Timewaster's Guide Archive
Games => Role-Playing Games => Topic started by: 42 on November 16, 2004, 05:32:11 AM
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So I want to integrate more puzzles and problem-solving stuff into my campaign sessions for my blood-thirsty combat oriented players.
So what have been some fun puzzles/games that people on the board have done in your RPG groups?
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the hardest thing about problem solving/puzzles is you have to be as clever as an entire pack of role players so that they don't have too easy a time of it.
Anyway, some puzzles I remember from long ago:
a trap where a statue, make it pretty close to indestructable, breathes fire out as it turns in a circle. It activates as you get half way to it through the room, filling it with damaging elemental damage of your choice (don't have to make it fire if, say, you have a party full of protection against fire). (so the party, or lead member of it, is one-quarter across the room, the statue is in the center). It's a large room, and it takes 4 rounds to completely cross the room. Every other round, the statue breathes fire (or whatever else) doing just enough damage to make it dangerous (make saves difficult but not impossible, the point of this exercise is to drain party resources - like spells - if they don't act quickly, not kill them outright). They can't destroy the statue, they can't get through the room without getting smacked at least twice. But a fast character (like an unarmored barbarian in D&D) can make it to the only safe spot in the room without getting hurt-- the top of the statue. Where is the switch to turn off the mechanism? Inside the mouth of the statue where the fire is coming out. the solution is the fast character enters and races to the statue while everyone else waits behind. He climbs it and waits for it to shoot out fire again. He then reaches in and turns it off.
There's always the handy "chess" puzzle too, where you enter at one end of the board and have to move like the chess piece that would start in that square across the board (diagonally if a bishop, etc) or else some magic trap activates. Whatever will be effective against your group. That might be too easy though. So make it an unexpected variant: it's a checker board. Make some tough golems (immune to crits and more importantly, back stabbing rogue abilities) or something they can't beat two-on-one, and since they can't surround the enemy, they have to get around them. If it's checkers, they don't have to run, they can make an acrobatics or tumble check (or equivelant) to pass through the space, which neutralizes the golems for the remainder of hte time they're in there.
if you can find it, the old module "The Castle of Inverness," which was a tourney module in the early 80s, had a number of good traps in it, if I remember correctly. I have a copy, but it's in storage.
Come to think of it, if they're in a place that's typically of one element. Say, a fire giant stronghold, and they're prepared for whats coming (lots of protection from fire, etc), simply making some traps of a different type, like electricity or cold in this example, would throw them off. It makes sense to me. A fire giant king wants to keep potential rivals in his tribe out of certain areas or coffers, he'd trap it with something that'd hurt fire giants too. And he would be aware that interlopers would be prepared for heat and fire, so he'd have to do something against that too.
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Those ideas sound good. I'll have to see if I can get a copy of "The Castle of Inverness" off of ebay or something.
I have decided that I'm limited how much time I give the players to solve a puzzle. Usually bout 15 minutes before I either solve it for them or let the characters take the full wrath of the trap. Unsolved puzzles and traps mean less rewards for the characters.
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a time limit certainly adds some tension so they try harder.
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One of my favorite traps is as follows:
You enter a 20' x 20' x 12' room with a green square in the middle and an adamantine (or some other near indestructible substance appropriate for your setting) door on the opposite wall. As soon as you clear the entranceway a door slams shut behind you. But nothing happens...
Allow the charater to investigate the room for a while, and with a decent search roll allow them to determine that the room is air tight, and is blocking all teleportation and inter-dimensional travel. But still nothing happens.
Eventually they will investigate the green square in the middle of the room. As soon as the character is standing on it a voice rings out, "You have 3 minutes to live!" (Start a timer for 3 minutes, or just keep track on your own as this will force the player to think quickly)Have the character make a spot check. If they are successful they will notice that the word "Patience" has appeared on the door opposite from the one they entered. If they fail, they don't see the "hint" before it disappears.
If the character remains on the square, they will survive. If they move off of the sqaure they are struck by a disintegrate spell once every round until the remainder of the 3 minutes have elapsed (based on the D&D round being 6 seconds).
Needles to say, my group still has a fear of rooms that are 20' x 2-' x 12'. ;D
A book that might also offer some ideas is the D&D Book of Challenges. I usually tweak the stuff in there, but it has proven to be a good source of generating ideas.
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So what's the frickin' trick to get out of the room alive?!
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I assume the adamantine door opens after the three minutes are up.
However, you're going to have to have some sort of anti-magic to make that work. A good stone-to-mud spell or a disintegrate of their own will rip open a wall.
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I was the unlucky individual that got this particular "death trap". The trick of course was to stay on the green square for three minutes. Being a young, impatient, and relatively novice gamer at this point, I didn't do the proper thing of using a spot check or whatever the revised edition of it for palladium calls it, so I didn't see the hint "Patience". So I went for the exit to force the door open like any inexperienced player would do and was executed by the gm for not being patient. Had I waited the three minutes or even a few rounds I would have realized that I wasn't getting hurt standing on the green square. Nicadymus at this point in his gm'ing career was notorious to kill off his players for the sheer fun of it. What am I saying, he still likes to try, but being that Nicadymus is still a rules lawyer at heart, we can sometimes keep him at bay with the rules that he threw out at us. The funny thing about this death trap was it was the first one for our group. I believe there were seven total, and I was the first to enter the room so there I went. I think only one or two guys in our group made it through. Sprig was the last one and he made it through, with help of hearing what was happening to the rest of us. That low initiative helps from time to time. But it was the death trap that was thrown at me that we still remember and get jumpy about, because Nicadymus will always change what he has put us through before, and let us relieve the challenge of something familiar but altered somehow. That evil little man with no hair. Ah the good times.
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Hey! That's a classic TMNT death trap. Man those were fun, written by Eric Wukick there were about 10 listed in the first TMNT adventure book.
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Yup classic traps. Hard to beat.
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see, I think those are great traps, but my players whine when they are given something that hards.
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We whined to when Nicadymus tries something like that, but Nicadymus tells us to shut our freakin yaps and deal. Then he gets this wierd look on his face and an evil glint comes into his eyes and he laughs very very evil like.
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See when I tell my players to quit whining, they get up and leave, telling me to call them when the encounter is over.
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Those wussies! I don't think our group has ever gotten up and left due to a few death traps. We may have tore up our charcter sheets and balled them up as tightly as we could, and then proceed to chuck them at the gm for the sheer fun (and frustration too). But leave, never. 42, you can come gm our group anyday, cause Nicadymus, Rican, Moredew and myself would never leave. Bitch yes, but leave never. We welcome the challenge of a gm trying to kill our group. Ha Ha, you could never destroy us!
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There was one time people left Capt., thought this was before you started gameing with us. It was a messy game session that involved about everyone getting mad and haveing our characters gank each other.
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Was the session spiritually damaging?
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only to the RHBS, though he wasn't the one fighting, more like the child stuck in the middle of it all.
Though that event, a Palladium Fantasy game, got me banned from playing the Aberrent alignment for quite some time. Though on the plus side the pricipled alignment also got banned. Never thought a goody-goody, tree hugging, hippy palladin would conflict with my "to save the world you have to destroy lots of things" attitude character. Also I killed his characters pet cat, which started the conflict (If I'm rememering it right).
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You're not being entirely fair to our group, 42. Your puzzles tend to be of the 'guess-exactly-what-I'm-thinking-or-you-can't-do-anything' variety. Whether you have a different view of the trap/puzzle or not, when we *do* try something different than the exact answer you have in mind, nothing happens. It might be that there just isn't any other way, but the puzzles you have made are designed like that. There's only one answer. We try for a while, but after the experience of a full two consecutive sessions of nothing but GM mind-reading, it's hard to be patient with the trend. Luckily, you're not making us guess answers to obscure art history questions to progress. ::)
Eagle Prince sent us in through a gauntlet, and we had a little trouble maintaining our patience, but there was one trap in particular that he had in mind for us to disarm our way through, but we couldn't. It took us a while to figure it out, but we made up a different way, and we made it through fine. There's a big difference there in design and execution.
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Sprig, I think it was my character that killed the cat. If I remember correctly, I was playing my assassin character and you hired me to kill the Paladin's pet cat, and then to avoid his wrath we hid in a Protection from Good circle. I think Castro had a bad gaming session that time because his cat died and his paladin character died at the hands of an angry farmer and his hoe. Who knew a farmer could kill a 9th level Paladin with his farming implement....and I guess it helps if the farmer rolls a nat 20 and the paladin botches his parry. That encounter was so funny. I think Castro cried himself to sleep that night...
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ahh, that's right. I knew I was involved in killing the cat, but couldn't remember how it happened. I remember hireing your chracter to kill it now, and hideing in a circle of Protection sounds like us too. We were probaly taunting him endlessly too. Man that was fun even though it pissed Nicadymas off that we caused he's campaign to fall apart. I think that event is what caused him to decided that players should never have their characters for very long, and the only way we'd get along is if we were worrying about dieing ever wakeing minuted of gameing. And it worked, in that we worried more about our GM killing us then other players.
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Here's a dumb trap I made for 2nd edition. You enter a round room with a very tall ceiling and a metal firepit at the center. There was magic runes around the walls that went off if you tried to read them. On the other side was a spiral staircase, which had a magic teleport trap you had to disarm to continue, using thief skills. Just before the teleport went off and put you further up the staircase, there was a metal handle. The other way to get past the staircase was to take the metal handle, clean out the firepit and notice two notches that the handle fit in to create an adamantine shield. If you had the shield, then the teleport trap didn't go off.
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What did the runes do when they went off? IF the teleport trap sent you up the stairs, isn't that where you want to be anyway?
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No, the stairs went down and you wanted to go down, ie if you didn't notice the teleport trap, you'd think the stairs kept going down forever. The runes were symbol spells, so they did all sorts of things, its a lot like the 3.0 symbol spell (or in 3.5 symbol of pain, symbol of fear, etc).