DnD: Gimme A Puzzle!
I'm trying to get some more puzzles for Saturday's DnD game; I have one puzzle so far, and I'm hoping to make a whole puzzle session. Any ideas? My current puzzle is a raising-lowering water puzzle.
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Okay, you guys suck. I've got an hour and a half till my game session and I have maybe an hour's worth of stuff prepared. I need 4 hours worth of stuff. >.<
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Huh. Maybe I don't. Managed to make it through due to the inability of my players to realize levers can be switched back to their former positions.
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Hell, I once had six pages of loose notes that carried me through an entire summer and fall. I wouldn't be any help because I only make very sketchy plans, the better to allow character interaction to be as free as possible. Plus I never did puzzles. I hate arbitrary roadblock puzzles in video games (i.e. block pushing, and, yes, water-level manipulation) and never put them in pen and paper games, so I wouldn't be any help in coming up with some.
Now, you want advice on how to run a seat-of-your-pants campaign for over four years and yet have the players commend you for your good planning the whole way through, then maybe I'm your man.
You managed to do that? Teach me, oh great one! This is the only session in the whole campaign that I planned out ahead of time.
By the way, anything I did, including puzzles, would have been randomly arbitrary. This is a session where they're in some sort of inter-realm zone made of chaos and magic. (They're moving from Greyhawk to Forgotten Realms.)
When I say "arbitrary," I don't mean just "random." I mean that the puzzle has nothing to do with the game being played, it merely stands as a roadblock to meaningful progress. Like every puzzle in a Myst game; none of them have anything to do with the setting, they're just random logic puzzles.
Onimusha on the PS2 did this with an annoying block-sliding puzzle, KOTOR did it with the Towers of Hanoi (and it's not the only offender in that regard), and lots of other games have included stupid block-pushing puzzles. None of them are either intuitive or relevant, like the puzzles in a good adventure game (King's Quest VI, or any Monkey Island game, or Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers). They're just arbitrary roadblocks.
So that's what I meant. Probably more than you needed to ever know.
There were monsters that the goal of the water raising and lowering stuff was to find ways to defeat without fighting who would have slaughtered them otherwise. Does that make it less arbitrary?
I request once again that you teach me how to run a fucking awesome seat of your pants campaign.
I was halfway through a (somewhat) brief answer when Firefox crashed and I got too annoyed to start over from scratch. I'll be more verbose later, but, in short, I'm not sure I can really teach it because I'm not entirely sure how I do it. I always figured I was just an okay GM, the guy who didn't mind running the game so everyone said "Eh, we'll play with him," until a number of people began telling me (without prompting, mind you) "You're one of the best GMs I've played with." It surprised the hell out of me, and it was a bit of an ego boost, but I really didn't know I was that good.
Anyway, I'll think on it and see what I come up with.
Interesting. So, for all I know, the capaign where I gave my players a flying castle after they slaughtered a family of giants and they went around having the wierdest adventures I could come up with was the Best Capaign Ever?
(To give you a hint what the wierdest adventures I could come up with is, they encountered yoshis. Fucking yoshis.)
Hey guys, I just happened on this little blog. Funney, Akusai, I have a very similar playing style. I gave up in depth planning after spending countless nights with detailed traps and encounters and all the players wanted to do was rob the town treasury or go off in a direction I hadn't anticipated.
I have run seat-of-your-pants gaming for over 15 years now and I am constantly told that I am one of the best DM's out there.
Of course doing npc and monster voices and sound fx help. ;D
All I can tell you is with practice you learn to be quick on your "feet". Often a player can make a desicion for you. Things like "I hope that's not a dragons cave" Insert a dragon of the appropriate level. Green and White are great for using stealth and hit and run tactics.
I often borrow from movies or books. Just try to think of what the next logical step would be. Think of single fun moments and then try to incorperate that. Brainstorm on the fly.
Chases are fun, chases in town are better. Slavers? Ohhh, get a party member captured by slavers. Caves are fun, caves filled with pockets of ignitable gas=cave in's.
Gas can cause suffocation, hmm, somewhere deep not near the entrance+purple worm. Ooohh yeah, I like it.
That's kinda how I do it but you gotta be quick.
You can do a light puzzle that they have to figure the possition of each out and they have to give the form of a symbol. h32r.
I like puzzles actually I also want to do something really creative I'm working on, when I getting some great ideas I'll let you know.m10m
Ah, puzzles. I think a good one would be:
(this works on any creature,no matter the scenary, there just has to be at least three players and some sort of challenging creature.) Have the one challenging creature say that his only motivations are love, self hatred, and suspicion, also include that one of them is lead by a lie. One player geusses which one it is (it's up to you to figure out a story line for the right answer) and if wrong, everyone but one player bursts into flames and dies. If right, then they win with an explanation behind it. But if not right, the one player thats left has one more chance to geuss the motivation right. If geussed correctly, the one player who geussed first, is back alive, and the game is won with an explanation behind it. If geussed wrong, the game needs to be won, one way or another.
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