The Wrong Way to Use Puzzles
Thoughts on being a referee in an RPG
I messed up last night. I gave my players a puzzle that required their characters to interact with a set of four tombstones in a specific order to open a hidden door.
My players tried to destroy the tombstones the moment they saw them, and I didn’t let them. I had the tombstones resist the damage because I didn’t want them to ruin the puzzle. Instead, they decided the tombstones must be some kind of trap and left.
Now, solving the puzzle wasn’t necessary for the adventure. It would give them an item that will be helpful but not necessary for future adventures. It’s okay that they didn’t solve the puzzle. But I could have handled the encounter so much better.
Murder Your Darlings
Arthur Quiller-Couch lectured writers to “murder [their] darlings,”1 meaning that they remove anything from their manuscripts that detracted from the story no matter how much they liked the thing on its own. Referees and Game Masters should do the same, except in our case we should let our players destroy or circumvent any part of our adventure if it helps them enjoy the game.
If I wanted to preserve the puzzle, I should have treated the destruction of the tombstone as an interaction. I should have had the clear orb embedded in the top of the tombstone glow red to show that they had interacted with the tombstone out of order. I should have had skeletons spawn from the ground because I’d already planned that to happen if they interacted with the wrong tombstone. If they tried interacting with the tombstone after they broke it I should have ruled that the interaction still counted.
I shouldn’t have committed the cardinal sin of telling my players “you can’t do that.” They would have learned that destroying the tombstones wasn’t a good idea and maybe realized that there was a puzzle to solve. They may have still left the puzzle alone after that, but I would have rewarded their choice by having the game world react to the choice. Instead, the puzzle room was an empty, forgettable encounter in an otherwise enjoyable adventure.
Other Thoughts
The ADHDM on the difficulties with puzzles in Role-Playing Games:
The Deficient Master on making your players the most important part of your game:
Quiller-Couch, Arthur. “On Style”, On the Art of Writing, 1914. Bartleby, bartleby.com/lit-hub/on-the-art-of-writing/wednesday-january-28-1914. Accessed 11 Nov 2024.