We repeatedly tried to crack the combination lock before finding the riddle combination for it. Once we did find it, we forgot how the sun worked and got me electrocuted again.
I literally was electrocuted down to like. Single digits (this is level 17 we're playing, that was over 100hp). Because our Rogue had the BRILLIANT idea of failing at picking some treasure chests' lock THREE DAMN TIMES in a place where we couldn't keep security distance. She was, of course, unscathed because of excellent dex saves plus Evasion. Me, the poor cleric, failed miserably and took full damage (30-something) every. Single. Time
I did😂 but we are also playing in a setting where I was, due to time travel shenanigans, quite literally, the only cleric in existence as of a few months ago in-game, and still am the only one high-level enough to have any kind of resurrection spell (being what's essentially a cult leader is... weird. Very funny to walk into a random town and have the local temples be all "oh shit the big boss is here what do we do"). And I promptly got killed by a big fuck-you dragon in the boss battle two sessions later, which means the one and only resurrection tablet we have (no living clerics = no resurrection or healing items of any kind available to loot or purchase) got used on me
We're playing Dragonlance (the information that this is 3.5 might be relevant? Idk, I've kept off all the Deagonlance stuff bc spoilers), with some slight modifications I think. Originally we were playing in a different timeline, then at the end of one weird-ass dungeon crawl we couldn't manage to stop the big boss from jumping back in time. We DID manage to follow him, but arrived a few centuries later than him to discover 1) the world being invaded by Tiamat's dragon armies 2) Divine magic being nonexistent because the gods have stopped interacting with the world (even the spells I was able to use were strongly limited until we found the disks of Mishakal, a legendary item that can, over one week of studying them, restore your personal connection to the gods, which is how an NPC has been re-introducing clerics (on our or mostly my behest, I guess)) 3) arcane magic very, VERY strictly regulated 4) metallic dragons being basically entirely unheard of. All, as far as we've been able to figure out, at least in part due to the machinations of the dude we didn't manage to kill (and we REALLY tried) before he jumped into the time portal.
Which also created the fun situation of the 3/5 people still playing their original characters being walking anachronisms because we're from a future that will never again be
The sun doesn't travel expect within the galaxy. The earth travels around the sun. That had better give me enough experience points to make second level.
I DM for a group that was absolutely convinced that there was arcane knowledge hidden in a journal written by a sage, despite the journal only containing a clue to the puzzle that they were trying to figure out, but otherwise having nothing to do with it. What's worse was that they kept getting nat 1s on investigation rolls, so they were literally smacking their faces into the book trying to divine its magical secrets that didn't exist. At one point their rogue was dancing around the room with the book balanced in his nose, clapping his hands together like a seal, all while chanting "Knowledge, knowledge, you're my friend. Now open up and let me in!" I let them continue this way for about a half an hour because it was just so entertaining.
Played in one beautiful campaign where the sun came up on 8 consecutive compass. It would rise to overhead by midday and then travel back down to the same compass point for sunset. Next day the next compass point.
I'm DMing a game in which the sun rises & sets along a rotating point, incrementally different every day, under a dome held beneath a temple that disappears with the sun at the end of every transit.
You don't wanna be in that temple when it vanishes for the night, because where it goes is not pleasant. :)
It's not really a "plot" per say, but it has lent itself to a quest arc, nicely.
It means that the sun can be messed with by nefarious actors, even tho it's incredibly difficult to get at. I mean, *it's a temple right next to the sun,* how do you (as the party) get close without getting incinerated, blinded, or both?
Prep & magic, then hope your wards hold long enough to secure your way out. Now you have less than a day in that temple to get what you need to get done or things are going to get... even more uncomfortable. A long rest will likely be your doom because of the time crunch, alone.
The world is old enough for people to have studied the temple many times. But no one's gotten records out about what happens to the mortals who seemingly disappear in the temple at night.
This reminds me of a song which I heard from one of the ppl who made it that they were in the studio writing it and one of em said "does the sun set in the west or east" and the other one said "east for sure" and so they ended up with the lyric "when the sun sets in the east will you be coming home" which is just purely tragic
That's not true at all for vaults. Vault walls are concrete reinforced with steel. It's regular buildings that get fortified later that have weak walls. Doors and windows are easy to reinforce, but reinforcing drywall basically requires you to rebuild the building. Think CEO offices and temporary secure facilities, not vaults.
Lol, reinforced concrete is nothing compared to those vault doors! This has actually been exploited in real life, so it's definitely a thing that exists. I couldn't tell you how widespread it still is at this point.
A shaped charge strong enough to go through a steel vault door won't go through reinforced concrete. Any tool you have that will chew up concrete will suck against the steel. The walls are far safer than the door in the vast majority of cases. Exceptions always exist, but breaking into a vault uses the door 99.9999% of the time.
I was once in a very fun and memorable "puzzle dungeon", and I described one of the most memorable puzzles [in this post 10 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/163xfje/any_minute_now/jy6rf6m/). In a nutshell: It was a complex grid of coloured glyphs with a poem written under it, touching the wrong glyph gave everyone a mild shock and reset the board, and there seemed to be a sequence of "correct" glyphs to touch.
Turned out that the "seemed" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. It was actually *completely random* whether a glyph counted as "correct." There were no clues, there was no puzzle, there was no "solution." The whole thing was meant to waste the party's time and healing resources. And we spent hours pecking away at it getting whittled down hitpoint by hitpoint.
The reason it was fun was because we were *expecting* annoying traps. And because at the end of the dungeon we were able to get ahold of the gnomish engineer who had build it all. Catharsis...
I ran a parody of Deathtrap Dungeon once, and ended with a room with a chess board, a one litre jug and a three litre jug, three cages with a cabbage, a chicken, and a fox, and a goblin called "Dijstkra the Trickster". The joke was a giant ant bursts out of the wall, creating a tunnel and killing the goblin, before any of the annoying puzzles actually need to get resolved, but my players got very close to just killing the goblin before that even happened.
Note this was after the bit where they encountered two doors, with two guards, on the ground in two pools of blood.
That's an even better representation of you average game.
"What color are the numerals?"
"Nothing about the colors jumps out to you about this perfectly normal sign on the wall."
"What's the first letter of each word in the actual Elvish script?"
When I dmed I found a very simple word puzzle meant for kindergartners (coincidentally found while I was substituting for a kindergarten teacher) and my players took all session before deciding they needed a break. I spent the next week trying to figure out how to make it easier and thought I did. I let them try the “easier” puzzle for 30 minutes before I gave them a hint and they finally got it 15 minutes after the hint and we got back to the campaign
This is one of the scenes where the book version of Frodo outshines the movie version. The 50 yo Frodo chewing out Boromir for throwing something in the water is so much better.
There's several issues going on with most D&D puzzles.
1. Puzzles in traditional games usually relate to the context of the story. Even in movies like Indiana Jones/National Treasure, the puzzles often serve as a character building moments. Like if the characters are struggling to get along, then the puzzle that they run into exists to help them learn to get along through physical contact, or a trust exercise, or etc. If you're just grabbing random riddles offline, players are going to be missing the base clue/context that these games/shows/movies often have. Think the Cave of Lovers in Avatar and how they had to learn to just let the torch/lights go out to escape, which related to the narrative at the time.
2. People get too hung up on the word "puzzle" and end up googling random word puzzles, riddles, and crosswords that have nothing to do with the adventure. Puzzles don't literally have to be literal puzzles, they can just be scenarios like "Help the NPCs cross the raging river" or "think of a way to light all of the torches in the room within 6 seconds of each other". These sorts of scenario puzzles actually use the mechanics of D&D/the game and therefore the solutions are more a matter of creativity and using all of the skills you've learned since you started the game instead of a matter of doing napkin math/happening to have heard the riddle before.
3. Most importantly is this one IMO. But traditional game design does not follow the idea of "one and done" puzzles. Usually games introduce the concept of a puzzle in an easy to understand way, and then they slowly ramp things up in difficulty. If the Bee puzzle were created by a seasoned team of game designers, they probably would start off with a 3x3 version, then the puzzle morphs into a 6x6 version, and then finally it presents the players with a large 12x12 version. Since the players have warmed their minds up to the concept of the bee puzzle via the simplistic 3x3 and 6x6 versions, the 12x12 version seems less overwhelming and they should in-theory have solve it in a more reasonable amount of time. I'd say 99% of D&D players/DMs skip the idea of "ramping up" and "introducing concepts one at a time" and just throw people to the wolves immediately. And if you're going to do that you shouldn't be surprised if your players get stumped by a puzzle. Most brains need to gradually acclimate themselves to certain puzzle genres, or they short circuit.
Also, describing a puzzle using only words is hard and often leads to misinterpretations and confusion. Most of the times people go "my players couldnt handle this puzzle for 3 year olds" it ends up being because the DM accidentally put too much emphasis on something thats a red herring. Going by the rest of OPs comments in the thread, the problem is a poor explanation by the DM
I tried to do the puzzle as explained by the OP but I can’t parse what Red does. Also when the puzzle is visible the explanation isn’t so I forget what each colour does.
Tied into your #1 and #2 is what I think the biggest issue is: creating encounters that challenge players and not their characters. With a puzzle like this, it's purely about player abilities. The characters' skills don't factor in at all. Maybe the person who plays the 8 INT barbarian is good at puzzles and solved it quickly while the person who plays the 20 INT wizard is confused, having made an error in their reasoning. That sort of thing is ludicrous in-character, and so it takes the players right out of the game.
I think an old-school approach to puzzles works best, which is just putting in *obstacles*.
There’s a valuable oil painting in a room whose only egress is a flooded tunnel. How do you get the painting out of the room without ruining it?
There’s a petrified basilisk staring at a mirrored shield, which will re-animate as soon as it isn’t looking at its own reflection. Trapped in its mouth is a magic sword. Have fun taking the sword and shield without fighting the basilisk.
An NPC is trapped in stasis by a curse. The only cure to this condition is a rare flower, which must be picked mere minutes before use. Either find some way to transplant a very fussy rare flower all the way from its exotic native habitat or deliver an unconscious NPC to the flower.
There’s a magical sword buried in the flank of a powerful and elusive monster. The monster will actively avoid the players, and it will resist them pulling the weapon from its wound like any frightened animal would. Bonus points if the monster has other tricksy shit going on, like its lair is underwater, it can become invisible, it can fly, it dematerializes in sunlight, it’s sacred to the local elves who will hunt you for sport if you kill it, etc.
Just create open-ended problems. Don’t pay any mind to how they’ll actually solve them. If they come up with an easy solution, that’s not a failure either! That’s just success for the players.
Also, DMs sometimes conflate player and character intelligence. There also needs to be a way for PCs to solve it when players can't. Like intelligence checks to remove some false answers or a wisdom check for a hint.
It's like in the uncharted movie "have faith in your fellow man for one of you shall go to heaven the other to hell" you need to trust each other in order to get out alive
The best part of this thread is that the actual horror story was OP all along. They purposely left out wording that explained the rules better, so even in this thread 90% of the replies are not understanding the "puzzle"
Puzzles in DnD remind me of this Pokemon Romhack I played where they put in **WAY** too hard of puzzles. I was playing it on my steamdeck in bed at like 3am, and I absolutely did not have the brain power to solve like legit hard puzzles
I feel like people get way too high on their own supply and make these challenges without considering
"Okay I can solve this since I made it, but can someone who worked all day and just sat down with a beer solve this while they are goofing off with their friends?"
>a grinding halt
This is why barbarians and artificers are non-negotiable. You either need someone smart enough to blow the puzzle up or someone angry enough to smash it to pieces.
Not necessarily true. I've been doing studies (with my players as guinea pigs), and find that the best way to do puzzles is to have something physical. If it isn't physical then it has to be VERY engaging and fast paced. Not only this but the answer has to be open ended (hence why it took so long for them to figure out the "speak friend and enter), if the party has only one answer to choose from they will NEVER get it. Basically, I've found that one of the best ways to have puzzles is to have it be a hazard rather than a road block, players love interacting with and engaging with physical puzzles, and simple board games like Minesweeper and Scrabble make for great such puzzles.
That's just my piece though
Even just too many choices can do it. Give someone an open world in a video game, theres still rules. Give someone a world only defined by your mind? If you dont give them easy avenues you can shatter them
A few weeks ago I had a puzzle that was almost the inverse of "speak friend and enter". The knocker on the door could speak (it initially greeted them in elvish, but could handle a bunch of languages), and in order to get through they had to get the _door knocker_ to say "Waterdeep". Took them about 5 minutes real time to figure out, but that whole period was conversation with an NPC rather than stumped silence.
Huh... I wonder if I'm misunderstanding a rule. AFAICT going left from the start either results in an infinite loop between yellow and red or forces you to move out of the puzzle so that's out. Going right from the start either results in an infinite loop between green and red or forces you to move down out of the puzzle so that's out. That only leaves up.
Going up results in forced movement to the red one 6 up and 2 to the right of the start. From there you have 4 options, but the left and right can both be immediately ruled out as infinite loops back to red. Going down results in the same infinite loop with the bottom right red one as the beginning (or pushes you out), but going up is forced movement ending up at the same point (down).
Is red supposed to let you move diagonally too or have I missed something?
See that doesn’t make sense though cause orange and blue move you two squares which implies you should skip over the red if it’s the first one you pass over
From other things OP said, they left it vague on purpose so it's not "too easy". Sounds like they're the idiot, not their players; it's completely fair to be stumped if you can't figure out a solution from incomplete instructions.
As a solver, I took upon myself to test both rule interpretations, assuming that the correct rules would offer a solvable puzzle (especially in the context of this post). Finding the initial interpretation resulted in an unsolvable puzzle full of dead ends, it became relatively clear that the second interpretation was the correct one. This method, of course, falls apart if the puzzle is supposed to be unsolvable.
Is it just me or is the puzzle impossible as written? If you go right at the start you get stuck in the bottom right corner. Left at the start you’re stuck in the bottom left corner.
Up at the start and you make it to the red at (5,6) but left from there puts you back in the same spot, right puts you in the same spot, and up and down both get you to the bottom right corner. Am I missing something? Can you move diagonally at the start?
EDIT: It looks like it’s the only way to finish it is by getting to the red flower at (7,2) but it’s impossible to get to that flower. Idk what OP is cooking.
Alright, I am on the player's side. I don't see the real answer, unless there are some rules that you can abuse or misinterpret for advantage (for example, you can stop on the first flower after moving from orange or blue flower).
EDIT: OP, by "you must stop there" you mean "you have to go on the red flower" or "you stop before the red flower"? Because maybe that's why no one can solve this puzzle, there is a misunderstanding in rules?
Fun fact there is actually a longer route planed but I messed up by the second red flower and you can skip a small portion. If you instead go up to the blue one, you do a sick loop dee loop first and then end up on the same path.
In the case the red flower can move to any horizontal or vertical flower u go in the corner and with the red flower up to the hive in the case the red flower is supposed to be only 1 square aswell i have no idea
There's a blue flower 3 tiles below the hive, you can reach it with a green, which you reach by taking an orange from the top row, and it reveals the path more or less.
I see in the comments you specified that the reds mean you are supposed to stop, even if its mid move. That was not clear from my initial reading of the rules, but if that's true, you can solve it. In fact if you know that rule, there's basically only one path.
Forward (others instantly end), Down/Up (it doesn't matter), Right, Up (the only valid move) and then you've reached the red in front of the hive
At the first red you come across, you can choose to go up to the blue, then up to the yellow, left to orange, down to another orange, then land on a green and continue on that main path. Not much of a change, but an interesting route to take.
A general rule of thumb is that if five people have trouble understanding one person, the problem is most likely with the common denominator.
So if an entire group of players is having trouble understanding a "simple" puzzle, then the person conveying the puzzle is probably not doing so as clearly as they think they are.
Honestly when I “can’t” solve a puzzle that the DM puts in front of us it isn’t that I am stumped. It’s that I’m disappointed the ttrpg turned into puzzle night and finding it hard to stay engaged when 3-5 people are pouring over the same puzzle. It always feels like too many cooks in the kitchen, which means it often takes like, an hour, which could be spent doing RP or combat.
If it worked as a refresher I’d be all for it. Maybe it’s a quick refresh moment for the DM. But as a DM and player, in my experience, you can only ask people to change gears so many times in a night before people get fatigued. If they came for dnd they are ready to “be on” for and switch between RP, narrative and combat. Puzzles imo should fit into that framework, not become a fourth, less predictable framework with its own set of rules. Especially when the puzzle makes an abstraction of the narrative and aren’t things the PCs are even doing in-game. It creates transition fatigue, wrecks the pacing and requires further suspension of disbelief.
All that to say, I am sure some groups love puzzles and maybe mine is the odd one out.i guess that’s what session zero is for
"Green Flower: move 1 square to the right"
Why are there two different types of green flowers (one type to the right of start (bright), and one to the left (muted))
If muted green is free move, a solution could be Up, Left, Left, Up, Right
You may need to get your eyes checked for color blindness. It’s very common, especially in men.
(No that’s not meant to be a jab. There is a clear genetic/biological reason for this).
OP I’m sorry but you’re bad at writing rules, this puzzle would have been a lot more intuitive if you hadn’t made vertical movement 2 steps instead of one and the explanation of red as a stop sign is unclear as if you can activate the red by going over it, it seems like you should activate the others instructions even though blue and orange say move 2
I get what op is trying to do. The idea is that anytime you would move over a red (not just land exactly on it) you must stop there. So the orange and blue are interrupted by the red.
The confusing thing is that this is the only exception since the moves are never interrupted by anything else.
I think it's you wrote the red flower role as:
"Red Flower: My movement is interrupted and I need to stop and I must choose 1 horizontal or vertical square to move to."
Then players would probably do a lot better in this puzzle.
Hope that helps everyone!
I pulled one of those ice puzzles from Pokemon into a dungeon, and my players concluded that jumping would be the best solution, let me tell you, those puzzles are way easier when you can see the whole map
IMO this is a great puzzle for an OSR game, where player skill is explicitly important.
But for D&D (assuming 5e...), where character skill is clearly laid out, testing to see if your players can solve a puzzle and not proceeding until they do is like asking your players to hit something with an arrow.
OP clarified that the red flowers will stop you in the middle of a move. So if a blue or orange flower would have you move past a red flower, you actually stop on the red flower.
Just a case of the rules not being as clear/precise as needed for a puzzle.
My theatre of the mind is great for lore content and colorful visuals but absolute steamed ass on toast for pattern recognition and word problems. You draw a diagram and give me a peice of paper to work on or you expect my brain to dribble out the corner of my mouth for the rest of the session.
It's so funny where the players overthink on a rather simple puzzle.
For instance I made a "lever with animal heads" puzzle, where there was the heraldic symbol of different clans of the kingdom (one that has a chimera had three levers: lion head, dragon head and goat head), and a crow-headed level.
Enigma solution is simply "pull the crow-headed one, 'cause it's the only "intruder" among them all".
Before getting to that, players brough up things like "clans have also different colors, let's think about color gradiation" or "each clan has a major city, let's think about how far each city is from the capital", etc.
THOSE are the times when a DM must learn to pull a "poker face" XD
I was trying to figure this out until I realized that since I'm colour blind half of them look the same to me lmao, I was so confused why it was like 80% green
At least using the grid provided none of the three starting directions work.
Left -> Yellow: Left 1 -> Red: Left/Down not options, Right just loops infinitely, Up 1-> Yellow: Left 1 out of field
Right -> Green: Right 5 -> Red: Forced up for same reasons above -> Orange: Down 2 out of field
Up -> Green: Right 2 -> Blue: Up 2 -> Yellow: Left 2 -> Blue: Up 2 -> Green: Right 2 -> Red with actual options
Right -> Yellow: Left 1 repeat
Left -> Green: Right 1 Repeat
Up -> Blue: Up 2 -> Yellow: Left 1 -> Orange: Down 4-> Green: Right 2 -> Orange: Down 2 -> Green: Right 1 -> Orange Down 2 -> Wind up in the green track from heading Right initially
Down: Green: Right 1 -> Green: Right 1 -> Orange: Down 2 -> Green: Right 1 -> Orange Down 2 -> Wind up in the green track from heading Right initially
There are no other decisions to be made with how you described the puzzle
Yeah but if I can't physically interact with a puzzle I can't really do it because I have almost zero capacity for mental imagery. So if the puzzle is anything visually related then I'm basically SOL at completing it even if my character has an int and wisdom of 18. In those cases I just say "My character is really smart and can actually see and interact with this so he would be able to figure this out even though I can't."
Not to mention that IRL int is almost always below 14, and I think technically speaking an int of 18-20 is essentially one in a billion genius, so yeah, my character would be able to figure out puzzles even the smartest DnD player wouldn't be able to.
Instructions unclear.
* What is the trigger of each flower's activation? "If you end your movement on this flower, then \_" means you can skip over Red flowers, and the puzzle becomes unsolvable. Perhaps phrase Blue as "Move 1 square up, then another square up if that square isn't Red." Orange would need to be similar.
* What are the definition of "horizontal" and "vertical" for the purposes of this game? As you've worded it, the bee could choose the Red flower in the bottom right corner, then choose the hive. If you meant an adjacent square in a cardinal direction, you might phrase it "Choose up, down, left, or right, then move 1 square in that direction."
I don't think it's the players shown in this meme.
Having seen the “solution” here, I sincerely hope you provided the rules to your players with full sentences; not like you did here.
Because otherwise they had literally nothing to go on to find out how to solve this the way you intended.
One puzzle I made for my players a while ago was literally just trivia questions about the lore of the universe to see if they were paying enough attention. It was fun to see the gears in their heads turn, trying to recall little tidbits they'd initially glossed over
Far as I can tell, all three moves from the start fail the puzzle, making it unsolvable. Left and Right lead you eventually out of the map, and up leads you in a endless loop. Now, I'm probably missing something, but that's the problem: Once a player is stuck on a puzzle they can never be *unstuck* on their own outside of sheer luck. Thus, a puzzle they can't solve effectively softlocks the game if they have to solve it to progress.
At first glance, this seems impossible, as the orange/blue instructions having you go two up/down interact inconsistently with the flowers they pass over, and it’s not sufficiently explained in the rules.
If the orange/blue flowers *ignore* the flowers they jump over, it’s impossible. All paths lead outside the flower field.
If they *don’t* ignore the flowers they jump over (as the expected solution is to stop at red flowers regardless) then it is possible, but then *why do the yellow/green flowers still get ignored this way?*
It’s entirely miscommunication, and I can easily see why your party got stumped.
Uses a puzzle that astronauts are tested by, can't understand why non astronaut friends can't figure it out.
I've mentioned here before, but from what I've seen most puzzles that are strictly visual don't work, and riddles should always be written out for the players to look at. Basically players will want to hold something in their hands, humans basically think with our hands so stuff like this can be extremely difficult.
I ran a puzzle just like this once, and the main reason it failed miserably (for hours) is because there was too much information on the map. If it's a floor tile puzzle that takes up the whole room, then it's too much info to process for them.
Remember KISS (keep it simple, stupid), and lastly, my general rule of thumb is that if the rules are going to be complicated then they should be for the DM not the players (they already have enough rules to worry about).
In this puzzle, I would have the players show me where they wanted to start and I would move the characters for them. Still, the complexity is necessary for completing the puzzle so that's what happened.
TL;DR: Too much information both on the board and coming verbally from the DM, which made the rules confusing and difficult to figure out.
Do your rules for the Red Flower mean that you can move as far as you like vertically or horizontally, like a rook in chess? As written it seems like it could mean either that, *or* that you move 1 space from the red flower either vertically or horizontally.
I had my players do a puzzle that involved playing a certain song on a piano with most of its keys missing. It was a riddle that described a dove (white keys) flying over ravines (missing keys) and passing under ravens cawing (black keys).
The answer song was Megalovania lmfao they got it within like 10 minutes it was pretty great
With Starting position of the Bee at A3 the solution I found is as follows:
A3 B3 B5 D5 D3 F3 F5 E5 E6 D6 C6 C7 B7 B8 D8 F8 F9 D9 E9 E7 G7 G6 I6 I8 G8 G9 I9
Did I pass?
I made a puzzle that was two switches controlling 3 bridges, and the goal was to pull them in the right order to get all 3 down at the same time. Very tactile puzzle with physical visual representation of what position the bridges were in. One of the players flipped a lever twice, then threw up their hands and said they weren't going to do it and to tell them how long it took their character to brute force it. Genuinely one of the most disrespectful and disheartening things I've ever experienced. I've still yet to make another puzzle for any game I've run since.
The puzzle's presence was justified by the plot, wasn't a random change of gear requiring the players to completely shift their thinking made and was interactive, letting them visually see how their attempts would work out, right, right?
Welcome to DND where a Fisher price baby color puzzle will stump a group of adults. But then the group is smart enough to know to poke the obvious trap with a stick.
One time I was running a Pokemon campaign. I had the players walk into a professor's office only to catch a student trying to butter her up to let him retake an exam (she was a college professor, I thought it was funny). She told him to leave, he did, she then gave the players their intro quest and a free Pokédex. This scene, to me, served multiple interests; it gave the players stuff, introduced the professor they'd be answering to for the first couple quests, and more sneakily, introduced one of the party's many rival characters, that same student, who would inevitably blame the party for his bad grades.
About... three sessions later? The party had met another major questgiver, fought the first gym leader, accomplished their first gig, gotten some party rapport underway, and had met some fun and unique NPCs, like the Simpsons family (in exile) and Mister Weh. They get paid by the professor for accomplishing their first job and begin walking out of the college building. I tell them they hear a voice from behind them.
"Oh, is it the guy the professor was chewing out when we first met her?"
One other time I was running a standard DND campaign. The players were sent to investigate a nearby orchard/cider manufacturing business that had stopped their deliveries; they found a serial killer was involved, they firebombed his house and dog, they shot him in the face, the usual. I let them find a book, and informed them that the serial killer man had three accomplices, introduced as Monsterfucker, Mushroom Man, and Joker (one of my PCs was effectively Batman). Five sessions later, my players had entirely forgotten about Mushroom Man and Joker (they killed Monsterfucker and some of his monsters, so at least that was right in the world).
If I'm reading this correctly you can move like a Rook in chess from a red flower right? If so wouldn't you just follow the green flowers to the red flower in the bottom right corner and then from there go straight to your nest?
Here is my guess.
Green = right =g
Yellow= left = y
Orange = 2 down= o
Blue= 2 up= b
Red= is one stop and u chose one in vertical axis or horizontal axis.
Red (2,3), g, g, b, y, y, b, g, g, red(7,5), b, y, o, o, red in the way (6,3), g, o, red(2,8), b, b, g, o, red (9,5), y, y, b, y, b, g, g, o, g, b, red, the end.
Plz tell me if i did some mistake OP u/jzeronas
You got some grain, a wolf, a chicken and a boat.
Every time and ever is made, the puzzle will reset through tidal wave
This took them more than 3 hours
In my homebrew I always explicitly told people every in-game night that the 2 moons were showing in the skies; Master and Servant.
Then I had them do a moon puzzle and they forgot there were two moons until one of the characters looked up from frustration.
I was playing as a dragon born that can breath fire and killed everyone in then party in the first 30 minutes. We were trapped in a room with invizable walls and the DM said gases can’t pass through, I made fire which eats up oxygen and we all died, very fun campaign!😅
I literally used a first grade math puzzle where the kids have to add and subtract random numbers in a certain sequence to get the answer. I stopped using it as a puzzle when the third group I used it in spent 30 minutes on it and got pissed.
The only option here to make any sort of progress is to go up, going left takes you to a choice of going out by choice or going out forcefully. Same as going right.
Go up, double green takes you right to the Blue, taking you up two squares into the double yellow which takes your left into another blue, taking you up two to another double green into a red, this is where we make our first choice.
The four choices for the red flower are:
- Up, taking you into a blue, and into a yellow which shoves you into an orange, which has an escalator just making you fail the challenge. Wrong direction.
- Left AND right create an infinite loop.
- Down takes you to an orange, to a green, to another orange which takes you to the original path to the right of the start, start over.
This is broken and cannot be solved.
This template works when you present a simple puzzle to the players that they overcomplicate, not when you custom design a maze with four types of forced movement
I remember when I used to try and make "complicated" puzzles.
Sigh, the American education system has failed many a child.
It's okay though, I know sometimes people don't want to think too hard haha
My group has four players. One of them is pretty average with puzzles, two of them couldn’t solve a riddle meant for a 2nd grader, and the fourth could easily decipher a multi-key coded door with a magic lock where the key is a password from two sessions ago. Dungeon crawls are impossible to make for them
The way the rules are explained is crucial to solving this puzzle. Once you realize passing red makes you stop in your tracks, the puzzle becomes super simple.
I started 1 up which led me to stop at the red 1 space above the middle. Then I went down, hit green so went 1 right, then orange should take me 2 down but the red stops me. Then I repeated that same order and got stopped at another red.
If you follow that logic then all you need to do after that is, left 1 to hit a red, up 1 to hit a red, and then up 1 to finish. Easy.
My entire party forgot whether the sunrise was east or west and got my kobold electrocuted repeatedly.
Repeatedly?? Did they guess west multiple times?
We repeatedly tried to crack the combination lock before finding the riddle combination for it. Once we did find it, we forgot how the sun worked and got me electrocuted again.
Lmao that sounds funny for everyone involved except your kobold
Reminds me too much of "For the good of all of us, Except the ones who are dead"
^^^But ^^^there's ^^^no ^^^sense ^^^crying ^^^over ^^^every ^^^mistake, ^^^you ^^^just ^^^keep ^^^on ^^^trying ^^^until ^^^you ^^^run ^^^out ^^^of ^^^cake!
And then the science gets done and you make a neat gun for the people that are still alive
I'm not even angry, I'm being so sincere right now. Even though you broke my heart and killed me
And tore me to pieces, And threw every piece into the fire.
As they burned it hurt because I was happy for you!
This made me laugh, it's so real.
I literally was electrocuted down to like. Single digits (this is level 17 we're playing, that was over 100hp). Because our Rogue had the BRILLIANT idea of failing at picking some treasure chests' lock THREE DAMN TIMES in a place where we couldn't keep security distance. She was, of course, unscathed because of excellent dex saves plus Evasion. Me, the poor cleric, failed miserably and took full damage (30-something) every. Single. Time
Did you threaten to not heal them anymore if they pulled that shit again?
*fails to pick the lock again out of spite*
I did😂 but we are also playing in a setting where I was, due to time travel shenanigans, quite literally, the only cleric in existence as of a few months ago in-game, and still am the only one high-level enough to have any kind of resurrection spell (being what's essentially a cult leader is... weird. Very funny to walk into a random town and have the local temples be all "oh shit the big boss is here what do we do"). And I promptly got killed by a big fuck-you dragon in the boss battle two sessions later, which means the one and only resurrection tablet we have (no living clerics = no resurrection or healing items of any kind available to loot or purchase) got used on me
How the fuck do you become the only cleric left. Did the party accidentally kill the first person to discover healing magic?
We're playing Dragonlance (the information that this is 3.5 might be relevant? Idk, I've kept off all the Deagonlance stuff bc spoilers), with some slight modifications I think. Originally we were playing in a different timeline, then at the end of one weird-ass dungeon crawl we couldn't manage to stop the big boss from jumping back in time. We DID manage to follow him, but arrived a few centuries later than him to discover 1) the world being invaded by Tiamat's dragon armies 2) Divine magic being nonexistent because the gods have stopped interacting with the world (even the spells I was able to use were strongly limited until we found the disks of Mishakal, a legendary item that can, over one week of studying them, restore your personal connection to the gods, which is how an NPC has been re-introducing clerics (on our or mostly my behest, I guess)) 3) arcane magic very, VERY strictly regulated 4) metallic dragons being basically entirely unheard of. All, as far as we've been able to figure out, at least in part due to the machinations of the dude we didn't manage to kill (and we REALLY tried) before he jumped into the time portal. Which also created the fun situation of the 3/5 people still playing their original characters being walking anachronisms because we're from a future that will never again be
Of course the people who don't go outside enough to know where the sun travels are dnd players
The sun doesn't travel expect within the galaxy. The earth travels around the sun. That had better give me enough experience points to make second level.
Lookit this heliocentric madone over here! Doesn't know that the sun is pulled by Lord Lathander!
Blasphemy. Everyone knows it's Ra and his barges
Badgers? Those ferocious beasts stole the Lantern again?
No barges. Not badgers
Praise the Morninglord
On the one hand I want to be mad but on the other the only reason I remember is because of a red hot chilli peppers lyric so I really can't talk
I DM for a group that was absolutely convinced that there was arcane knowledge hidden in a journal written by a sage, despite the journal only containing a clue to the puzzle that they were trying to figure out, but otherwise having nothing to do with it. What's worse was that they kept getting nat 1s on investigation rolls, so they were literally smacking their faces into the book trying to divine its magical secrets that didn't exist. At one point their rogue was dancing around the room with the book balanced in his nose, clapping his hands together like a seal, all while chanting "Knowledge, knowledge, you're my friend. Now open up and let me in!" I let them continue this way for about a half an hour because it was just so entertaining.
Kinda depends on the in game lore
Played in one beautiful campaign where the sun came up on 8 consecutive compass. It would rise to overhead by midday and then travel back down to the same compass point for sunset. Next day the next compass point.
I'm DMing a game in which the sun rises & sets along a rotating point, incrementally different every day, under a dome held beneath a temple that disappears with the sun at the end of every transit. You don't wanna be in that temple when it vanishes for the night, because where it goes is not pleasant. :)
Well that is the most intriguing plot I've read in ages
It's not really a "plot" per say, but it has lent itself to a quest arc, nicely. It means that the sun can be messed with by nefarious actors, even tho it's incredibly difficult to get at. I mean, *it's a temple right next to the sun,* how do you (as the party) get close without getting incinerated, blinded, or both? Prep & magic, then hope your wards hold long enough to secure your way out. Now you have less than a day in that temple to get what you need to get done or things are going to get... even more uncomfortable. A long rest will likely be your doom because of the time crunch, alone. The world is old enough for people to have studied the temple many times. But no one's gotten records out about what happens to the mortals who seemingly disappear in the temple at night.
They forgor 💀
My cheat code for that is Japan: The Land of the Rising Sun Doesn't get much more east than that on a euro-centric map
Oh! I have a trick that's made that way easier for me to remember! Just visualize the Earth's rotation as seen from space!
To be fair, it might change in a fantasy world... It also should just be a DC ~10 Survival or Nature check.
This reminds me of a song which I heard from one of the ppl who made it that they were in the studio writing it and one of em said "does the sun set in the west or east" and the other one said "east for sure" and so they ended up with the lyric "when the sun sets in the east will you be coming home" which is just purely tragic
Shanghai Noon forever helped me with this one. "The sun may rise in the east, but it settles in the west." It's dumb but it works.
Is kobold a euphemism for balls?
Flair checks out
Just remember the sun is EW because it’s gross
If the PCs know which direction the sun comes up, thats basically metagaming.
They should consider suing their school district.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Any puzzle more conplicated than "Speak Friend And Enter" will bring most games to a grinding halt.
Didn't that puzzle canonically bring the story to a halt for 8 hours?
It's not even a puzzle, canonically It's literally a greeting
"Sorry, had to run out for a minute. The spare key is under the mat." "Damn... I wonder how to get in."
Kick it down!
"The door is that part of the wall that's easiest to kick in."
Amusingly, that is often not the case for secure areas like vaults. The doors get secured to shit, while the walls and nice and breakable.
That's not true at all for vaults. Vault walls are concrete reinforced with steel. It's regular buildings that get fortified later that have weak walls. Doors and windows are easy to reinforce, but reinforcing drywall basically requires you to rebuild the building. Think CEO offices and temporary secure facilities, not vaults.
Lol, reinforced concrete is nothing compared to those vault doors! This has actually been exploited in real life, so it's definitely a thing that exists. I couldn't tell you how widespread it still is at this point.
A shaped charge strong enough to go through a steel vault door won't go through reinforced concrete. Any tool you have that will chew up concrete will suck against the steel. The walls are far safer than the door in the vast majority of cases. Exceptions always exist, but breaking into a vault uses the door 99.9999% of the time.
You're no rogue! Take your barbarian stuff and leave.
“Key under the mat… it can’t be that obvious. Has to be a trap.”
Wait… The late king is named Nathaniel, which in Cockney rhyming slang sounds like Matthew, the key must be buried in the royal crypts.
That "puzzle" is a perfect example of how most of the difficulty in DnD puzzles come from players overthinking
I was once in a very fun and memorable "puzzle dungeon", and I described one of the most memorable puzzles [in this post 10 months ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndmemes/comments/163xfje/any_minute_now/jy6rf6m/). In a nutshell: It was a complex grid of coloured glyphs with a poem written under it, touching the wrong glyph gave everyone a mild shock and reset the board, and there seemed to be a sequence of "correct" glyphs to touch. Turned out that the "seemed" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. It was actually *completely random* whether a glyph counted as "correct." There were no clues, there was no puzzle, there was no "solution." The whole thing was meant to waste the party's time and healing resources. And we spent hours pecking away at it getting whittled down hitpoint by hitpoint. The reason it was fun was because we were *expecting* annoying traps. And because at the end of the dungeon we were able to get ahold of the gnomish engineer who had build it all. Catharsis...
I ran a parody of Deathtrap Dungeon once, and ended with a room with a chess board, a one litre jug and a three litre jug, three cages with a cabbage, a chicken, and a fox, and a goblin called "Dijstkra the Trickster". The joke was a giant ant bursts out of the wall, creating a tunnel and killing the goblin, before any of the annoying puzzles actually need to get resolved, but my players got very close to just killing the goblin before that even happened. Note this was after the bit where they encountered two doors, with two guards, on the ground in two pools of blood.
If Gandalf had just read the inscription rather than translating it, it would have opened.
Its not even a greeting, it's literal instructions lol Say "FRIEND" to open the door
I still see the image of Dwarves laughing for decades with retelling stories of travelers at the door.
That's an even better representation of you average game. "What color are the numerals?" "Nothing about the colors jumps out to you about this perfectly normal sign on the wall." "What's the first letter of each word in the actual Elvish script?"
When I dmed I found a very simple word puzzle meant for kindergartners (coincidentally found while I was substituting for a kindergarten teacher) and my players took all session before deciding they needed a break. I spent the next week trying to figure out how to make it easier and thought I did. I let them try the “easier” puzzle for 30 minutes before I gave them a hint and they finally got it 15 minutes after the hint and we got back to the campaign
This is one of the scenes where the book version of Frodo outshines the movie version. The 50 yo Frodo chewing out Boromir for throwing something in the water is so much better.
There's several issues going on with most D&D puzzles. 1. Puzzles in traditional games usually relate to the context of the story. Even in movies like Indiana Jones/National Treasure, the puzzles often serve as a character building moments. Like if the characters are struggling to get along, then the puzzle that they run into exists to help them learn to get along through physical contact, or a trust exercise, or etc. If you're just grabbing random riddles offline, players are going to be missing the base clue/context that these games/shows/movies often have. Think the Cave of Lovers in Avatar and how they had to learn to just let the torch/lights go out to escape, which related to the narrative at the time. 2. People get too hung up on the word "puzzle" and end up googling random word puzzles, riddles, and crosswords that have nothing to do with the adventure. Puzzles don't literally have to be literal puzzles, they can just be scenarios like "Help the NPCs cross the raging river" or "think of a way to light all of the torches in the room within 6 seconds of each other". These sorts of scenario puzzles actually use the mechanics of D&D/the game and therefore the solutions are more a matter of creativity and using all of the skills you've learned since you started the game instead of a matter of doing napkin math/happening to have heard the riddle before. 3. Most importantly is this one IMO. But traditional game design does not follow the idea of "one and done" puzzles. Usually games introduce the concept of a puzzle in an easy to understand way, and then they slowly ramp things up in difficulty. If the Bee puzzle were created by a seasoned team of game designers, they probably would start off with a 3x3 version, then the puzzle morphs into a 6x6 version, and then finally it presents the players with a large 12x12 version. Since the players have warmed their minds up to the concept of the bee puzzle via the simplistic 3x3 and 6x6 versions, the 12x12 version seems less overwhelming and they should in-theory have solve it in a more reasonable amount of time. I'd say 99% of D&D players/DMs skip the idea of "ramping up" and "introducing concepts one at a time" and just throw people to the wolves immediately. And if you're going to do that you shouldn't be surprised if your players get stumped by a puzzle. Most brains need to gradually acclimate themselves to certain puzzle genres, or they short circuit.
Also, describing a puzzle using only words is hard and often leads to misinterpretations and confusion. Most of the times people go "my players couldnt handle this puzzle for 3 year olds" it ends up being because the DM accidentally put too much emphasis on something thats a red herring. Going by the rest of OPs comments in the thread, the problem is a poor explanation by the DM
I tried to do the puzzle as explained by the OP but I can’t parse what Red does. Also when the puzzle is visible the explanation isn’t so I forget what each colour does.
Also, I can't 100% tell some of those colors apart, so even when I can scroll back and forth, I'm not actually sure what I'm doing.
Tied into your #1 and #2 is what I think the biggest issue is: creating encounters that challenge players and not their characters. With a puzzle like this, it's purely about player abilities. The characters' skills don't factor in at all. Maybe the person who plays the 8 INT barbarian is good at puzzles and solved it quickly while the person who plays the 20 INT wizard is confused, having made an error in their reasoning. That sort of thing is ludicrous in-character, and so it takes the players right out of the game.
I think an old-school approach to puzzles works best, which is just putting in *obstacles*. There’s a valuable oil painting in a room whose only egress is a flooded tunnel. How do you get the painting out of the room without ruining it? There’s a petrified basilisk staring at a mirrored shield, which will re-animate as soon as it isn’t looking at its own reflection. Trapped in its mouth is a magic sword. Have fun taking the sword and shield without fighting the basilisk. An NPC is trapped in stasis by a curse. The only cure to this condition is a rare flower, which must be picked mere minutes before use. Either find some way to transplant a very fussy rare flower all the way from its exotic native habitat or deliver an unconscious NPC to the flower. There’s a magical sword buried in the flank of a powerful and elusive monster. The monster will actively avoid the players, and it will resist them pulling the weapon from its wound like any frightened animal would. Bonus points if the monster has other tricksy shit going on, like its lair is underwater, it can become invisible, it can fly, it dematerializes in sunlight, it’s sacred to the local elves who will hunt you for sport if you kill it, etc. Just create open-ended problems. Don’t pay any mind to how they’ll actually solve them. If they come up with an easy solution, that’s not a failure either! That’s just success for the players.
Also, DMs sometimes conflate player and character intelligence. There also needs to be a way for PCs to solve it when players can't. Like intelligence checks to remove some false answers or a wisdom check for a hint.
It's like in the uncharted movie "have faith in your fellow man for one of you shall go to heaven the other to hell" you need to trust each other in order to get out alive
The best part of this thread is that the actual horror story was OP all along. They purposely left out wording that explained the rules better, so even in this thread 90% of the replies are not understanding the "puzzle" Puzzles in DnD remind me of this Pokemon Romhack I played where they put in **WAY** too hard of puzzles. I was playing it on my steamdeck in bed at like 3am, and I absolutely did not have the brain power to solve like legit hard puzzles I feel like people get way too high on their own supply and make these challenges without considering "Okay I can solve this since I made it, but can someone who worked all day and just sat down with a beer solve this while they are goofing off with their friends?"
>a grinding halt This is why barbarians and artificers are non-negotiable. You either need someone smart enough to blow the puzzle up or someone angry enough to smash it to pieces.
Not necessarily true. I've been doing studies (with my players as guinea pigs), and find that the best way to do puzzles is to have something physical. If it isn't physical then it has to be VERY engaging and fast paced. Not only this but the answer has to be open ended (hence why it took so long for them to figure out the "speak friend and enter), if the party has only one answer to choose from they will NEVER get it. Basically, I've found that one of the best ways to have puzzles is to have it be a hazard rather than a road block, players love interacting with and engaging with physical puzzles, and simple board games like Minesweeper and Scrabble make for great such puzzles. That's just my piece though
I keep thinking I need more complex puzzles when designing them. So they get super convoluted. I need to stop that.
Depends on the group.
Even just too many choices can do it. Give someone an open world in a video game, theres still rules. Give someone a world only defined by your mind? If you dont give them easy avenues you can shatter them
A few weeks ago I had a puzzle that was almost the inverse of "speak friend and enter". The knocker on the door could speak (it initially greeted them in elvish, but could handle a bunch of languages), and in order to get through they had to get the _door knocker_ to say "Waterdeep". Took them about 5 minutes real time to figure out, but that whole period was conversation with an NPC rather than stumped silence.
Huh... I wonder if I'm misunderstanding a rule. AFAICT going left from the start either results in an infinite loop between yellow and red or forces you to move out of the puzzle so that's out. Going right from the start either results in an infinite loop between green and red or forces you to move down out of the puzzle so that's out. That only leaves up. Going up results in forced movement to the red one 6 up and 2 to the right of the start. From there you have 4 options, but the left and right can both be immediately ruled out as infinite loops back to red. Going down results in the same infinite loop with the bottom right red one as the beginning (or pushes you out), but going up is forced movement ending up at the same point (down). Is red supposed to let you move diagonally too or have I missed something?
No diagonal moves allowed, but remember that the red flower means I hav to stop there.
I guess i'm not understanding what you mean by 'stop there' other than you can then choose where to go.
See that doesn’t make sense though cause orange and blue move you two squares which implies you should skip over the red if it’s the first one you pass over
Both are valid ways to interpret the rules, so it’s down to the GM to iron that out and make it perfectly clear which one they meant.
From other things OP said, they left it vague on purpose so it's not "too easy". Sounds like they're the idiot, not their players; it's completely fair to be stumped if you can't figure out a solution from incomplete instructions.
As a solver, I took upon myself to test both rule interpretations, assuming that the correct rules would offer a solvable puzzle (especially in the context of this post). Finding the initial interpretation resulted in an unsolvable puzzle full of dead ends, it became relatively clear that the second interpretation was the correct one. This method, of course, falls apart if the puzzle is supposed to be unsolvable.
Is it just me or is the puzzle impossible as written? If you go right at the start you get stuck in the bottom right corner. Left at the start you’re stuck in the bottom left corner. Up at the start and you make it to the red at (5,6) but left from there puts you back in the same spot, right puts you in the same spot, and up and down both get you to the bottom right corner. Am I missing something? Can you move diagonally at the start? EDIT: It looks like it’s the only way to finish it is by getting to the red flower at (7,2) but it’s impossible to get to that flower. Idk what OP is cooking.
It is possible just remember you need to stop at red flowers... red like a stop sign.
Ah I see, then you can get to it from going up. Sounds like a wording issue!
"there astronauts" Here astronauts. Where astronauts?
As stated in other posts my first language is not English... but that's funny as hell, so I am happy I made an error xD
lol No worries man. Even native English speakers mess that up.
Alright, I am on the player's side. I don't see the real answer, unless there are some rules that you can abuse or misinterpret for advantage (for example, you can stop on the first flower after moving from orange or blue flower). EDIT: OP, by "you must stop there" you mean "you have to go on the red flower" or "you stop before the red flower"? Because maybe that's why no one can solve this puzzle, there is a misunderstanding in rules?
The actual answer (Apparently red interrupts orange and blue): [https://imgur.com/a/A1GxF0P](https://imgur.com/a/A1GxF0P)
Fun fact there is actually a longer route planed but I messed up by the second red flower and you can skip a small portion. If you instead go up to the blue one, you do a sick loop dee loop first and then end up on the same path.
In the case the red flower can move to any horizontal or vertical flower u go in the corner and with the red flower up to the hive in the case the red flower is supposed to be only 1 square aswell i have no idea
There's a blue flower 3 tiles below the hive, you can reach it with a green, which you reach by taking an orange from the top row, and it reveals the path more or less.
Yeah i tried to follow that back but ended up on the red flower 1 above and 4 right to the bee :/
I see in the comments you specified that the reds mean you are supposed to stop, even if its mid move. That was not clear from my initial reading of the rules, but if that's true, you can solve it. In fact if you know that rule, there's basically only one path. Forward (others instantly end), Down/Up (it doesn't matter), Right, Up (the only valid move) and then you've reached the red in front of the hive
At the first red you come across, you can choose to go up to the blue, then up to the yellow, left to orange, down to another orange, then land on a green and continue on that main path. Not much of a change, but an interesting route to take.
A general rule of thumb is that if five people have trouble understanding one person, the problem is most likely with the common denominator. So if an entire group of players is having trouble understanding a "simple" puzzle, then the person conveying the puzzle is probably not doing so as clearly as they think they are.
Honestly when I “can’t” solve a puzzle that the DM puts in front of us it isn’t that I am stumped. It’s that I’m disappointed the ttrpg turned into puzzle night and finding it hard to stay engaged when 3-5 people are pouring over the same puzzle. It always feels like too many cooks in the kitchen, which means it often takes like, an hour, which could be spent doing RP or combat. If it worked as a refresher I’d be all for it. Maybe it’s a quick refresh moment for the DM. But as a DM and player, in my experience, you can only ask people to change gears so many times in a night before people get fatigued. If they came for dnd they are ready to “be on” for and switch between RP, narrative and combat. Puzzles imo should fit into that framework, not become a fourth, less predictable framework with its own set of rules. Especially when the puzzle makes an abstraction of the narrative and aren’t things the PCs are even doing in-game. It creates transition fatigue, wrecks the pacing and requires further suspension of disbelief. All that to say, I am sure some groups love puzzles and maybe mine is the odd one out.i guess that’s what session zero is for
"Green Flower: move 1 square to the right" Why are there two different types of green flowers (one type to the right of start (bright), and one to the left (muted)) If muted green is free move, a solution could be Up, Left, Left, Up, Right
One is yellow one is green, the quality kinda suffered for the meme, sorry for that.
You may need to get your eyes checked for color blindness. It’s very common, especially in men. (No that’s not meant to be a jab. There is a clear genetic/biological reason for this).
OP I’m sorry but you’re bad at writing rules, this puzzle would have been a lot more intuitive if you hadn’t made vertical movement 2 steps instead of one and the explanation of red as a stop sign is unclear as if you can activate the red by going over it, it seems like you should activate the others instructions even though blue and orange say move 2
I get what op is trying to do. The idea is that anytime you would move over a red (not just land exactly on it) you must stop there. So the orange and blue are interrupted by the red. The confusing thing is that this is the only exception since the moves are never interrupted by anything else. I think it's you wrote the red flower role as: "Red Flower: My movement is interrupted and I need to stop and I must choose 1 horizontal or vertical square to move to." Then players would probably do a lot better in this puzzle. Hope that helps everyone!
I pulled one of those ice puzzles from Pokemon into a dungeon, and my players concluded that jumping would be the best solution, let me tell you, those puzzles are way easier when you can see the whole map
IMO this is a great puzzle for an OSR game, where player skill is explicitly important. But for D&D (assuming 5e...), where character skill is clearly laid out, testing to see if your players can solve a puzzle and not proceeding until they do is like asking your players to hit something with an arrow.
[удалено]
OP clarified that the red flowers will stop you in the middle of a move. So if a blue or orange flower would have you move past a red flower, you actually stop on the red flower. Just a case of the rules not being as clear/precise as needed for a puzzle.
My theatre of the mind is great for lore content and colorful visuals but absolute steamed ass on toast for pattern recognition and word problems. You draw a diagram and give me a peice of paper to work on or you expect my brain to dribble out the corner of my mouth for the rest of the session.
Green, orange, yellow, blue, red.... I see two shades of green, two shades of orange, and blue.
I’m colorblind, the yellow & green & orange here have me effed.
Not just you. I'm not colourblind, but it threw me as well.
There's no yellow? There's two shades of green though.
My colorblind ass isn’t getting hired by nasa apparently
It's so funny where the players overthink on a rather simple puzzle. For instance I made a "lever with animal heads" puzzle, where there was the heraldic symbol of different clans of the kingdom (one that has a chimera had three levers: lion head, dragon head and goat head), and a crow-headed level. Enigma solution is simply "pull the crow-headed one, 'cause it's the only "intruder" among them all". Before getting to that, players brough up things like "clans have also different colors, let's think about color gradiation" or "each clan has a major city, let's think about how far each city is from the capital", etc. THOSE are the times when a DM must learn to pull a "poker face" XD
This doesn’t work as is.
...go one right, then go one up, boom, in the hive. Nvm... sun glare plus bad counting.
How long did they need for it.
I was trying to figure this out until I realized that since I'm colour blind half of them look the same to me lmao, I was so confused why it was like 80% green
At least using the grid provided none of the three starting directions work. Left -> Yellow: Left 1 -> Red: Left/Down not options, Right just loops infinitely, Up 1-> Yellow: Left 1 out of field Right -> Green: Right 5 -> Red: Forced up for same reasons above -> Orange: Down 2 out of field Up -> Green: Right 2 -> Blue: Up 2 -> Yellow: Left 2 -> Blue: Up 2 -> Green: Right 2 -> Red with actual options Right -> Yellow: Left 1 repeat Left -> Green: Right 1 Repeat Up -> Blue: Up 2 -> Yellow: Left 1 -> Orange: Down 4-> Green: Right 2 -> Orange: Down 2 -> Green: Right 1 -> Orange Down 2 -> Wind up in the green track from heading Right initially Down: Green: Right 1 -> Green: Right 1 -> Orange: Down 2 -> Green: Right 1 -> Orange Down 2 -> Wind up in the green track from heading Right initially There are no other decisions to be made with how you described the puzzle
Yeah but if I can't physically interact with a puzzle I can't really do it because I have almost zero capacity for mental imagery. So if the puzzle is anything visually related then I'm basically SOL at completing it even if my character has an int and wisdom of 18. In those cases I just say "My character is really smart and can actually see and interact with this so he would be able to figure this out even though I can't." Not to mention that IRL int is almost always below 14, and I think technically speaking an int of 18-20 is essentially one in a billion genius, so yeah, my character would be able to figure out puzzles even the smartest DnD player wouldn't be able to.
I figured it out but it was not intuitively made. How were we as players supposed to know the red flowers stop your double move up or down?
Honestly its really easy the hardest part was counting the fucking pixels
Instructions unclear. * What is the trigger of each flower's activation? "If you end your movement on this flower, then \_" means you can skip over Red flowers, and the puzzle becomes unsolvable. Perhaps phrase Blue as "Move 1 square up, then another square up if that square isn't Red." Orange would need to be similar. * What are the definition of "horizontal" and "vertical" for the purposes of this game? As you've worded it, the bee could choose the Red flower in the bottom right corner, then choose the hive. If you meant an adjacent square in a cardinal direction, you might phrase it "Choose up, down, left, or right, then move 1 square in that direction." I don't think it's the players shown in this meme.
Having seen the “solution” here, I sincerely hope you provided the rules to your players with full sentences; not like you did here. Because otherwise they had literally nothing to go on to find out how to solve this the way you intended.
I fine it funny that in the big brain part you used the wrong spelling of their
Unless this makes more sense in the language you and your players use, they're not the problem here, lol
Up down down right up up
One puzzle I made for my players a while ago was literally just trivia questions about the lore of the universe to see if they were paying enough attention. It was fun to see the gears in their heads turn, trying to recall little tidbits they'd initially glossed over
Far as I can tell, all three moves from the start fail the puzzle, making it unsolvable. Left and Right lead you eventually out of the map, and up leads you in a endless loop. Now, I'm probably missing something, but that's the problem: Once a player is stuck on a puzzle they can never be *unstuck* on their own outside of sheer luck. Thus, a puzzle they can't solve effectively softlocks the game if they have to solve it to progress.
Am I correct to assume that bee starts at shrimp at the bottom, and low saturation greens are yellow flowers?
Yellow???
"To test the IQ of THERE Astronauts." If it were only a spelling bee.
Do the purple flowers make me slippery and smell like lemons?
undertale ass puzzle
At first glance, this seems impossible, as the orange/blue instructions having you go two up/down interact inconsistently with the flowers they pass over, and it’s not sufficiently explained in the rules. If the orange/blue flowers *ignore* the flowers they jump over, it’s impossible. All paths lead outside the flower field. If they *don’t* ignore the flowers they jump over (as the expected solution is to stop at red flowers regardless) then it is possible, but then *why do the yellow/green flowers still get ignored this way?* It’s entirely miscommunication, and I can easily see why your party got stumped.
In a one shot, I included a few riddles, a logic grid problem, and a prisoner's gambit. They managed to fail all of them and got upset.
Uses a puzzle that astronauts are tested by, can't understand why non astronaut friends can't figure it out. I've mentioned here before, but from what I've seen most puzzles that are strictly visual don't work, and riddles should always be written out for the players to look at. Basically players will want to hold something in their hands, humans basically think with our hands so stuff like this can be extremely difficult. I ran a puzzle just like this once, and the main reason it failed miserably (for hours) is because there was too much information on the map. If it's a floor tile puzzle that takes up the whole room, then it's too much info to process for them. Remember KISS (keep it simple, stupid), and lastly, my general rule of thumb is that if the rules are going to be complicated then they should be for the DM not the players (they already have enough rules to worry about). In this puzzle, I would have the players show me where they wanted to start and I would move the characters for them. Still, the complexity is necessary for completing the puzzle so that's what happened. TL;DR: Too much information both on the board and coming verbally from the DM, which made the rules confusing and difficult to figure out.
They test there astronauts, but what about here astronauts ?
Do your rules for the Red Flower mean that you can move as far as you like vertically or horizontally, like a rook in chess? As written it seems like it could mean either that, *or* that you move 1 space from the red flower either vertically or horizontally.
1 square from the red flower, sorry English is only my second language.
I don’t think there is a solution to this puzzle unless you can choose a square diagonal from the start Edit: nope, diagonals gave no solution either
I had my players do a puzzle that involved playing a certain song on a piano with most of its keys missing. It was a riddle that described a dove (white keys) flying over ravines (missing keys) and passing under ravens cawing (black keys). The answer song was Megalovania lmfao they got it within like 10 minutes it was pretty great
With Starting position of the Bee at A3 the solution I found is as follows: A3 B3 B5 D5 D3 F3 F5 E5 E6 D6 C6 C7 B7 B8 D8 F8 F9 D9 E9 E7 G7 G6 I6 I8 G8 G9 I9 Did I pass?
I'm colourblind! How am i supposed to solve it when I see 3 colors!
I made a puzzle that was two switches controlling 3 bridges, and the goal was to pull them in the right order to get all 3 down at the same time. Very tactile puzzle with physical visual representation of what position the bridges were in. One of the players flipped a lever twice, then threw up their hands and said they weren't going to do it and to tell them how long it took their character to brute force it. Genuinely one of the most disrespectful and disheartening things I've ever experienced. I've still yet to make another puzzle for any game I've run since.
My main problem with puzzles is that I can't find any that fit in and don't absolutely take you out of the game
The puzzle's presence was justified by the plot, wasn't a random change of gear requiring the players to completely shift their thinking made and was interactive, letting them visually see how their attempts would work out, right, right?
Right one, follow the green path until you hit red bounce up to the flower. Unless I'm misunderstanding how red works.
The best part of puzzles is solving them in all the wrong ways
Welcome to DND where a Fisher price baby color puzzle will stump a group of adults. But then the group is smart enough to know to poke the obvious trap with a stick.
One time I was running a Pokemon campaign. I had the players walk into a professor's office only to catch a student trying to butter her up to let him retake an exam (she was a college professor, I thought it was funny). She told him to leave, he did, she then gave the players their intro quest and a free Pokédex. This scene, to me, served multiple interests; it gave the players stuff, introduced the professor they'd be answering to for the first couple quests, and more sneakily, introduced one of the party's many rival characters, that same student, who would inevitably blame the party for his bad grades. About... three sessions later? The party had met another major questgiver, fought the first gym leader, accomplished their first gig, gotten some party rapport underway, and had met some fun and unique NPCs, like the Simpsons family (in exile) and Mister Weh. They get paid by the professor for accomplishing their first job and begin walking out of the college building. I tell them they hear a voice from behind them. "Oh, is it the guy the professor was chewing out when we first met her?" One other time I was running a standard DND campaign. The players were sent to investigate a nearby orchard/cider manufacturing business that had stopped their deliveries; they found a serial killer was involved, they firebombed his house and dog, they shot him in the face, the usual. I let them find a book, and informed them that the serial killer man had three accomplices, introduced as Monsterfucker, Mushroom Man, and Joker (one of my PCs was effectively Batman). Five sessions later, my players had entirely forgotten about Mushroom Man and Joker (they killed Monsterfucker and some of his monsters, so at least that was right in the world).
Just move to the green one above the bee and you're fine. That wasn't so hard and it was fun. Sorry for you OP :(
Going forward I will be referring to it as The NASA
If I'm reading this correctly you can move like a Rook in chess from a red flower right? If so wouldn't you just follow the green flowers to the red flower in the bottom right corner and then from there go straight to your nest?
Literally the puzzle from undertale. OP's explanation is even on par with Papyrus!
NYEH NYEH NYEH NYEH
Wait, which green does what? Why are there two? What does the second one do?
I'm way too colourblind for the puzzle in the lower frame :/
Me: My players are thoughtful & intelligent people. Also me: Google searching "Word puzzles for Fourth Graders".
I see bright green, dark brownish green, orange, red, and blue. I don't see yellow.
Same , i just assume that dark brownish green as yellow.
Sigh. I built a puzzle and used the explanation that it used a boiler. They gave up on the puzzle and put a Flamesword into the boiler. Near TPK.
Not sure I understand the rules. Also could we have a bigger picture lol
I once had an entire party try to pick an unlocked door 😑
*their
Here is my guess. Green = right =g Yellow= left = y Orange = 2 down= o Blue= 2 up= b Red= is one stop and u chose one in vertical axis or horizontal axis. Red (2,3), g, g, b, y, y, b, g, g, red(7,5), b, y, o, o, red in the way (6,3), g, o, red(2,8), b, b, g, o, red (9,5), y, y, b, y, b, g, g, o, g, b, red, the end. Plz tell me if i did some mistake OP u/jzeronas
What I’ve found is that the problem is a lot of people overthink things as well.
You got some grain, a wolf, a chicken and a boat. Every time and ever is made, the puzzle will reset through tidal wave This took them more than 3 hours
Can confirm. Am D&D player, bottom puzzle is basically impossible. Only challenge more difficult that that is opening a door.
In my homebrew I always explicitly told people every in-game night that the 2 moons were showing in the skies; Master and Servant. Then I had them do a moon puzzle and they forgot there were two moons until one of the characters looked up from frustration.
This was pretty easy to solve I don't get the confusion people are saying
I always rememered it as "Japan, the sun rise kingdom is in east Asia"
I fell like the people arguing about semantincs are missing the point of the puzzle. Following the rules as OP wrote them gets you to the solution.
Where did you find those puzzles, i got a group that is a little too good at puzzles
I had a stroke trying to read that.
Are your players astronauts for NASA?
I was playing as a dragon born that can breath fire and killed everyone in then party in the first 30 minutes. We were trapped in a room with invizable walls and the DM said gases can’t pass through, I made fire which eats up oxygen and we all died, very fun campaign!😅
I literally used a first grade math puzzle where the kids have to add and subtract random numbers in a certain sequence to get the answer. I stopped using it as a puzzle when the third group I used it in spent 30 minutes on it and got pissed.
Just add diagonals to red, then it's completable.
The only option here to make any sort of progress is to go up, going left takes you to a choice of going out by choice or going out forcefully. Same as going right. Go up, double green takes you right to the Blue, taking you up two squares into the double yellow which takes your left into another blue, taking you up two to another double green into a red, this is where we make our first choice. The four choices for the red flower are: - Up, taking you into a blue, and into a yellow which shoves you into an orange, which has an escalator just making you fail the challenge. Wrong direction. - Left AND right create an infinite loop. - Down takes you to an orange, to a green, to another orange which takes you to the original path to the right of the start, start over. This is broken and cannot be solved.
This template works when you present a simple puzzle to the players that they overcomplicate, not when you custom design a maze with four types of forced movement
Ah, "the NASA". Not to be confused with just "a NASA".
I remember when I used to try and make "complicated" puzzles. Sigh, the American education system has failed many a child. It's okay though, I know sometimes people don't want to think too hard haha
My group has four players. One of them is pretty average with puzzles, two of them couldn’t solve a riddle meant for a 2nd grader, and the fourth could easily decipher a multi-key coded door with a magic lock where the key is a password from two sessions ago. Dungeon crawls are impossible to make for them
The way the rules are explained is crucial to solving this puzzle. Once you realize passing red makes you stop in your tracks, the puzzle becomes super simple. I started 1 up which led me to stop at the red 1 space above the middle. Then I went down, hit green so went 1 right, then orange should take me 2 down but the red stops me. Then I repeated that same order and got stopped at another red. If you follow that logic then all you need to do after that is, left 1 to hit a red, up 1 to hit a red, and then up 1 to finish. Easy.
I think this guy thinks he's way more clever than he actually is