Creating Great Puzzles in D&D 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by the grim hollow monster grimoire which is just launch on kickstarter our friends at ghostfire games are releasing this book packed with over 400 new monsters for 5th edition kelly and i love dark fantasy and this book is offering an amazing bestiary of horrific creatures abominations and undead monstrosities inspired by your favorite tales of grim dark dreary monster tales not only that but this book is going to contain rules for how to harvest monster parts and the crazy items that you can make with those parts also the book is going to be packed with tons of great advice for dungeon masters on how to make the most of these monsters in your adventures and encounters you can follow the links below to join in on the kickstarter now and now onto this week's episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we're talking about how to build great puzzles for your games of dungeons and dragons 5th edition now puzzles in dungeons and dragons can be puzzling and we're here to unravel sort of the mystery around what makes a good puzzle and what might make a bad puzzle there's a lot of do's and don'ts that we're going to go over in this episode and as well as look at some of the key features that make a puzzle work dungeons and dragons 5th edition presents a couple good guidelines for designing combat encounters and even skill based challenges but the scope is much wider when it comes to designing a puzzle are you going to involve skills how are you going to challenge the players what makes a puzzle too hard how do you manage information what is even appropriate to use as a puzzle there's no monster manual filled with puzzles for d5e and often times we must look to other sources like books movies and particularly video games for inspiration we're going to share some of our tips and tricks but it's worth keeping in mind that this is a very creative form and there's no right way to design a puzzle but there are a lot of pitfalls designing puzzles for d5e is so challenging because you really want to avoid that situation where all your players are sitting around the table scratching their heads sighing in frustration because they don't know what to do or they solved it instantaneously and what took you three hours or longer to prepare for lasted five minutes at the table there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling first and foremost one of the major elements that you want to keep in mind when you're designing your puzzle is that a puzzle is just another type of encounter yeah it lies in the same spectrum as combat encounters social interaction encounters or even skill challenges or exploration encounters and in many cases a great puzzle in dnd can actually involve elements from almost every other encounter type weaving them together to present an interesting problem that the players have to solve sometimes puzzles can be very very explicit the classic lich's riddle presented in front of you or something that feels more at home in the legend of zelda or portal put placed in front of the table but sometimes puzzles can be very abstract and players might not even realize they're solving a puzzle like a murder mystery or a difficult political scenario so there's a lot of ways to creatively mask what a puzzle is but generally speaking we like to think about a puzzle as being something that is contained to something about as much as a combat encounter because as soon as it gets beyond that we're not now looking at more of a mystery oftentimes a puzzle is going to present an obstacle to the players where they have to use their reasoning their logic and their creativity in order to solve it oftentimes a puzzle is used for sealing a door or hiding a treasure or deciding the worthiness of the person or group of people that are attempting to bypass it yeah a puzzle can be a difficult test or a challenge or it can be used as sort of a security measure to protect an evil artifact or to prevent tomb robbers from getting into the lich's phylactery chamber now even beyond that puzzles could be part of the environment and might be a natural piece that the characters might just not have immediate information about a great example of a puzzle like this might be in a sewer system where a series of switches and levers will dictate the sluice gates opening and closing and the players need to figure out the combination of which levers are up and which ones are down in order to proceed forward it's a more natural element that is explained by the environment that the players now have to solve because they don't already know how this system works yeah the players might encounter a magical ritual gone wrong or they might encounter a strange eldritch machine or even some sort of natural phenomena or environment that rather than being an intentionally constructed puzzle it's really a broken device or a broken system or something that the players have to repair interpret or discover how it works in order to advance forward in their adventures when you're thinking about your puzzles you want to surround them with circumstances that are hard to bypass by simply using a spell or a charisma check perhaps you have that famous situation where there are two guards standing outside the gate and one of them always tells the truth and one of them always lies but if your players have zone of truth or can cast suggestion or can just beat them up and make them give them the proper answers then that's not really going to work in terms of creating a puzzle yeah if you have an amazing door with this incredible mechanical locking system and the player's sensibly dimension door to the other side well all that work that you put into designing that puzzle just went out the window so it's not to say that you shouldn't necessarily embrace the player's creativity when you're designing these puzzles and sometimes having these kind of bypasses can be a great way that if the players are stumped you actually let this fly but you do want to consider all the ways that the players could bypass your puzzle using their character abilities and decide whether or not that's something that you want to put some creative constraints on so the players can't easily get past it or whether that's something you actually want to put on the table i myself love creating puzzles that one up the players and surprise them when they try to bypass them and introduce interesting complications to the scenario when i'm dming a puzzle i sometimes like to put clues out there that could be found by using the character's abilities or by interrogating the right target or charming the right person these don't solve the puzzle but they give the players more information to work with so that they have more tools now when they approach the puzzle and of course with any puzzle it the context really matters your puzzle needs to present some interesting stakes perhaps a time constraint can be an interesting one as well sealing the evil artifact behind a door that is open by solving a riddle is a really horrible security strategy and for me i find those types of puzzles to be very difficult to believe and it makes me wonder why more serious security measures were not considered for this world-ending artifact but even still you can still find ways to use things like that in interesting ways that make sense as part of a wider system so do think about why this puzzle exists in your world because often times in real life we don't encounter explicit puzzles unless they're in a book that you bought at the dollar store and that is actually one of the detriments that i've seen in d d is a lot of people take dollar store puzzles and throw them into their games when they think they might need a puzzle but if the main entrance to your villain stronghold is protected by a multi-numbered puzzle that you need to solve using math equations it becomes cumbersome to put puzzles in the way of well-trafficked areas so you need to really think about the environments that you're putting the puzzles in why the puzzle exists in the first place and what purpose it serves and even more so i like to think about what the puzzle says about the environment it's in now the next point that we want to talk about is actually how to make a challenging puzzle for both the players and their characters if you take a dollar store sudoku puzzle and put that in your dnd campaign and you actually have the player playing the barbarian who is a master in real life of solving sudoku puzzles it's going to feel really odd when the player playing the barbarian solves the mathematical suduko puzzle when the 20 intelligence wizard who hates sudoku is sitting there on the sidelines this is often a really big inconsistency that we run into with a lot of puzzles and campaigns and it's led to this mantra of you should challenge the character and not the player the idea that we should challenge the character and not the player is a little bit of an issue because if we look at other encounters like a combat encounter a combat encounter both challenges the player character themselves and what's on their character sheet but the player's own sense of tactics and strategy also matter in that combat encounter so the answer is that a good puzzle should not be making an either-or decision between challenging the player or challenging the character both of those things should be challenged by a good puzzle because that's what we do in combat encounters now a lot of puzzles that have been presented in dungeon the dragons do lean on the side of challenging the players and not the characters but there are a lot of tools that you can use to make puzzles involve both not only is a puzzle going to demand the logical thinking of your players that's part of a puzzle they are going to have to look at the clues presented the options given and figure out what the answer is no matter what way you shake it up that is going to be the player's logic however by including elements in the puzzle that the characters can interact with that are part of the environment that they can touch move handle switch up and down buttons to push things of this nature are really going to be important for bringing the puzzle to life in the game setting for the characters now we don't want to make the puzzle something that can be simply solved by making a couple intelligence checks or dexterity checks that is not interactive at all and certainly we don't want to reintroduce that problem that we discussed earlier of simply letting the characters bypass the puzzle using a spell like speak with dead or contact other plane we want to have those elements in play but not necessarily have those be the silver bullet that solves the entire problem so when you are designing one of your puzzle take stock of the abilities of your players and consider the ways they might use those to gain clues information or hints that help them solve the puzzle rather than simply beating it instantaneously there should be a bit of a balance and a back and forth between them get being rewarded for using their their abilities but still ultimately needing to make the the connections themselves and logic things out it's a difficult balance to strike but that's what makes a really good puzzle in dnd designing puzzles can be difficult you need to make sure to challenge the logic of your players present something interesting and compelling for them to interact with that makes sense in your story now you can alleviate some of the pressure by simply looking at some great resources out there for inspiration on your puzzles we actually love looking at a lot of video games that use non-standard puzzles that do speak to the environment and the surroundings games like skyrim or half-life or portal are really compelling games that introduce options for puzzles that you could rip out of the game shift a few elements make it more dndified and then put it into your world be careful though because some work does need to be done oftentimes a resident evil style puzzle involves finding the right components to put into a door and turning them to the right thing so that it opens but it might not work if your barbarian can just smash down the door so look at the elements and what makes the puzzle interesting but then apply them in a way that makes sense for dungeons and dragons one of the biggest things to be careful of when you are drawing inspiration for your puzzles from other sources such as video games or even standard classic puzzle books is that dungeons and dragons is not a visual medium you might be using maps and miniatures but ultimately you as a dungeon master have to communicate the world through your verbal description one of my favorite puzzles from skyrim is in one of the first dungeons where you have to figure out the sigil that opens a door and you find the solution to that by picking up an item in your inventory and looking at the sigil underneath the dragon's claw that is a visual puzzle and it doesn't work in d d because you have to describe it now you could bring in visual aids to do these sorts of sorts of things and if you want to go ahead and make props and do things like that bonus points to you as a dungeon master but you don't have to do that to make a great puzzle it's really about figuring out how to communicate information in a visual manner and make sure that you are being forthcoming and giving your players enough information to understand what they're looking at um and that they can figure figure things out be aware that if you do give the players a handout or a printout that's going to get really scrutinized and personally i would avoid puzzles that really rely on visual things because often times i've seen games where the dungeon master breaks out a bunch of puzzle pieces and now d is over while the players around the table are literally putting together puzzle pieces so i find a visual aid can actually create a distraction that breaks the immersion of the game and it's for this reason that i generally avoid creating puzzles that rely on word scrambles mathematical equations or other visual and positioning based elements that would require me to give the players a handout of some kind it's really tricky to design those well and the more it feels like the puzzle could just be in a dollar store puzzle book the less it's probably appropriate for d so with that in mind there are several do's and don'ts of creating puzzles let's go over them when designing your puzzles you want your players to be puzzled not confused you want to make sure that you are presenting enough information that they can decipher first of all the purpose of the puzzle why they are solving it and what they need to do to solve it you want to give this information readily and use some maybe some skill checks or things like that to present hints or clues that can further their involvement in the puzzle on the flip side though when you are making a puzzle do not gate critical information behind a skill check if your players need to make a perception check to notice a detail and they fail that perception check they just fail the entire puzzle use perception investigation knowledge checks and other skill checks to give your players hints but not essential information they should be able to solve the puzzle without relying on these things unless there is an alternative way for them to obtain that information also make sure to write down your riddles and room descriptions one of the key reasons for this is consistency a lot of times when you are presenting a puzzle or riddle to your players they are listening to the words you are saying very carefully not only that but even the nuance of your voice where you add inflection could be really important for the puzzle so by maintaining consistency and having it written down in front of you you make sure to deliver the same clues to them time and time again with your delivery of the information i can't tell you how many times i have made a minor inconsistency in giving a description during a puzzle and created an unintentional red herring in my players simply because i used the wrong word in that moment and that's the other thing with with puzzles in general be careful about injecting intentional red herrings just like with a mystery your players are going to create red herrings on their own and you don't you probably don't need to put misinformation in the puzzle it's better to be overall honest with the whole situation and keep it very very clear about how things work a puzzle is also a great way to broadcast lore about your world you might have a puzzle that has three statues of various gods that are defined by their name and the element that they are associated with the god of water air and fire each holding out their hands they can read the scriptures identify who these gods are and that informs your world but on the other hand if you create a puzzle where it has the names of the gods but doesn't tell the players who they are or that this is the god of fire then they might not know that information you could say to them oh well i gave you that information 17 sessions ago when we were discussing the gods but there's a good chance they're not going to remember that so there's a difference between giving lore through your puzzles or having your puzzle hinge on the lore of your world and you want to err on the side of the first option where it can explain the world and make it deeper and more compelling but the answers to the puzzle should be readily in front of them and available to the players without them having to remember small little bits of information that you may have thrown at them a month ago don't make your puzzle a history test on the lore of your game setting that is a recipe for disaster when we think of combat encounters one of the major elements of a combat encounter is placing it in an interesting environment or having interesting terrain for the characters to interact with while they do the combat encounter and the same is true about a puzzle you want to think about the environment that they're in and the way that the puzzle is designed so that the players need to interact with the environment putting a puzzle in a unique and compelling spot that the players find interesting is going to make the puzzle more interesting for them to solve having things in the environment like switches that can be pulled and adjusted to different positions blocks or objects that can be pushed or moved into different spots in the room or having buttons that can be pressed or objects that can be eaten or drunk or moved around in this space or perhaps even mirrors that can be used to bounce light around or doors that can only be opened in specific combinations these can all be really interesting in dynamic environments and the more the player characters are moving through the world the more opportunity actually exists for the puzzle to be layered on top of a combat encounter you might design a puzzle where the players have to get through a series of several locking doors but only one door can be opened at a time each time a door is opened or closed ghosts appear which they have to fight and so it becomes an interesting navigation choice of how are the players going to split themselves up so one player can open one of the doors and one player can close one of the doors but the others can still fight the challenges they're in this is why i really love portal 2 specifically if you've ever played the co-op levels of portal 2 it is a master class on how to have multiple players work collaboratively to solve a physical puzzle it's totally worth playing and honestly you could probably just steal the levels from the portal games and put them in your dnd stuff and maybe come up with a different version of the portal gun or something like that and you'd have some great puzzles on your hands one of the great things about a puzzle designed with levers or switches or buttons is that it gives the player characters an opportunity to experiment you get to actually flip the lever and see what happens and once you learn what that lever does you move on to the next one and after sort of figuring out the nuances of which levers do what you can now start to piece together the puzzle this is a really interactive way for the characters to be involved moving around the environment try flipping this switch and now you flip that one and okay you're gonna flip that one next but we have to do it one two three in order that is a really interesting way to inspire teamwork collaboration and critical thinking that involves the environment the characters but also the player's logic i also like using this as an opportunity to telegraph to the players the dangers that might be inherent in the puzzle if the puzzle has an element of a death trap to it like pulling the wrong lever kills whoever's in the room well then that experimentation phase is an opportunity where the players can see oh yeah that's the lever that releases the poison gas and and that way they know what the stakes of the puzzle are so they can actually see oh if we try this for real and don't get it right we're going to take some damage or we're going to lose our spell slots or we might be at risk of death this experimentation is a really great way to communicate the stakes because you can tell the players yeah if you don't get the answer right you might take some damage but you're not going to instantly explode or the inverse of yeah you better make sure you're ready to commit to your answer because if you give an answer and don't have the right one you are going to instantly explode and this is one of those few opportunities puzzles is one of the few places in d d where as a dungeon master i very confidently create instant death scenarios but they're always really really well telegraphed i had a puzzle once that involved your choice of three different chests and choosing the wrong chest killed the character instantly but because of the way the rest of the puzzle was constructed that was very clearly communicated to the players and they had the opportunity to walk away we wanted the treasure so we had to decide which of the chess and be really really specific on making sure that all of us agreed that this was the chest to pick and i think joe got it right inversely we also had the situation where there was a difficult riddle where the entire party ended up getting knocked unconscious and captured absolutely um you never know you never know so and so even in these situations when you do have difficult puzzles like this if it does seem like your players are struggling to solve the problem the way that you intended it to be solved but they're coming up with other creative ideas that sound like they might work you could embrace that and if your players never figure out what the right answer was but their alternative answer is convincing enough you can always roll with it and you could wreck con it on the spot so there is something to be said for still presenting the puzzle but if the players really aren't getting it or if they've come up with something that is really brilliant and really creative embracing that rather than just shutting down their creativity is a really great trump card to pull out when the puzzle isn't quite going as planned now on the other side of that your puzzle might be solved relatively quickly and fact of the matter is that when you are creating a puzzle for dungeons and dragons the actual goal of that puzzle is to be solved by your players so don't feel thwarted or like you did all that work for nothing if the players actually come to a relevant conclusion somewhat quickly it is the purpose of the puzzle and it just means that your players nailed this one and maybe you'll get them next time but that's just part of d yeah we have all made a combat encounter that gets absolutely trashed unexpectedly we have all made puzzles that didn't end up being that challenging it happens to everybody don't get upset by it don't feel disappointed when your players solve the puzzle they were going to solve the puzzle no matter what and so if they did nail it right off the bat well now you know how they think about a little bit more and you can plan the next puzzle to be even better at the end of the day puzzles are an important part of dungeons and dragons they're another type of encounter to layer on top of combat exploration and social interactions adding in a puzzle here and there really brings to life new elements of what dungeons and dragons has to offer but when you're thinking about your puzzles make sure that they fit in with the environment that they challenge both the players and the characters and that they involve something that the characters get to physically interact with and collaborate on by doing this you're going to create a compelling puzzle that drives the narrative forward possibly informs more information about your world and your lore and challenges the players in a new and interesting way yeah so put down those crossword puzzles in those suduko books don't worry too much about getting inspiration from escape rooms and really focus on making those interesting physical puzzles that your players can interact with as a group so this has been a look at creating awesome puzzles in dungeons and dragons tell us about some of your favorite puzzles that you've experienced or created in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters many of whom helped give us feedback as we were putting together the script for this episode in our monthly writer's room that we host on our patreon only discord server if you enjoy the work that we create here on youtube and want to help contribute to our work please consider joining our community by following the links in the description below and we're creating a book dungeons of drakenheim is coming to kickstarter we've partnered with ghostfire games to bring this campaign to life as a fifth edition module you can follow the links below or go to drakenheim.com and join the mailing list to be up to date on all the information regarding this kickstarter and don't forget to check out our live plays shadows of drakenheim which is tuesday nights at 6 p.m eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got lots more great advice for dungeon masters running d5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we will see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 125,606

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: Hlp-ZsmoSxo

Length: 26min 33sec (1593 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021