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GameMastery Guide / Advanced Topics / Puzzles and Riddles

The Mechanism

Source GameMastery Guide pg. 248
There are dozens of puzzle types, but not all of them are great for every adventure. When designing a puzzle, consider the story and environment, and decide whether the mechanism fits.

Logic Puzzles: These puzzles are popular, but be careful: when confronted by a logic puzzle, fears of middle-school math class haunt many players’ brains, intimidating them away from even looking at the problem. In addition, all the rules of logic in the real world don’t necessarily apply to a fantasy world. Having such a puzzle be half solved can help players know what state of mind to consider the problem in, and hint at the right path.

Mazes: Complex labyrinths are difficult to use, especially when employing a map and miniatures makes revealing a maze boring and obvious. At best, mazes should be simple, preferably nothing more than a single intersection or two, with the correct choices offering a safe path and the wrong ones leading to peril. Giving the PCs forewarning of the safe path earlier in an adventure or by means of another riddle rewards them for their cleverness, but only penalizes them with traps and additional challenges.

Physical Puzzles: The best types of puzzles are those you can hand out, giving your players something directly from the adventure to manipulate. If they face a door that must be opened, give them a sketch of a combination lock with letters on it and make them remember the name of the centuries-old lich’s lost love. Or just give them a design with seven colored studs that need to be pressed in a hurry—are the buttons random, or does the rainbow shape in the background have some meaning? Physical puzzles can take any form you can imagine, and while they might be labor intensive to create, they can also prove the most memorable.

Riddles: Elusive questions can be the basis for entire adventures. One of the most important parts is to make sure that the answers are comprehensible to the PCs, not just the players. While players know a lot about monsters, treasure, and locations in their universe, not every PC does. Questions with answers that both players and PCs might reasonably know and understand often prove best, as it allows the players to wrack their brains just as their characters world, and not trust in purely real-world knowledge. Thus, if the PCs need to figure out which temple in a massive city contains their foe, a riddle like “I make wolves from men when I arrive, and men from wolves when I depart” could lead to the temple of the moon god.

Wordplay: Assuming your players are comfortable speaking English, you can use puns, anagrams, hidden words, and the like to befuddle them. Often such puzzles come off as being cute or quirky, so make sure that dour wordplay doesn’t undermine your adventure and villains— while a sprite might naturally spout rhyming riddles, the same approach instantly robs a vampire of his menace.

Archives of Nethys

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The Mechanism