Top 10 Puzzles to Add to a Dungeon in DnD 5E

when it comes to puzzles and dungeons they don't necessarily have to be dangerous or even that difficult sometimes all you need to make a good puzzle is just to find all the clues and then solve a very simple riddle and you're good to go and in this video we'll be going over 10 puzzles you can add to your game that you can also modify easily so the answers are not obvious and starting off at number 10 we have the three slit door this is probably the simplest puzzle to solve and you can use it if you want to block off an important area that your party needs to progress to and the setup is basically just set a large metal door that has a permanent anti-magic effect on it where there's no magical or physical way of forcing entry now for some of the puzzles on this list you can actually get around them by just going through the walls or spending a long time digging around the doors but for this list we're going to assume that characters are actually trying to solve the puzzles in front of them and whether they can get around them is up to you but for this one the puzzle is simply a door that has three slits in it and the way to solve the puzzle is to simply stab all three of the slits at the same time with some kind of edged weapon so if collectively a party has a whole bunch of daggers and swords that can be shoved into it that should work and once the door opens it remains open for 5 seconds before it closes again with no way to open the door from the other side now in order to help a party figure out how to solve this puzzle you could have some kind of hint written on the wall nearby maybe even a couple of rusted daggers and swords lying around the immediate area or you could just not give any hints at all and see what your players do when they encounter a wall that they can't force open or pick the lock of it's technically a very easy puzzle to solve but you'd be surprised how long a party might be stuck on something like this because they might overthink how it's actually supposed to be solved and spend a long time looking for a specific key or something in number 9 we have the force wall color puzzle the setup for this one is a lover inside a force wall but also it has four colored circles surrounding it the solution to this one is to simply push hard enough through the force wall in order to go through as it's not a real force wall and just an invisible wall that has some resistance to it if they step on the collars they will light up but ultimately it doesn't matter what order they step on them because they don't actually do anything and are there to just deter people from actually trying to push on the wall to get through this is another very easy puzzle that just requires a little bit of brute force and is an excellent one for a party who doesn't really like to solve puzzles anyway as they might try to destroy the wall in some other way which you should definitely allow and not make it indestructible and at number eight we have the lever room the setup for this one is just one large room which has a number of levers in it equal to the number of party members plus one then also have something in the room that the characters are trying to open be it either a door to advance further a treasure chest or activate some kind of teleportation circle the way to pull this off is to hit all the levers within six seconds of each other which means if everybody the party activates one with an item interaction then at least one person will have to run to another one in order to activate it within six seconds otherwise they all reset and to make it harder make it so all the levers have to be activated at the exact same time and a little bit of advice for some of these puzzles that all have a failure state you should probably have some kind of detrimental effect happen if they try to do it wrong otherwise they'll just try to brute force every puzzle so maybe poisonous gas floods the room if they don't successfully unlock the puzzle or it triggers an alarm or some kind of fire or spike trap not something that kills the party but definitely makes them not want to try to brute force every single puzzle but there are exceptions like the previous two spots of this list now the way to adjust this puzzle to make it more difficult since it's actually pretty easy to just have one person run around to another lever and use it or just have anyone with mage hand hit one of the levers at the same time is to simply increase number of levers based on how many party members you have if you want to make it really difficult create a number of levers equal to two times the amount of party members you have that way they have to run around in initiative order trying to hit two levers in one turn or even alter the location of some of the levers and put a couple of them on the ceiling or hitting behind a door that they have to run around and find just make sure the party has some way to determine the amount of levers they need to trigger and that they'll all be located close enough to each other so they can be triggered all at the same time then when they hit all the levers and whatever's being locked is opened up they have a sound or light activate so they know they did it correctly and at number seven we have the animal statue room the setup for this one is a little bit complicated but is easily adjustable for your campaign as the basics for this puzzle is you have four magical animal statues and you have four levers that you're trying to trigger however each lever is in an adjoining room and each of these rooms has very diverse interiors too effectively hit the levers you need to use the magical animal statues which while in your possession turn you into an animal while you're inside one of the adjoining rooms so in a room where the lever is high up you might need the hawk statue a lever in a room that is cold like the arctic so you need the penguin statue to not freeze a third level that can be completely enveloped in vines so to tear them apart you would need the bear statue another lever is in a room full of enemies in which case you would use the statue of the ferret in order to sneak past them now what makes this puzzle infinitely customizable is that you can just change the rooms to have anything you want inside of them while you can make it as simple as a room full of water and have one to the animals be an aquatic creature you can also make the room so they're sold with multiple animals add in an animal that could wall climb like a spider which your party could use instead of the hawk allowing your players to have some choice about which animal statues to use one of the advantages of this puzzle over a more standard one is that it doesn't require any complicated math or trying to solve some kind of riddle and it's pretty easy to try to figure out a different solution to the rooms in a way that doesn't require too much difficult thinking which is not going to be the case with some of the other puzzles on this list in number six we have the do as i do statue puzzle the setup for this one is characters go into a room that has a statue as well as some kind of square platform in front of it the statue will be in a power pose of some kind of your choice and if your character gets on the platform and copies the statue's pose then it starts the event where all they need to do is just copy what the statue does in order to advance to the next room or unlock whatever other kind of secret you have hidden behind this puzzle and since this one is simply just copying what the statue does it's infinitely customizable to whatever you can think of but for the sake of this video let's go over a sequence of events that might actually be difficult to copy first up you have a statue smash its fist into the floor breaking some of the tiles in order to get to the next sequence the player also has to do the same thing taking a little bit of bludgeoning damage as they draw blood on their hands from hitting the ground with a bare fist the second action is the statue will pull out a sword and stab a nearby statue drawing blood and the way the characters can copy this is by stabbing one of their party members with a piercing or slashing weapon dealing the damage of the weapon itself to them and finally the statue takes a dagger and pierces its hand revealing a key inside where one of the players has to do the same definitely taking some piercing damage in the process now you can obviously make this a lot less gruesome in your game but just make sure the action they have to copy is not super easy or super obvious on what they have to do as once they have the key they're pretty much good to go and you can have the key be used in order to open whatever was locked or just have whatever was locked open up and now they have a key that they don't know what to do with yet and that you could use as a key to solution to a future puzzle and at number five we have a simple order of operations this is a puzzle that requires everyone in the party to work together to perform one specific task however these tasks must be accomplished back to back in quick succession for example say you need to get across a chasm in order to advance further the only way to do this is to press a button which opens a secret door across the room however once the button is no longer being pushed then it closes the door so you need someone to push the button in order to open the secret room and then you need someone to go into the secret room in order to disable the trap which lowers the bridge then a third person needs to run across it in order to push the button that allows the trap to stay in place so that everyone else can run across the bridge and join them on the other side and this is another one that is very easy to adjust because all you're doing is having characters perform specific tasks that can't necessarily be done as a group because you need everybody else to run to a different location in order to perform a specific task so you could also associate skill checks to these things where it may be that the first button is high up on a wall in an awkward location so they can perform an athletics check in order to even reach it the second one needs a thieves tools check in order to unlock the second button the third button requires an arcana check in order to disable some kind of magical trap and the last one requires an acrobatic check in order to get across the bridge fast enough because there are broken sections that you have to avoid or something and at number four we have the blood fountain the setup for this one is a pretty decent sized room or hall of the party needs to cross the area of the room the party walks into has a fountain filled with blood or some other kind of foul substance that makes the characters not want to be near it and then they look at the floor of the room and they'll notice bloody footprints going across all the way to the other side and if any of the characters try to cross the room the walls will open up and start shooting darts at them which don't stop until all the way under the side of the long hallway so the way to get across is for the characters to take a bucket or pitcher and just cover themselves with blood or the other substance at the start of the room while covered in the blood they'll be able to walk to the other side of the room no problem this puzzle is pretty easy to solve for a lot of players and it's only really a deterrent to people who are really into role playing and are probably playing a character that doesn't want to dirty themselves so thoroughly in order to get across a single trap so if you have a very rp heavy party this is an excellent puzzle to throw at them and probably a terrible one to throw at meta gamers as they'll have no problem dunking their characters in whatever non-deadly substance they need to in order to advance the game and at number three we have the build your own number puzzle the setup for this one is a 10 digit combination lock that the players need to input the correct numbers for where each number is a totally unique one from each other so the numbers are all ten of the digits from zero to nine the way the characters can find to solve the lock is scattered around the dungeon in certain areas more logically looted from bodies and some of the denizens because they would probably have clues in order to unlock the door rather than being randomly found inside a treasure chest the way you give them the answer to the combination lock is by just giving them a whole bunch of clues that correlate to specific numbers for example you could have a clue that says the last three digits are the days in the year so 365. the middle two digits add up to 10 and are both even numbers the first five digits add up to 20 the number four appears before zero the number created by the first two digits plus the numbers created by the last two digits equals the numbers created by the middle two digits and so on and so on so you don't have to make it as complicated as my previous example and could have all the numbers just be something correlated to very easy to figure out events like each bandit lieutenant in the dungeon has a section of the password and once you get all the parts you can just enter it in the puzzle is definitely a lot harder than the previous ones on this list but could also be really easy if you make some of the hints very simple and pretty easy to devise yourself as a dm as long as you just have a series of random numbers and then work backwards in order to create hints so that your players can figure it out and at number two we have the three steps ahead cipher in the same vein as a previous puzzle this is a pretty simple word puzzle that can be easily modified to whatever message you want as the dm although probably a little bit easier than the number puzzle so here's how it works basically you describe what you want your hidden message to be for this video we'll say we want the hidden message to be rosebud so the message would be labeled somewhere in the dungeon as u-r-v-h-e-x-g and they need to decipher that random series of letters in order to find the password each letter can be properly decoded by simply looking for the letter in the alphabet that is three places backwards so three letters back from u is r three letters back from r is o three letters back from v is s and so on and so on the way the players can figure out how to decipher this message is by finding a cipher which is simply a riddle that tells them something along the lines of you should really watch your back and at other times you need to suspect everyone but in this particular instance you are three steps ahead if they're able to figure out the cipher from this message it's basically that each of the letters has three steps ahead of whatever they're supposed to be and because of how easy it is to create a custom cipher for this you can also just change the riddle to be two steps ahead if you wanted and also pick whatever message you want by just going however far in the alphabet you want for every letter and at number one we have the dragon's mouth the setup for this one requires a little bit of ambience where the dm must describe a very important key or button located in the mouth of a dragon statue which you have to describe as having very sharp teeth with possibly blood dripping from it or even add a skeleton with a ripped off arm next to the statue the players will need to open the dragon's mouth and stick their arm in very deep in order to push a button in order to grab the object necessary and you have to emphasize how deadly and sharp the teeth seem to be you can even make sure to tell them that whatever they need to grab inside is heavier than 10 pounds so no mage hand shenanigans or let them it doesn't really matter because the puzzle to this is that nothing actually happens if they simply open up its mouth and reach their arm in they can push the button or grab the key without anything bad happening to them but if they try to deface the dragon maybe they try to steal some of the jewels that are embedded in its face then it will just spit fire at them this is definitely a puzzle that only really works once because the next time you can just have it be real and actually chomp down their arm if they put it in but make sure it only deals some piercing damage to them and doesn't actually tear their arm off unless you're running a very deadly campaign in which case you can put a sphere of annihilation inside the dragon's mouth to make their arm go away after they push the button alright and that's the video do you know of any other fun puzzles that can be added to a dungeon or have any ideas for future videos just like this one if so i'd love to hear about them down in the comments [Music] you

Channel: TheD&DLogs

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Keywords: D&D, Dungeons and Dragon, s Dungeon & Dragons, D&D Beyond, DnD, Wizards of the Coast D&D, Heroes Campaign RPG, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, rule, rules, d20, d12, d10, d8, d6, d4, DM, PC, tips, tricks, advice, guide, dice, book, PHB, VGTM, dungeons and dragons, 5th edition, best, overpower

Id: 70EC_pzMBrw

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022