I’m terrible at puzzles
Puzzles are a long-standing tradition of role-playing games. Besides battling monsters, figuring out the way to unlock ancient tombs or solve magical riddles is perhaps one of the most iconic aspects of table-top RPGs. I’m just… not very good at it.
When I participate in escape rooms — which both Erica and our friends enjoy — I’m only just not dead weight. My brain simply doesn’t work that way. I have a few ideas for finding clues, but I’m not the one who pulls the group through the room. The same goes for RPGs, even the video game variety. Shuffling statues around a room to get them into the right order to open the path forward never interested me much — or maybe just wasn’t interesting because I’m not good at it.
So it will likely come as no shock to you that my role-playing games don’t involve a lot of puzzles. This post will definitely not be a guide to making some for your game, because anything I come up with would be terrible. I’m sure that plenty of other Storytellers are much better at puzzles, and they can help you come up with some doozies for your game.
But there are other kinds of problem-solving, and I get by without using just about any puzzles. Here’s a sort of quasi-puzzle I’ve used — I have created a mysterious villain with followers infiltrating governments and towns all across the world. At some point, the party needs to enter one of the villain’s strongholds, but the entrance is sealed with a magical password.
A very typical puzzle might involve searching around the area, looking at statues or pictures or something, and then playing word scramble to get the password. To me, that doesn’t make much in-world sense — even power-mad cultists know better than to write their password down or make it so obvious nearby. Instead, the password is a term or phrase associated with their master, one that the party has a chance to hear them shout as a battlecry, or overhear when spying on one of their rituals. The password comes across a little more naturally that way, I think.
Another pseudo-puzzle I used in a villain’s lair was some sliding tiles that showed a picture of a sorcerer cowed at the foot of a demon lord. With a short mental stat crisis, the players rearranged the tiles — which changed into a picture of the sorcerer now sitting on the throne and the demon lord sprawled at their feet. No props, and nothing for the players to really solve. Their characters slid some tiles around and created the new picture because it wasn’t about the villain having a random puzzle in his lair, but about telling a piece of the antagonist’s story, to share some background in a way that let the characters literally get their hands on it. And in-world, the move felt like a total ego-stroke for the villain, so no one thought it was too cheesy.
What I really lean on, though, are crises. I’ve used crises for poker games, delivering a baby, disarming bombs, chases, and just about everything else. I’ve even done an entire game without traditional fight scenes, using crises when we couldn’t engage in real-time combat. Sailing through a thunderstorm, an NPC goes overboard and desperately needs a rescue — that’s my puzzle. Do the characters throw the flailing sailor a rope? Dive in and swim out to them? Use magic? Instead of recombining letters into a password, or matching a silver and gold goblet to a silver and gold statue or something, most crises are a sort of free-form puzzle. Sure, I’ve got rolls for at least one solution in my back pocket so that I don’t accidentally box them into a no-win situation. But if someone comes up with a unique solution, then I happily go with their idea and give them the dice rolls that best seem to fit their plan.
But a puzzle can be even more abstract than that and might not even involve rolls. Say there’s political intrigue between senators. The party suspects that one of them is working for the campaign’s villain, so they need to dash any political ambitions before the evil senator gains political control and becomes untouchable. Is there some proof of the senator’s true allegiance? How do the characters get that proof? Who can they trust to show it to, or what do they do to expose the senator?
You can complicate this sort of scene by introducing a friendly senator who the players need to keep away from the intrigue, and the characters may have to be careful that they don’t taint the evidence or weaken their case. That’s a sort of puzzle, too. It can involve crises or maybe even literal puzzles — to open the senator’s locked and trapped safe, for example — but solving the riddle of exposing a villain’s evil requires problem-solving skills, too.
Honestly, I think these less literal puzzles are more appropriate in most game worlds. And much more exciting! So if you’re not very good at coming up with puzzles and riddles like me, it doesn’t mean that you can’t challenge your players intellectually.
