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Yawgmoth posted:Your DM learned about a thing he personally thinks is cool, then tried to recreate it cargo-cult style and expects you to have the same enjoyment screwing around in puzzlespace as he did when he first heard about this thing. You can try to brute force it or you can say "look dude, you found something you think is cool and I'm happy for you and all, but manually figuring out hashes isn't my idea of a good time. Please just let me roll Int so we can move on with the game and do the things we all enjoy." Yeah I did this with Corbett's journal when I ran the Haunting and it fell apart quickly. Thankfully it was resolved in one play session.
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Jun 7, 2021 23:40
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Trying to find a specific villain write-up (I think it was a 4e stat block) from a former incarnation of this thread. Do the words "libertarian Batman" ring any bells?
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Jun 8, 2021 00:42
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"Love for puzzles" is something that should be covered in Session 0, IMO. Anything where there's only ONE TRUE WAY to exit the room/advance the plot is just bad design. Plus, it confuses player/character skills; soemtimes, players who are good at puzzling WANT to play the Big Dumb Fighter, or the clever wizard player has no IRL clue how to solve it. Or at least DMs should read the room better; some people like puzzling things out, but most players I've met don't. Or follow the "good enough" school of puzzle solving; a cryptic riddle, and enough space to allow freedom. "You prestidigitate yourselves red and green and stand on your heads on opposite corners? The door opens." Of course, every time I've tried to be clever, or subtle, or drop hints, it's completely sailed by the players, so there may be an art to it I fail to grasp. Or I need to find more detail-oriented groups.
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Jun 8, 2021 00:49
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What I generally do in any scenario at all is to have at least three solutions: 1. Roleplay it out. Solve the puzzle, talk out the situation, whatever. Use your brain combined with your IC knowledge and get through the encounter. 2. See if your character knows more than you. Roll a skill/ability/etc. and see if your character can riddle it out. They're the ones staring at the floor covered in lettered tiles, after all. 3. Roll initiative. I almost always include combat as an option for my puzzles because I predominantly run D&D and sometimes you just wanna go "ehh gently caress it let's break poo poo." There's usually more actual options but most of them fall under one of those three main categories.
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Jun 8, 2021 01:44
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I remember spending 8 hours on a session not progressing in a dungeon because the GM wouldn't let us get past this certain door until we looted a specific Kobold that had the key to it.
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Jun 8, 2021 03:43
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MelvinBison posted:Your GM is cool because it would've been too easy for them to just go "Um, she casts Counterspell I guess." It would have been hilarious if he had broken concentration in the 1 minute after arriving and failed to complete the process of banishing himself.
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Jun 8, 2021 04:25
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Space Kablooey posted:I remember spending 8 hours on a session not progressing in a dungeon because the GM wouldn't let us get past this certain door until we looted a specific Kobold that had the key to it. Jeez. I played a one-shot years ago at a convention. We, the heroes, were in some village trying to figure out some mysterious deaths. Except that NOTHING we tried worked. Skill checks had no effect, NPCs were no use, investigating anything and everything went nowhere. After over 2 hours of this, our unofficial leader announced that, seeing as our investigation was fruitless, we should leave town and look elsewhere. This led to the GM almost panicking, and after a pointed discussion laying out our complete lack of progress, an NPC suddenly approached us with a much more helpful attitude and some previously unreleased information, and we finally got into the plot. Unfortunately, time was almost up, so we didn't get far. Post-session, someone asked the DM why he let us fumble around for 2 hours, since there were several things we had done that could given clues or pointed us in the right direction. His reply was, "That wasn't how it was written." Then he asked for feedback...and got a unanimous chorus of "adventure was poorly written/run." He looked pretty crushed, and part of me felt sorry...but part of me just wasted 2+ hours playing guessing games, so I didn't feel too sorry. D20 Open License has some things to answer for.
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Jun 8, 2021 05:32
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Yawgmoth posted:Just because you like a certain kind of puzzle or riddle or even encounter design does not mean their rest of your group will. There's always gotta be an option for "roll a thing, move on". I played a Night's Black Agents game that was great right up until we actually got the Dracula Dossier. It died almost immediately after, because the dossier is a million plot threads waiting to be pulled on, and the momentum slowed to a crawl while our crack team of former spies tried to figure out "what do now" Unrelated, but since I asked about the Libertarian Batman: here is the hero Sharn deserves
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Jun 8, 2021 07:03
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Cobalt-60 posted:"Love for puzzles" is something that should be covered in Session 0, IMO. Anything where there's only ONE TRUE WAY to exit the room/advance the plot is just bad design. Plus, it confuses player/character skills; soemtimes, players who are good at puzzling WANT to play the Big Dumb Fighter, or the clever wizard player has no IRL clue how to solve it. Or at least DMs should read the room better; some people like puzzling things out, but most players I've met don't. Or follow the "good enough" school of puzzle solving; a cryptic riddle, and enough space to allow freedom. "You prestidigitate yourselves red and green and stand on your heads on opposite corners? The door opens." we've been playing with this DM for 20ish years, so I think i'm more taken aback than anything else because this is the first cipher we've ever had. I think someone was right that he thought it would be a cool idea and went with it. We play in a very unforgiving system and we're all comfortable with that, so part of the surprise was even having a NPC help us in the first place; especially since the theme of the campaign is 'you're so poor and unimportant no one even believes your stories about monsters and cultists.' thankfully he's pretty good about signposting/setting up plot threads and giving players 3-4 ways to find something out, so even if we dead end on the cipher we have a bunch of other options to try. Ciphers just seem like a weird thing to do even when they're discussed in between sessions. Notably, no one besides me even tried to solve it since I think they had the same reaction to it that I did
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Jun 8, 2021 14:24
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The problem with investigation mechanics in most games, tabletop and video, is that it can be very hard to differentiate between 'there's nothing here, try something else' and 'there is something here, we just haven't found it yet'.
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Jun 8, 2021 15:04
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JustJeff88 posted:The problem with investigation mechanics in most games, tabletop and video, is that it can be very hard to differentiate between 'there's nothing here, try something else' and 'there is something here, we just haven't found it yet'. Yep, it may be a little immersion breaking for some but it's better to telegraph in some form that you're looking at a dead end.
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Jun 8, 2021 16:11
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JustJeff88 posted:The problem with investigation mechanics in most games, tabletop and video, is that it can be very hard to differentiate between 'there's nothing here, try something else' and 'there is something here, we just haven't found it yet'. Gumshoe does this really well - if you spend some of your investigation resources, you find everything.
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Jun 8, 2021 16:26
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JustJeff88 posted:The problem with investigation mechanics in most games, tabletop and video, is that it can be very hard to differentiate between 'there's nothing here, try something else' and 'there is something here, we just haven't found it yet'. yeah, that's a great way to phrase it The all time most memorable investigation we ever did was a player being upset with how his character was turning out and just working with the DM to have his character die of natural causes in his sleep. The player had to miss that session and we spent most of it being like ... did a demon kill him? an assassin?? how did this happen??? and it was just nope, he had a brain aneurysm but no one knows what that is. eventually the dm just had to tell us there was nothing going on and we wouldn't believe him until the player told us too
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Jun 8, 2021 17:04
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LA Noire had the cool music stop with a chime when all the clues were found at a crime scene. I wonder if you could do the same thing in tabletop, just play a sound when the players have all they need?
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Jun 8, 2021 17:11
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mastershakeman posted:we've been playing with this DM for 20ish years, so I think i'm more taken aback than anything else because this is the first cipher we've ever had. I think someone was right that he thought it would be a cool idea and went with it. We play in a very unforgiving system and we're all comfortable with that, so part of the surprise was even having a NPC help us in the first place; especially since the theme of the campaign is 'you're so poor and unimportant no one even believes your stories about monsters and cultists.' This was the thing I was going to ask about. IC your party wizard farmed this out to his contact who is just crackerjack at deciphering code, and he returns a partially completed form. It really feels to me like this should have been a multi-level answer like was suggested above. Solve it OOC as a fun little side puzzle, Solve it IC by rolling intelligence or Arcana or something else appropriate, or farm it out to an NPC in exchange for gold or a side quest. Getting a partial solution just seems bizarre.
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Jun 8, 2021 17:15
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mastershakeman posted:yeah, that's a great way to phrase it You flatter me. I'm used to talk-and-plot heavy campaigns (keep in mind that I stopped in 2e), but I'm terrible at role-playing if that makes any sense. To put it another way, I'm bad at pretending to be someone else, but I believe that action has to be separated by long stretches of build-up or it is meaningless. Campaigns for ages have seemed all about combat, and that's kind of tedious. The only campaign that I ever did that was combat-heavy was Myth Drannor, and I found out later that the box set for that literally said that the players should be constantly hounded while inside the city. There was tons of loot, especially scrolls, potions and other charged items, but we burned almost everything just to stay afloat. That was fun at the time, but it's a sort of 'hot-shotting' that burns out quickly.
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Jun 8, 2021 22:47
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My DM always has a set way things need to be solved, but every 5-10 minutes he'll feed us a clue/hint/let us roll to nudge us in the right direction. If we come up with something clever that was completely unexpected, he'll let us try it and if we succeed, problem solved...and then he tucks the "original" solution away to reuse later in the campaign/in another campaign. Apparently, he's had the same solution to a puzzle for 17 years because no one's come close to figuring it out except for his ten-year-old daughter.
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Jun 8, 2021 22:49
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I have exactly one "puzzle" with a single actual answer that I love because most groups accidentally solve it. You have a golem (or some other automaton) standing guard on a very heavily locked door. It stands there and does nothing except say the same thing to anyone who gets within 10ft of it: "what is the password." It's not a question, it's a statement. As soon as anyone says "what" to it, it unlocks the door and lets the group through.
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Jun 8, 2021 23:58
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I once ripped off a puzzle from Earthbound for use in a 7th Sea game, but you could use it in anything: The PCs are trying to gain entrance into a secret meeting/thieves' guild/hideout/etc. Prior intel only reveals that the passphrase is "four minutes of silence." So when they approach the door and the guy in the peephole asks for the password, the PCs are to stand there quietly for four minutes. You can sprinkle in a check against the characters fidgeting too much or humming absentmindedly, to taste. If you hate your friends, you can make them do it OOC.
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Jun 9, 2021 00:47
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JustJeff88 posted:it can be very hard to differentiate between 'there's nothing here, try something else' and 'there is something here, we just haven't found it yet'. I read this phrase in relation to organized play, but it's great for general use too: "It is obvious to you that nothing of use will be found in this chamber." Or: "You recognize the shoddy limestone used in this sculpture, and it is obvious to you that the great ugly thing really is just for decoration." Or: "There are thousands of of fingerprints on the pillar from those who explored these halls long before you. Since none found a secret, it is obvious to you that the pillar has no secrets to find." Or even: "A previous adventurer carelessly left 2d6 + 4 gold in the alcove, but it is obvious to you that the painting itself serves no purpose beyond creepy ambience."
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Jun 9, 2021 00:58
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Captain Walker posted:Or even: "A previous adventurer carelessly left 2d6 + 4 gold in the alcove, but it is obvious to you that the painting itself serves no purpose beyond creepy ambience." Cool. I loot the painting.
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Jun 9, 2021 01:01
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Tunicate posted:Cool. I loot the painting. The ancient frame breaks as you take it down--something is drawn on the back of the painting!! ...a crude sketch of the male genitalia, in thick ink visible from the other side of the parchment. Nice going, Peruggia. Railing Kill posted:four minutes of silence Didn't realize it when I played but Earthbound recycles this concept for the Mu training later on, only because it's Earthbound the game escalates in the weirdest way, gradually adding a threat that you cannot do anything about. You start to wonder "am I in actual danger here? Is this guy gonna take my soul and my save file??" Earthbound was one of a kind, man.
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Jun 9, 2021 01:21
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Railing Kill posted:I once ripped off a puzzle from Earthbound for use in a 7th Sea game, but you could use it in anything: Or you could make it so that the spoken phrase 'four minutes of silence' is the password. The PCs don't know which and if they guess wrong, a huge unwinnable fight breaks out. That's probably excessively cruel, which is why I thought of it.
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Jun 9, 2021 03:29
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Tunicate posted:Cool. I loot the painting. I attempted to DM a campaign once and it went very poorly. In the first session, they were trying to escape from a nobleman's house after getting caught getting info from the daughter of the house. I hadn't planned any loot to be taken, so when they looked around there were only paintings on the walls. 2 sessions later, they came across some thieves hiding the woods and you guessed it, they were hiding after robbing an art museum I didn't realize what I had done until the entire table groaned
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Jun 9, 2021 03:40
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Tunicate posted:Cool. I loot the painting. Hey, this is how a "Harlequin-Romance" style painting of Orcus ended up in the Thieves Guild...
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Jun 9, 2021 11:59
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Becoming a Warlock, but only because you're kind of horny for the patron and collect art of them with their shirt off while a cultist swoons in their arms
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Jun 9, 2021 12:12
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A much bigger one is something that wasn't supposed to be a puzzle becomes one, usually because someone forgot something.
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Jun 9, 2021 12:32
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hyphz posted:A much bigger one is something that wasn't supposed to be a puzzle becomes one, usually because someone forgot something.
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Jun 9, 2021 14:45
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Wasn't one word spelled right that she thought was wrong?
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Jun 9, 2021 15:14
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Kavak posted:Wasn't one word spelled right that she thought was wrong? This ST was a person I fully convinced that Brain Spiders were an actual thing in real life. (They live in the subarachnoid layer of your brain, you see, and they eat your old neurons. That's why you can't remember where you parked your car; the neurons holding that info got eaten by your brain spiders.) She was very irate when her attempt to use this information to appear intelligent and educated to her coworkers was met with laughter and mockery.
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Jun 9, 2021 15:52
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Yawgmoth posted:I think so, yeah. It's been like ten years since that game happened and there was a lot in that whole scenario that made it a hailstorm of annoyance. Maybe her Common Sense Cockroaches were sleeping that day.
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Jun 9, 2021 17:45
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JustJeff88 posted:Or you could make it so that the spoken phrase 'four minutes of silence' is the password. The PCs don't know which and if they guess wrong, a huge unwinnable fight breaks out. That's probably excessively cruel, which is why I thought of it.  In an unrelated story: We're still playing 5E Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We found an Abboleth: a megalomaniacal cosmic horror who infects and mind controls an ever-increasing area around where it dwells, deep underwater. We found it in an underground lake, apparently early enough that its area of effect isn't far-reaching...yet. So after it issues an arrogant "leave or be enslaved by the god-king" message telepathically, we decide to retreat to form a plan to beat its rear end. We sweep the area on this level of its enslaved minions. The last area we stumble across is an encampment of Kua Toa (fish people). They're evil as a general rule, and apparently build their own mini-gods. This particular clan is also sick and dying due to the pollutant effect the Abboleth is having on the water they call home. But there's a fuckload of them, like about 40 capable of fighting. Our party consists of a Bard, a Warlock, a Paladin, a Monk, and a Ranger. With three high-CHA characters, we spontaneously go for the classic "we are your gods now!" approach. Some use of Alter Self and several crushed intimidate and persuasion checks later, we have them convinced that our disguised Ranger is the avatar of the god they are currently constructing. My Bard has a field day verbally abusing these people because she's a legit anarchist and utterly loathes all the bootlicking of these people as well as the Abboleth. She uses her magical, disguisable armor to go from looking like a Victorian goth to a pint-sized member of GWAR. She convinces them that their own pronunciation of their new god's name is wrong and it is making him irate. This sets the tone for the whole interaction. The Warlock nat-20's a couple Intimidate checks along the way, and we're off the the races. "What does KLA-bu--- uh, Kla-BU asks of us, its humble servants," the Kua Toa priest, Noolgaloop, finally asks. "Your insipid cowering is unworthy of Glorious Kla-BU!" my Bard barks at them. "You must muster your forces and attack the beast in the lake...immediately," she says icily. They take this order as well as a penal unit being commanded to a suicide attack, which is exactly what it is. Our plan is to use the Abboleth to wipe out these assholes, and use them to soften up the Abboleth for our attack on it. I think the module might have designed these guys as a fetch quest: to help them get the specific materials to finish their new god statue, maybe to help with the Abboleth. That's definitely not what we do. So we run around to an eastern approach to the lake, while the Kua Toa mobilize and set out for the lake from the west. Once we hear the attack start from the west, we move in. We run into only two of the six Chuul minions the Abboleth has guarding it, because the other four are dealing with the Kua Toa. The Abboleth ends up mind controlling no one, and poisoning only one of us (with an effect that makes them only able to breathe water until it is cured). The Paladin and Ranger dole out damage on the thing so fast that it goes down in two rounds once it is in melee. Meanwhile, the Monk is running interference and the Warlock and I start bathing in Fireballs and Eldritch Blasts the clusterfuck that is the melee between the fish people and the Chuul. Hilariously, the Kua Toa never figure out where these are coming from due to the range and the chaos of the melee they're in. Toward the end of combat, my Bard takes up a position atop the statue of the old Kua Toa god, which is on an island in the middle of the lake. I kick the things festooning the statue off it and with an angry "No gods, no masters!" and I launch one more Fireball from my wand into the mass of Chuul and Kua Toa. When the steam clears, the Kua Toa have taken 95% casualties. Only Noolgaloop and 2-3 others remain alive. All the Chuul are dead, the Abboleth is dead, and dead fish people are everywhere. Nevertheless, Noolgaloop lets out a triumphal, Zoidbergian "HURRAH!" The session ended on that "hurrah!" but the Warlock's player has already said that the next game is going to start with Noolgaloop immediately eating an Eldritch Blast.
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Jun 12, 2021 12:33
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Blimey, even I think that that was harsh. I assume that it never occurred to anyone to work with the fishmen to take the aboleth down in exchange for safe passage? So sue me, I'm of a gentle and cooperative nature... aboleths being a notable exception.
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Jun 12, 2021 17:36
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Railing Kill posted:The session ended on that "hurrah!" but the Warlock's player has already said that the next game is going to start with Noolgaloop immediately eating an Eldritch Blast.
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Jun 12, 2021 18:04
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AND you could have liberated them from hierarchy and superstition! Set up a syndicalist fish commune!
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Jun 12, 2021 18:06
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I mean it does, but it still sounds like a good campaign of murder hoboing and it seems like the whole party had fun
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Jun 12, 2021 18:25
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:AND you could have liberated them from hierarchy and superstition! Set up a syndicalist fish commune! We already turned a Lawful Evil clan of Hobgoblins bootlickers into True Neutral communists (only because chaotic good seemed a bridge too far). I can't speak for the rest of my group, but personally I just didn't want a repeat of the same plot. We already have a clan of badass Fantasy Klingon anarcho-communists behind us. We don't need another, for practical or dramatic purposes. We did liberate the Kua Toa from the yoke of superstition though (by getting them all killed).
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Jun 12, 2021 19:30
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The Glumslinger posted:I mean it does, but it still sounds like a good campaign of murder hoboing and it seems like the whole party had fun Absolutely. I never thought I'd be so engaged with a pure dungeon crawl for ten months and counting, and yet here we are. It helps that 5E is by far the best version of D&D I've every played (having played all of them since 2E), and our DM is good about balancing rules and breaking rules both to be conducive to letting cool, funny, interesting, or challenging things happen. Oh, and pandemic hellworld. That too. Our weekly (remote) game has been a legit mental health/social health boon for everyone involved. We are definitely a gang of murder hobos, though. My goth bard is easily the biggest bleeding heart in the party, and she's trucking around with a NG paladin of vengeance, a TN Shadar-kai monk, a TN warforged ranger, and a CN warlock. Lots of neutrality-by-way-of-naturalism in this party. Despite that, my character keeps trying to collect friends like my daughter does when she plays this game. So far I've befriended a goblin, a whole clan of hobgoblins, a robot, and a wererat. This does not include my pet mouse, Mr. Whiskers the Cheddar Risker. My next project is to pull the warforged ranger toward Good. His player has said he's starting as a blank slate and a True Neutral with the intent to drift toward an alignment through gameplay. He'll be my anarcho-communist robot pal. 
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Jun 12, 2021 19:47
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At this rate you're just going to end up replacing alignment with different leftist tendencies Chaotic syndicalist bard (w/ banjo), anarchist insurrectionist rogue with molotovs, a leninist paladin (Oath of the Common Man), maoist ranger...
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Jun 12, 2021 23:05
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:At this rate you're just going to end up replacing alignment with different leftist tendencies I'd link the "Dungeons & Discourse" comic here but the artist kinda sucks so I'm not going to bother.
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Jun 12, 2021 23:09
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