Riddle Puzzles

Dante shared his recent post on the macro puzzle... that over-arcing sometimes frustrating puzzle that has to be solved to advance to the next step. These are usually highly frustrating for me because if I don't figure it out right away, I feel as if I've missed something very important.

I prefer riddles. To me, riddles are a much more satisfying intellectual challenge. One of the traditions of GenCon is to earn the Riddle Master badge from Cloud Kingdom as soon as possible once entering the sales floor. Because life as a Riddle Master is grand.

For the DMs out there, I'd like to share a riddle experience that I felt went very well from a player's perspective. At GenCon, several years ago, we met up with a bunch of college friends, one of whom was there with his dad, who was an awesome DM and offered to run a short, one-night hang-out-and-have-fun kind of session. We all jumped at the chance.

This was the basic premise: we mighty adventurers encountered a sage of some kind, who provided us with charms to help us in our quest. To earn your charm, you had to answer a riddle, but you could get help from the rest of the party to solve your riddle.

There were two things I really liked about this approach. First, it was a gift - if you couldn't answer the riddle, nothing bad happened. Second, you could get help; instead of stranding you there with everyone staring at you, waiting to see if you were going to make a guess, you got to ask for help from everyone. The bonus was that everyone stayed involved, even if they already had their charm.

Keeping everyone involved, making the goal achievable without making the stakes too high, and making sure everyone has fun keeps the challenge from being overwhelming.

The Curse of the Macro Puzzle...

Let's face it, boys and girls... puzzles can sometimes be frustrating. In our recent Ravenloft campaign, we have been marooned on a strange island upon which we appear to be trapped. Our group made several attempts at paddling our lifeboat out into the sea, only to get repeatedly deposited back on the same shores from whence we came.

At this point, I don't know if it is a puzzle or one of those magical effects intended to keep us within the constraints of the general plot, but suffice it to say several repeat failures was a wee bit frustrating for our group.

The cost of moving on

I have attempted to use these larger scale puzzles or traps within my own campaigns, and I constantly run into trouble with people not "getting the hints" or constantly trying the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result. This is actually Einstein's definition of insanity, for those keeping score at home.

One of two things happen: the session grinds to a halt, with frustrated players quickly breaking character and discussing the plot reasons why they aren't able to solve the approach with their best efforts, or they attempt to abandon the puzzle and move on to find out more about their surroundings hoping later to find the key that will lead them to success.

I have two pieces of advice for those wanting to inject this type of event into their campaigns: expect your players to be stupider than you give them credit for. The glaring hint that you have given them will almost never make sense unless you beat the players over the head with it, or give them several data points upon which to connect the dots. Secondly, you should always give your players an "out", where they can move on to explore another part of the plot while they figure out the aspects of the puzzle that are currently unclear.

Luckily, our DMs for this campaign did the latter and allowed us a few leads to different areas of the plot, which we wrapped up the last session by following. Hopefully more will become clear next week, but the progress was encouraging and that is the benefit from this approach.

Bricks in The Road To Hell: A Cautionary Tale of Accidental Roleplay

Last night, I was playing some Fable 2 Pub Games before bed. I'm not all that crazy about the game, but it's a good timekiller if one is just looking for a little braindead entertainment. Most of the reason I play it is because the controls consist of pushing one button or another, and when you've got a baby in your lap that's all you can use. I didn't preorder Fable 2 to get a free copy, and I would certainly not pay 800 Microsoft points for the thing -- but fortunately a nice lady at Gen Con had a big table full of free vouchers for the game so I didn't have to. I'll probably be picking up Fable 2 at some point after it comes out, but there are also a lot of games coming out in which I need to play a little plastic guitar, and my budget is currently limited.

At any rate, I suck at pretty much every game in the thing. Fortune's Tower is my preferred vice. It's basically a cross between Solitaire and Deal Or No Deal. The way you play goes as follows:

1. You place a bet.


2. Your cards literally burst into flames, and you lose all your money.


3. Occasionally, something will happen that gives you just enough hope to get cocky and think you can win your money back. Then go back to step 2.


4. Repeat.

If you buy Fable 2, your gold (or debt) can transfer to your character. The game has now started to remind me that excessive debt may have "in-game consequences". I started last night 14,000 in debt, and I started to get on a winning streak. I started to feel hopeful about my character's future, about my ability to play this game, about avoiding the loan sharks' wrath! It was about then that the tables with the more expensive betting limits started opening to me, and the wave of good feelings I was riding convinced me that only good things made out of platinum would come of this.

Two hours later, I realized something very important. I had inadvertently started roleplaying during a game of chance. I created a character in my mind that didn't even exist yet, and gave him hopes and dreams and a credit rating. I desperately wanted him to succeed, and got caught up in the moment. And now I am 70,000 chips in debt. The good news is that I have 5-star gambler rating, and I can borrow LOTS of chips. The bad news is that my poor character is probably going to need new kneecaps. Oh god, you can have a family in Fable 2! Are they going to come after my wife and kids and.... *choke* MY DOG? I vowed then and there to train my character as fast as possible so I could defend my family and lands from these scoundrels, while paying my debt honestly through hard work.

I'm thinking very hard about leaving my debt as is and allowing my character to inherit it just to see what happens. In short, the game itself was boring but I had fun in my own little fantasy world -- and I would have probably done the same thing regardless of whether a "real" RPG was coming out associated with it or not.

The moral of the story here? To put it Yoda-style: Adversity leads to conflict. Conflict leads to drama. Drama leads to story. Gambling leads to depression. Which is not hard to roleplay when you're 70,000 in the hole.

Rituals in Roleplaying

This weekend, Dante & I helped celebrated our niece's first birthday! Let me tell you, watching a 1-year-old make a huge mess of her little "for me to destroy" birthday cake is pretty darn entertaining.

And as I'm sitting here, grasping for straws for something to write, I am thinking back fondly of the "adult" cake (and how oh-so-tasty it was), and I begin to consider how ritualized the birthday party is. In our family, there's the socializing time, generally including food, followed by presents, then cake. It's a very specific pattern of events that occurs every time, no matter who is celebrating a birthday.

And now to the point... All this reminiscing of birthday party rituals has lead me to consider ritual patterns in roleplaying.

In terms of mechanics, there are patterns of behavior governing actions. For instance, initiative to determine order of combat, actions taken in order. It's the same pattern that is followed every time there is combat.

In-character rituals are a little harder to identify as they are generally subjective. One that comes to mind stems from both parts of our last big campaign. Various characters had their rituals to follow whenever the party arrived in a new town. Nathanial, the goblin-turned-human paladin of Horus-Re, would visit the local temple and clean it. Batloaf, the Rock bard extraordinaire, would scope out the population of available women and select his partner(s) for the evening; I won't share with you the specifics of this ritual so-as to keep this post family friendly.

My character, Ari, didn't really have any specific pattern of behavior to follow when arriving in town. I realize after the fact that this is one of the components of roleplaying that I neglected with this character. I was vaguely uneasy when reaching a new town as it seemed that most other characters had something to do, and Ari didn't really have a ritual to follow. In a fluff-heavy group, not having something fluffy to do made it a little less fun.

It's easy to say that the solution in this case would be to find something to do, but that may be difficult to accomplish, depending on the character's personality. So, unsatisfyingly, I don't really have an answer for this. But I would recommend that if you are involved in a fluffy campaign, take some extra time between sessions to consider your backstory (because it's a fluffy campaign and I know you have a backstory). Is there something there that your character could use to fill those empty hours in town? Maybe you could write letters home or update your adventuring journal: these two options don't require much (if any) in-game time but they can give you a ritual to complete. Plus, it leaves an opening for you to write that letter/journal entry between sessions as a character-building exercise; what would your character have to say about that crazy old oracle you visited?

As a player, if you're having difficulty involving your character, try working with the other players to see if you might find something your characters can do together. Or maybe your DM can offer some insight on what your character could be doing or what areas of town that might be of interest.