep a DM journal and will gladly add anything that looks interesting to it.

Let's try to get some more combat oriented puzzles, as I think we have traps and room puzzles covered. Keep the good ideas coming, and thanks again.

MC

[Calthropstu]

Fun puzzles:

Place an illusionary prismatic wall in front of the door.

Place the illusion of a wall in front of the door.

Place something to fire crossbows at anything that moves through the room. Possible work arounds include combat (destroy them), Illusions (bypass them), deactivation (hidden switch in the passage before the room.)

Make 6 switches around a room that need to be pulled to open a door. Have an invisible imp/pixie/something going around deactivating the switches behind the PCs.

[Deeds]

You can do a "hard to reach key" puzzle. Imagine a simple locked door, a den of full of sleeping guardians, and a key ring hung on the 15 ft ceiling. The players can choose combat, stealth, or breaking the door down and fleeing (not to mention that PCs could come up with other clever solutions.)

A friendly animated door has a random word written above it. The door enjoys talking but is trying to avoid saying the random word. When the door says the word above the door, the door opens.

[Rijan_Sai]

Make 6 switches around a room that need to be pulled to open a door. Have an invisible imp/pixie/something going around deactivating the switches behind the PCs.

Spoiler

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[Venger]

Make 6 switches around a room that need to be pulled to open a door. Have an invisible imp/pixie/something going around deactivating the switches behind the PCs.

this will end... poorly

[Rijan_Sai]

this will end... poorly

To be fair, he completely deserved that.