Solving the Problem of Puzzles in RPGs

What exactly is inside the dungeon? Monsters and treasure, definitely. Some NPCs and treasure, sure. Traps and hazards, of course. And… puzzles. 

But puzzles can cause problems. The game grinds to a halt as the DM explains and re-explains an incongruous logic pretzel or goofy riddle. The natural born puzzlers in the group go to work, while the rest of the table checks out.

Even with the best of intentions, people are left behind. In one game where I was a player, our party encountered a puzzle that was an elaborate gag… referencing a TV show that only some of the players in the game had seen. (The GM in question did a great job generally, so I was happy to sit on the sideline in that instance; but the example was still instructive).

By player request, puzzles are part of the mystery of my Knave game, Strangers on a Train, and I have found it’s possible to gradually, slowly, get better at making puzzles. And puzzles are worth keeping in our games.

Tricks, Not Puzzles

Most people know that old-school D&D included instructions for populating dungeons with monsters, treasure, and traps. But new-school D&D players overlook some of the other guidelines for keying the dungeon. Old-school D&D did not suggest (at least not principally) featuring “puzzles” in the sense they are commonly understood today, but rather included “tricks.” The difference is informative.

A puzzle, as typically deployed in RPGs, has one correct answer. There is no partial success. There is no amusing mistake that still moves the scenario forward. There often is not even room to improvise workarounds that bypass the puzzle entirely. Poorly written 5E adventures merely offer a greasy trail of ability checks to give hints to bored PCs until they bump into the right answer.

A trick has no answer because it is not asking questions. It is probably more harmful than helpful to the average PC, but with the tantalizing possibility of lucky benefits or creative leveraging. Because a trick doesn’t have a “right” answer, it’s much easier to plan one. A puzzle, like a joke, needs to have a satisfying conclusion. A trick is more like an amusing non-sequitur that sets the stage for improvisation.

The remainder of this post will talk about puzzles as they’re more commonly understood, but a good time-saving first step is always to ask “could this just be a trick instead?”

Built into the Background 

When used poorly, puzzles have the proverbial glowing neon sign pointing to them, announcing their presence. They are “mini-games,” which is to say, a break in the flow of the actual game everyone showed up to play.

A really good puzzle is one the players solve without realizing they’re doing a puzzle. Piecing together the clues to the location of the lich’s phylactery or identifying the murderer may in a sense be a “puzzle,” but if the players solve it purely through asking questions and interacting with the fiction, all the better! The best puzzle is the kind that never announces itself as such.

The Puzzle Pieces 

Begin with a collection of related pieces of information. A list can be enough. A dozen animal names. Digits with a non-obvious connection, like ascending prime numbers. A collection of paintings by one particular artist.

Now imagine that someone has access to only a quarter of the list. Could they intuit the pattern, and fill in the rest?

Take this process and phrase it as a question. In its simplest form, it could be “if X, then Y, what comes next?” Or “if you have seven objects with such-and-such characteristics, and seven places to put them, how much information would you need to place all of them correctly (without brute forcing it)?”

The puzzle will feel more natural if the puzzle pieces are not all grouped conveniently around the puzzle itself. The pieces can be bits of information that dungeon residents know. They can be evidence near the crime scene. They can be treasure. They can be pieces of miscellaneous lore or background information that don't fit elsewhere in the game.

After we’ve finished our list of puzzle pieces, we can work backwards to “...why?” Depending on the type of game, this may be easy or difficult. A funhouse dungeon doesn’t really need to explain its puzzles; they’re present because that’s the style of play the players signed up for. But most other games will want more context. Remember, this doesn't have to suggest realism; it simply has to convey verisimilitude, which is to say, it must be true to the shared reality of the game itself.

So why is there a "puzzle" in the game? 

• The obstacle has deteriorated from something that used to unambiguously hide or limit access, and can now be "solved" in its weakened state.
• The obstacle includes "clues" that were a reminder for its creator, or an explanation intended for someone else.
• The obstacle is a test to determine worthiness (but be careful with this one, as it's typically overused).
• The obstacle was designed as a game first and foremost, and only later adapted to gate something valuable or useful, probably by an entirely different party from the creator.
• Someone has previously partially solved the puzzle, and showed their work in the process, providing enough information to get started.
• The "puzzle" is an obstacle that is malfunctioning in some way that has subverted its original purpose and made it cryptic and opaque.
• The obstacle's clear meaning and purpose is in a lost language, and the “puzzle” lies in ambiguous translation.
• The obstacle is possessed or guarded by a trickster spirit (such as a mischievous imp or rogue AI) that amuses itself by confounding those who wish to move past it.

Next week: Puzzle Escalation (Not Obstruction)

Bizarre Life Cycle

Last Week: What Do Really Long Lifespans Mean For a Setting? 

One of my favorite solutions to this problem comes from the Sorcerer's Skull blog. This is a great way to solve two problems with one answer. It both explains why elves have such long lifespans, and also why the various types of elves are so different from each other.

The solution to the latter problem is underrated. A lot of the attempts to “fix” drow, orcs, and other ancestries in modern D&D basically add up to patches and hotfixes on the lore, aimed at nudging them into some kind of approximate moral equilibrium with the other ancestries. This is an imprecise solution, and rarely pleases anyone. I would like to see more creators think big in the style of the Sorcerer’s Skull idea, elegantly solving these issues by making them part of an alien (but understandable) life cycle.

Another excellent example is this False Machine post on elves. This is part of a series of posts that take the conventional modern fantasy races and tries to recontextualize them and make them alien without abandoning their conventional characteristics. False Machine's elves (or Aeth) are recognizably within genre conventions, but ramp up the strangeness. The longer lifespan doesn’t seem so strange when the alienness of elves is front and center.

Both of these approaches require some buy-in from players more familiar with the bog-standard elves of the Forgotten Realms and similar settings. But it's a small price to pay for integrating elves in a more organic way within a game’s setting.

A Different Kind of Old Age

This is an extension of the idea from the Sorcerer's Skull post. Science fiction and fantasy stories that consider the impact of immortality (or extreme life extension) devote a lot of energy to examining what it would mean to live forever. These characters are not simply interesting because they are long-lived; they are interesting in ways specifically informed by being long-lived. This could be as simple as blocking out the lowest levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, one by one. A very long-lived creature simply ceases to care about such things. Or it could be subtler.

Elves live much like humans for the first century or two. In their third and fourth centuries, many enjoy an extended period as wise sages and leaders; similar to Elrond and many other familiar elves from existing fiction. Many humans assume that these elves are the very oldest elves, but they’re really just middle-aged, by elven standards.

By the time these elves reach their fifth century, their interaction with the world simply begins to constrict. This happens very gradually and slowly; it's not sudden or abrupt. They are just as wise and experienced as ever. But the scope of people, places, and events they apply their lived experience to begins to narrow. Perhaps they grow indifferent to the world beyond elven lands. Or they become obsessively focused on a single pursuit. They almost certainly withdraw from society in some form or another. Carrying on a conversation with them becomes difficult. People outside their focus are immaterial and unreal to them, like ghosts. 

This is not, by elven cultural standards, inherently a positive or negative thing. In one instance, a truly ancient elf might be an unparalleled master of a craft. In another case, a tragic case of monomania, centuries spent perfecting an essentially meaningless task or habit.

If you are thinking this kind of presentation could present parallels to real-world humans, well, you’re not wrong. How much you want to grapple with those parallels in your fantasy wizard game is up to you; just carefully think through with your players what you want out of the game (as thoughtful writers have done time and time again) and how close or far you want it to live from those real-world questions.

What Do Really Long Lifespans Mean For a Setting?

What is an elf, anyway? In folklore, a goblin or gnome or troll was traditionally a malleable idea, and many such words would overlap or share a common definition of “magical creature living in the wilderness.” D&D was one of the first enterprises to create a systematic taxonomy, and to decide what exactly should differentiate, say, a hobgoblin from a bugbear.

While elves were still vague in the very earliest years of D&D (like the decidedly dwarf-like “bearded elf” pictured in the original D&D brown books), the game soon settled on an conception of elves familiar to Tolkien fans: human-sized creatures with pointy ears, famous for their grace and artistry, and imbued with magic. D&D makes its elves astonishingly long-lived, presumably drawing from the Tolkien example; but (to the best of knowledge, because I am not a lore person) the game does not copy Tolkien’s cosmological underpinning for that long lifespan, and usually ignores the societal implications of thousand-year-old sapient creatures mingling freely with humans living out conventional lifespans.

What if we don’t ignore this incongruity?

Elf Time Hits Different

Think about this – a 1st level elf fighter and a 1st level human fighter are only marginally different from each other in most editions of D&D. So how do we explain their comparable fighting skill, given the drastically different lives they must have led before taking up adventuring?

In D&D 3.5, for example, the starting age table for a human fighter suggests 15 + 1d6 years – that’s 18.5 years old on average. The recommended starting age for an elf fighter is 110 + 6d6, or 128 years old. Shouldn’t the venerable elf have vastly more martial skill than the pimply inexperienced human teen, even if they are both 1st level fighters?

A possible answer is that longer-lived creatures simply experience the passage of time differently. Elves, with so much time available to them, are just more deliberate and gradual in how they live their lives. An elven fighter spends years contemplating the art of swordcraft before ever picking up the blade. Their training and instruction is glacially slow. Hundreds of thousands of hours are spent just holding the blade, understanding its balance. Endless days of superficially irrelevant exercises to reinforce basic form, ala martial arts films. Doing it faster might technically be possible, but it would just seem… wrong to them. Thoughtless. Unnatural. Graceless. 

The human fighter, by comparison, learned to be a “fighter” during a breathless blur of weeks, days – maybe just hours. They grabbed a spear from a fallen warrior  and desperately attempted to defend their village from an attack. Or they were drafted by the emperor’s army and received only a few weeks training before they were thrown onto the front lines. Their martial education was impromptu, improvised, condensed, ramshackle; whatever it was, it was fast.

To an elf, everything about the human fighter looks sloppy, rushed, reckless, ramshackle. To the human, the elven fighter might as well be a sloth. This kind of contrast between fighting styles shows up all the time in fiction – think of the two contrasting swordsmen protagonists in the anime Samurai Champloo, or the broadsword/rapier battle at the end of the movie Rob Roy. Just extend that contrast to humans and elves writ large, and you start to answer the lifespan discrepancy.

Next week: Bizarre Life Cycle

Detectable Magic Is No Magic At All

I have a long, long list of complaints with D&D 5E’s spell list. Perhaps I will someday finish the entire alphabet, but it is more likely that my mind will crumble into dust before that particular project is ever completed. So let’s jump ahead and deal with one particularly troublesome spell: Detect Magic.

In 5E, Detect Magic is a 1st-level spell that can be cast as a ritual (which essentially means that it is free, as long as time isn’t of the essence). At higher levels, even the non-ritual version is pretty easy to deploy liberally, as full caster classes have an abundance of lower-level spell slots, which they rarely exhaust.

Put simply, Detect Magic is a spell that makes magic less magical. The unknown can trivially be flagged, categorized, and quantified. The status of a haunting hallway, mysterious monster, or nefarious NPC can often be quickly and easily diagnosed. Magic is decidedly mundane, ordinary, and known. (The spell Identify is also a problem for the same reasons, but at least has the dignity to restrict itself to one object per casting.)

I'll concede there is some logic to 5E's approach here. If every spell and magical item in the game follows the same taxonomic logic, players can understand how to interact with those effects. It supports the idea that the game’s schools of magic pervade everything magical within the world, and in running 5E, I have occasionally found that underlying taxonomy useful in interpreting my players’ proposed solutions to their problems.

But the spell incentivizes players to approach situations with a standard operating procedure. Much like Guidance – another problem spell, which is almost always correct to cast in any situation calling for an ability check, as long as action economy isn’t a factor – Detect Magic becomes the always-correct first step to evaluate an unknown situation. And that can be an easy way out of avoiding the more challenging process of manually engaging with the fiction.

I didn’t know how much this bothered me until players in my Knave game found magic items. The Knave rules also include a Detect Magic spell, but the game’s levelless approach to spells puts the opportunity cost of the spell on par with every other spell; and, of course, since magic in Knave is limited to spellbooks, players must physically obtain the spell, rather than selecting it during character creation or while leveling up. So a DM has the choice to simply not offer Detect Magic in a game where it would be disruptive.

The first truly magical object my players found in our Knave game was a glove that could invert hot and cold temperatures. If they could have cast Detect Magic and Identify on it, it would have been easy to tease out its exact mechanical function and limitations. But magic is magical in Knave because it is not easy to unpack logically. Its mechanics and functions are not obvious. So the PCs could only learn how it worked through trial and error.

That trial and error process, and the accompanying sense that PCs are tampering with the unknown, pushed the game closer to the Appendix N fiction that predated and influenced D&D and its descendants. And it’s a much more magical place to be.

High Level D&D Characters Can Simply Break the Rules

I finished several long-running D&D 5E games in 2022 and 2023. I don’t know if I’ll ever return to 5E (or 5.5E, or the many derivatives that have emerged since the SRD was released to the Creative Commons). I could play games in various old school, new school, and no-school lineages indefinitely, and be fine never again explaining the game's baffling design to a new player.

But… if I ever return to the game, it would surely be in part because I have run so much of it. I feel entitled to judge its design in a way I wouldn’t do for any other game because I’ve played 5E the most. And I would be very comfortable hacking it for the same reasons, in a way that I am not (yet) comfortable hacking other games.

D&D 5E is a carefully balanced game. I believe the entire “problem” of balance could have been avoided in D&D’s design by adopting rules-light principles from other games. But setting that aside, and accepting that Wizards of the Coast wanted to create "balanced" options for players to choose from, 5E succeeded admirably.

Look at the core classes in the 5E 2014 handbook. They are remarkably well-balanced against each other. There are a few dud archetypes (subclasses), but even those can be fixed with minimal accommodations by the DM. Players don’t need system mastery to create a character that stands on equal footing with the rest of the party. Mission accomplished.

…Up until around 11th level, anyway. The game plays smoothly during the first two “tiers” of levels, but begins to break down in the third tier, and crumbles entirely in the fourth tier. I experienced this in a game that I ran from level 1 to beyond 20 (using Epic Boons to continue progression past the de facto endpoint). The sheer power and range of options available to a high-level party meant that it was increasingly difficult to present level-appropriate challenges within the framework that had held up through tier one and tier two. And even without any players intentionally min-maxing, certain characters begin to shine brighter than others at high levels, just because of the nature of their class or the player’s style of applying their strengths to the game.

I’ve talked about creating tougher challenges before. Insofar as the DM has essentially no restrictions on how strong they can make antagonists and obstacles, the only limit on ratcheting up challenge to match the group’s power is player trust in their fairness as a referee. 

Breaking the Game

But what about balance within the group? I believe D&D 5E, through its design, implicitly promises internal party balance among PCs. And that internal balance breaks down in the third tier of play. In online discussions, I see people lament this as a weakness that should be fixed. But that feeling of balance from the first two tiers isn’t coming back, so I’ve found it’s more useful to embrace the breakdown.

A good way to do this is to let characters break more rules. This is less radical than it may sound. Many PC powers are merely specific exceptions to general rules. For example, the power to levitate is, in a broad sense, just an exception to the general rule that gravity applies to the characters.

The 5E cleric’s Divine Intervention is a good example of this. “The DM chooses the nature of the intervention; the effect of any cleric spell or cleric domain spell would be appropriate.” Note the text indicates that copying a spell would be appropriate, but clerics are not limited just to spell effects. This is good space to break the game in interesting ways, as long as it’s consistent with the logic of magic and the deity's power within the context of the game. (Of course, WotC's rejiggering of 5E into 5.5E has at least considered replacing this language with something boring and rules-compliant; once again (in my view) trying to find a solution to something that isn’t a problem).

As an example from one of those long-running games, a PC chose the Tavern Brawler feat. They chose it for the flavor, as it wasn’t particularly optimal for their barbarian. But this was easy to address. I offered them magic items and diegetic feat-like abilities that complemented Tavern Brawler by removing restrictions on how it was used. Soon they were using enemies as improvised weapons and throwing impossibly large objects at their opponents.

Is that “broken”? In the abstract, perhaps. But in practice, it was no more extreme than what several other characters in the party were doing with strong conventional class features. D&D 5E at high levels should play like this. It should leave balance behind. It should probably feel like another game entirely.