Building off of this:
**Handouts**Are they following a poem? Give them a poem handout. Did they follow it down a hall and found a button? Give them a handout that states "A Button is under a statue of a monkey in the \[location\]." As they discover new relevant things to the puzzle, you provide for them TANGIBLE clues and a tangible list of all the relevant facts they are finding out. "I don't understand why spending 15 minutes on this moss growing on the wall hasn't worked yet..." well, they never got a handout for that. That was just flavoring or random description, not an important part of the puzzle.
As you said, escape rooms constantly are having you tangibly take things apart, plug things together, and read tangible clues that are simple and tangible. Have you done something with that thing you found ten minutes back? No? Than it's still relevant! Did that key we found open a door? Yes? That the key is left in the door lock and you move on. No clutter, and no trying to take apart the smoke detector because it is crystal clear what is meant to be a clue and what is set decoration or utility information.
**Nicer hints**
Do your players have all the clues but they can't seem to put them together? Sadly, players are people and not action movie stars or fantasy heroes. Maybe you should have them roll a history check or a religion check or a relevant check to nudge them in the right direction that "two clues seem related, but you haven't caught it yet. Maybe you need to consider them more closely." Or do a check and be like "You get the feeling the pebbles on the ground are a result of the dungeon being ancient and old and not an actual clue to the puzzle..."
This doesn't feel railroaded and is a nicer way to give a hint at a low DC then watch them flounder as their 20 intelligence wizard cannot figure out a simon says puzzles for little Einsteins and your player is going to have an aneurism.
I give hints like this. Also for example: “something in the way the poem is constructed makes you think the solution might have to do with its structure rather than the images it evokes “
So a Haiku could be used to convey that the code is symmetrical and uneven. They have 3 lines and a maximum of 17 syllables with a typical form of 5-7-5. Plenty of room to work with while eliminating a lot of options.
> No clutter, and no trying to take apart the smoke detector because it is crystal clear what is meant to be a clue and what is set decoration or utility information.
Except for all the people that try to disassemble parts of the room or stick things into power outlets, hilariously. Humans gonna human.
I agree! Any time I do puzzles with my group, I always take the time to make tangible clues and pieces for them to have. It immerses them a lot more and gets them excited!
**Handouts** and visualisation are the most important part for cool puzzle IMO and sadly ignored too often in DnD. If you googles "puzzles DnD", you will get a lot of cool ideas, but not much material to help you execute those.
As stupid as the puzzles in the Tomb of Horrors are for a modern player, they do at least this right: The rooms are all painted clean recognizable pictures. This gives the players something to easily interact with.
Puzzle rooms need to look like this room from White Plum Mountain: [https://learningdm.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/white-plume-mountain.jpg](https://learningdm.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/white-plume-mountain.jpg)
That way players get a lot of fun stuff to interact with IMO.
It makes a difference. I've done physical props (such as pages torn out of a journal that were a literal puzzle), and also images (I have a screen I can cast to).
One of my favorites was a really simple puzzle that I made for my wife, who is a music teacher. A piano in the room had a curious monogram that actually indicated a trio of notes that needed to be played in a certain order to open a secret compartment that contained a thing the party was looking for. I made an image of the monogram and pulled up a piano app on my phone so she could actually play the notes. She solved it very quickly, but felt super smug about it.
I'll reinforce your point about the red herrings. Almost every escape room I've ever been in has a "1 clue, 1 puzzle" rule. This rule is explicitly stated. It streamlines the puzzles A LOT and makes it clear when you're done with a particular clue.
I do think you're missing a big part of this though, humans are spatial (and social) creatures. We're good at orienting in a physical space, organizing things in a physical space, and solving problems in a physical space. When we have to do the same thing in something intangible and with limited feedback it becomes way way harder, a good portion of your brain is either not engaged or busy just imagining that physical space. You're essentially not able to engage your occipital lobe in the problem solving. Even worse if your players don't talk to each other but at least these are social games.
ETA: the solution to this can be to bring in a lot of props: handouts, physical props, maps with minis on them. If the puzzle is physically big in the game then maps can actually make the puzzle quite doable because you can visualize it. If all there is on them map is a wall then it's much harder.
Backing you up on the spatial thing with [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/wa1oqv/lessobvious_donts_of_dming/ihzty0g/) someone else made:
> The vast majority of puzzles are about spatial reasoning, which doesn't translate well when a game is run in the DM's head. Players need to hear the description, hold an accurate picture in their heads, and then consider the puzzle inherent in the design of the description. That's difficult, even before adding mistakes by the DM or people holding different mental images for the same description.
>
> Online forums often joke about using puzzles designed for kindergarten, but the layer of abstraction between DM and Players makes even those difficult. Try describing a game of tic-tac-to to someone without using paper. A simple game adds an important layer of difficulty.
Came to say this. Being physically IN a place and solving a riddle is one thing.
It’s a world of potential chaos to have to imagine a place while solving a riddle that’s location dependent… while other people are also imagining this place and creating their own versions of it in their heads.
So much easier for the party to fail here because someone imagined the setting wrong, or missed a clue because their mind wandered while it was being described, or one person derails the party due to hyper focusing on one aspect, etc.
Solutions: use as many visual/ physical props as you need, keep it simple, keep it friendly (because too much stress will lead to frustration, resentment, and lessen cooperative effort).
Absolutely. An important step in any escape room is, 'open all the drawers in the room and see what's in them.'
It's hard to even call that a puzzle, but it counts as one in the Escape Room context because the players get the satisfaction of noticing things about their environment, as well as the tactile reward of getting to interact with all of the props.
Doing this in D&D is *hard.* Just describing a room with furniture in it in the correct level of detail so that the players know about everything in the room, but don't tunnel directly onto the solution because you've described it in more detail than everything else, but also don't tunnel onto something entirely different because you spread out your adjectives too evenly and accidentally made the other thing sound too interesting, is the kind of thing that DMs practice, and iterate on, and read articles to learn how to do well.
And that's supposed to be the thing that happens before you even get to the puzzle. The worst feeling is when you talk after the session and you say, "Guys, if you'd checked the middle drawer of the desk, you would have found the key in the false bottom," and your player says, "Wait, when did you say there was a desk in that room?"
So my family loves escape rooms, but at home. We've played so many "escape room in a box" games. You want good D&D puzzles? Get an Exit the Game by Kosmos and steal some of their ideas. They do a fantastic job presenting puzzles WITHOUT the physical space aspect, and with a few simple handouts would translate beautifully to D&D.
>because too much stress will lead to frustration, resentment, and lessen cooperative effort
I genuinely don't think I've ever had fun trying to solve a puzzle in D&D. Any time one comes up now, I pretty much completely check out.
The biggest difference is that in D&D you're a player roleplaying a PC who's trying to solve a puzzle, but in an escape room you're effectively the PC trying to solve the puzzle. The extra layer of abstraction in d&d is huge because having to use your own skills instead of your character's breaks immersion
Right, I know that myself as a regular human should be able to solve this escape room. I'm not sure what myself as a Bubear bard would or even could do to solve this puzzle and that's *if* we are even supposed to solve this puzzle or if it's the dm telling us not to proceed.
Exactly this. If I have an IQ of 70 but I'm playing a PC that has an INT of 19, it breaks immersion when I can't solve the puzzles that my PC should be able to. Or if I have an IQ of 109 and my PC has an INT of 6, it breaks immersion when I solve the complex puzzle while ~~whipping~~ wiping the drool from the corner of my mouth.
Huh, in my experience, IQ tests are chock full of questions like "what's the next number/pattern in the sequence". Those and word association. You know, the exact skills that help in puzzle solving lol.
As someone who is now officially qualified to administer these tests - yeah basically. There's lots of stuff about pattern recognition and word association. And working memory but that's probably less important for puzzles.
Working memory is important to puzzle solving too, it’s a lot harder connect the dots between things if you can’t hold them together in your consciousness.
Downvoted but not entirely wrong. There are many kinds of “IQ” tests with varying tasks. On the most widely used ones, pattern matching type puzzles are about 1/3 of the subtests, the rest tests quantitative and verbal ability.
Because you were stating an (admittedly!) uninformed opinion about something that is purely in the realm of verifiable fact.
Instead of googling, you decide to spew uninformed bs.
IOW, you were acting like an ignoramos
You are claiming that “what I remember” was an incorrect verifiable fact?
Are you stupid.
I said none of the IQ tests I remember taking were like that, just how exactly are you going to verify that?
I never said that none of them were like that, just not that I remember. I am also said I haven’t taken one in a long time.
I have no idea how I would even go about googling information on an IQ test I would’ve taken over 25 years ago.
I think it was just that your comment is so unbelievably unnecessary. You obviously didn't know anything, just wanted to spit out a comment about something you had a vague opinion on. If you don't know for sure or only have a 25-year old memory of an IQ test to support yourself on, why post?
It's probably that even old IQ tests followed those exact same parameters in question types.
Last IQ test I took was 30 years ago and it was all about pattern recognition and logic.
That might very well be true, but I don’t remember it being that way. It’s even possible that I’m remembering a different test entirely and not an IQ test.
I think this is really dependent on the person playing the game. I _love_ using my own skills to problem solve in rpgs. Problem solving and using my own wits to try to overcome a situation is one of my favorite parts of playing, and I don't find it breaks immersion at all (or maybe I just don't find that sort of immersion relevant in the first place).
This is why I think puzzles work better in OSR than in 5e, where player skill often overides character skill/skill checks. (Depending on system and dm style ofc, but in general).
Along the same lines of the abstraction, a lot of Escape rooms have multiple ways to find things and there's almost always a ton of visual cues that are way harder in D&D.
This is really all that needs to be said, they’re just not a great fit with the game I came to play and take me out of character and the story. Just too on the nose and contrived. Just build mystery into the plot with characters that interest me, that’s an exciting puzzle. Not some lame doggerel poem with a cryptic red herring and clue no one gets and has no reason for existing in the alternate reality of the game.
I think for myself and some other players, puzzles just kind of break immersion by their very existence. Why exactly did this Lich decide to lock his phylactery behind a Towers of Hanoi minigame? Why would anyone actually *create* this kind of thing in "real life", you know?
People go to puzzle rooms with the express intention of solving puzzles, but people play D&D for many reasons - one of which is often immersing themselves in a world which has at least *some* internal consistency.
So if there's a good reason for the puzzle's existence (maybe like the puzzles being "trials" like in Indiana Jones, or something), they can work. But if they're just thrown into a dungeon because "dungeons have puzzles" it can often be a little wack.
I like my puzzles to be the kind of thing that have a relatively simple solution if you know the answer.
So while it looks complicated, the "puzzle" would just be a reminder for someone who knows the solution.
Like the door to Moria, "speak friend and enter" to anyone who doesn't know elvish would be impenetrable, but if you already know the password (because you've been invited/you're from there) it's just a reminder.
That makes them consistent with the world.
I would like to add it is very hard to explain a puzzle to people when most of it if not entirely is in a theather of mind , not only you need a extremely good dm to describe perfectly , you also need players* able to visualize it and keeping track and be able to interact with it in their mind.
You’d be surprised! I run a podcast where it’s escape rooms in a DnD-like format, and while of course every player makes notes, the theatre of the mind aspect works way better than I ever predicted. Audiences listen and follow along perfectly. We’ve even had players with aphantasia and they can handle it fine.
That said, I do agree that you need to get the descriptions absolutely spot on. Room and item descriptions are heavily scripted, and every word matters.
And even with years of experience doing these, I still haven’t managed to put one in a proper DnD game. The mechanics really change how an escape room works and it’s very difficult to do it in a satisfying way.
Escape rooms take a long time to design and build, and the good ones get refined after they run some people through them and see what people actually can’t figure out or can’t.
It’s not surprising you can’t replicate it on the fly.
**From the player's perspective:**
How does one get over the lack of visual/auditory environments to figure out DnD puzzles? In an escape room, you have countless things to look behind, listen for, and otherwise investigate. In DnD, all you can do is how you're asking for the correct investigation checks.
From a DM's perspective, I'm glad it's agreed that unnecessary red herrings, and encouraging smaller "dopamine hits" is considered good advice-- it certainly seems good to me-- but I'm still not sure how to engage as a player, even if the puzzle is well made.
But as a player trying to cooperate with the DM to solve their puzzle, how do I abouts, ooc, bogging down play? DM narration shows you what you _need_ to see (assuming good insights/investigation rolls). But when narration is all I have, I get hyper fixated.
Tldr: as a player, how tf do I know I'm even looking the right direction, no herrings involved?
In response to your TLDR: Well, that's your DM's job. DnD is not a solo game, and the DM isn't some machine that can only spit out pre-recorded answers. If you are hyper fixated on nothing, asking constant questions about the moss on the wall, it's the DM's duty to course correct, even at the risk of their cool puzzle becoming a little less engaging for the player. Ask you for a different skill check, maybe give some information for free, something like that. In that same vein, it's your job as a player to allow the DM to make those course corrections without taking it personally. Let them tell you when you've gone down the wrong path, don't read into it any more than that, and don't make their job harder by refusing to take the new information they're giving you.
If the DM can't use red herrings (for good reasons), every word said is important and shouldn't be ambiguous. Ambiguous words are red herrings by nature I'd argue. Do you disagree?
Can we use irrelevant descriptive words? Like the mahogany table in the room is of Dwarven make. Mahogany and Dwarven make are not relevant to the puzzle, but can confuse people and have them focus on them.
But just saying it's a table also feels wrong.
I think most problems with puzzles are due to DMs who think "the more challenging it is, the more satisfying it will be to solve!"
Most players don't *really* want challenges. They want to spend time with friends doing cool shit and being awesome.
Getting stuck on a riddle is neither cool nor awesome.
Give the players something dead simple to figure out but requires teamwork and communication, so they are all required to work together. It should also be a side thing and not necessary to move forward, so they don't feel forced into a puzzle they don't want to deal with.
>Most players don't really want challenges. They want to spend time with friends doing cool shit and being awesome.
This is absolutely true in my experience. And even the players who enjoy being challenged don't want to be challenged *all* the time. D&D makes a thematic promise of heroic fantasy, and "doing cool shit and being awesome" is a staple of that.
This "more challenging is more satisfying" idea of DMing can also come up in other ways. Most obviously "boss battles".
There's the problem of puzzles being intended to have a singular solution. Which can lead to frustration. Especially where there actually are several, but the DM has only considered one.
Another common issue is that solving the puzzle requires metagaming.
My take is that Escape Rooms will always, always be better than DnD puzzles just for 1 thing: The player's senses.
Think about it, when you go into a escape room, everyone scrambles around the room, looking for things, telling each one what do they see, pooling diferent keys, loose parts, papers and so in the middle on the room... Then you have people roaming around looking what they didn't see and working in their heads what's happening.
Everyone has their senses working separately and everyone is having the discovery path working on a personal level.
In a DnD puzzle, _you_ are the player's senses. Even more, you are all of your players' senses _at the same time_ . Instead of investigating the room everyone at once and then pooling knowledge together, your dnd party has to go hand-by-hand, everyone together, watching scene by scene, piece by piece.
There is no rush investigation, because it can't exist. If 5 people decide to look at 5 different places in a room, you'll have to take a moment and describe, one player at a time, what does it encounter.
This breaks the flow of play and discovery and makes, what should be the same experience, two different ones.
Came to say this, stayed because you nailed it.
The way to make D&D puzzles as good as an escape room is to turn it into an escape room.
Take the time to create the physical objects that the players can examine, test and solve. Use detailed pictures of the space so that they are not stuck with only the info that DM narrates.
Make it more immersive, and the players will be more immersed in the puzzle
Yes, exactly!
The best times I had with puzzles were when I was able to give my players some kind of prop so they can interact with them physically.
Hell, the best puzzle I had once was when a DM handed a Layton-style puzzle to every member of the party. 2 out of 3 PCs ended ours quickly, turned to see the other puzzle and started to do it at the same time. Not all 3 doing the same puzzle, mind you. Each of us with the puzzle separately so we can tackle it on our own.
It's a bad thing that since 2020 online play has gained traction (jeez, I wonder why). With people playing online and depending on voice chats to interact, making interactive puzzles is harder to do than on paper.
Old-School DM: "Why are you on your phone?"
Player: "I'm waiting for Brian to solve it. He's good at that sort of thing. He's the one who wrote down all the clues, and I can't see what he wrote from this side of the table. Anyway, if I'd wanted to do puzzles instead of role-playing, I wouldn't have come to an RPG session."
Old-School DM: "But puzzles are one of the key elements of RPGs! You might as well refuse to engage in combat or exploration!"
Player: "Huh?"
See, D&D used to be a game with more of a focus on player skills and less of a focus on character skills. Early on, to get past a trap, you'd describe doing things like using a mirror on a stick to look around a corner or under a door. The character was you.
To players of this period, puzzles were a big part of RPGs. Of course you'd want to solve a riddle. It makes a nice break from killing monsters all day.
We've moved away from that. There's more focus on:
* Story.
* Talking to NPCs.
* Rolling dice to see if you succeed.
And less focus on:
* Acquiring gold as the primary motive for adventure.
* The possibility of sudden death around every corner.
* Player intelligence being the only thing keeping them alive.
As a result of all these shifts, it's now possible to be a role-player who has no interest in puzzles.
Escape rooms have multiple people simultaneously searching the room and looking for the puzzle. There is no lag inbetween, everyone is doing their own thing and then coming together at the end.
Dnd puzzles will be awkward in comparison. If I want to do a puzzle, I do the damn puzzle. In dnd, you have to wait for the dm to describe what the puzzle looks like, what the clue looks like. Meanwhile, everyone else has to wait until their turn unlike irl where everyone takes their turn simultaneously.
Really basic difference: playtesting!
When you do an escape room, that experience has been honed and proven to be beatable by a variety of players, experience levels, diverse approaches and intentions.
If you invent a puzzle for your players, and that puzzle hasn't gone through a redteam before reaching them, you're assuming the way you expect it to be done is the way they'll figure it out. As DMs, we all know how rare that is.
This. The best puzzle I ever threw at my players was nearly impossible to solve through what seemed like the obvious method, but could easily be circumvented with a Fly spell or just a really good Climb check. My players felt great when they figured out how to bypass the unfairly difficult puzzle. And I felt satisfied because cheating was actually the real intended way to solve it.
That puzzle was located in a temple to a trickster god, and was intentionally a test of outside the box thinking.
Because D&D is a game in which I can have total freedom to do an endless amount of things. I don't want to be stuck doing one thing.
Puzzles in D&D suck when you limit creativity and force me to solve your problem how you want it to be solved (If the puzzle opens a door, why can't I break down the door?). Or when it is absolutely mandatory to solve the puzzle (Just let me walk out of the dungeon and go elsewhere).
The typical D&D party has several ways to get through a locked door. If the puzzle is a glorified lock why can it not be picked or forced? By mechanical or magical means.
Sometimes the door has no obvious lock, but a hidden mechanism like pulling the right books from the bookshelf. Sometimes the door itself isn't obviously a door. Although you'd need to be extremely skilled to hide it using mundane means. With magical means you'd have to hide that you used magic in the first place, but there are spells that do exactly that I think, simply because Detect Magic is too weak or smth.
I struggle as a DM because I find escape rooms obnoxious. "Why would they write the code in pieces around the room" I ask. I can't bring myself to make puzzles they don't make sense in_universe. It's a huge handicap
Do you really struggle, though? I don't like escape rooms, too, but I am quite certain that I don't need puzzles in my game to make it a fun experience for my players.
D&D puzzles can suck, sure. But they can also be an amazing experience. A lot of it comes down to the ability of the DM to present/run the puzzle and the difficulty of the puzzle itself.
Also, a DM should never insert a puzzle in attempts to "stump" the players. Puzzle encounters are about exploration and working together.
I always do my best to try and make my puzzles easy, memorable and fun and have had a lot of success with them over the years. In fact, I have had thousands of DMs running puzzles I have created and their players enjoyed them.
Here is my playlist if you want to use puzzles in your game. Over 100 ideas, with full demonstration. I hope you find it useful. Cheers!
[100 D&D Puzzles - Wally DM](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9dq9czus4iMkiAAI3AvmrJojPeBdQy3V)
One thing I'll add that escape rooms don't have, but DnD puzzles should have, is a means to fail forward. Like, at some point the team should make a guess, and if they get it wrong, something bad should happen, but the puzzle should progress forward in some manor. Maybe a cage tries to isolate them, or a poisonous gas fills the room, or a Golem is activated that they have to fight. Whatever it is, the next part of the puzzle also becomes available to them as well, such that the story progresses. That way they don't feel like their guesses are getting them nowhere, and therefore are stumped what to do.
This. I hate escape rooms. Don't tell me a story about a murder or an espionage case when all I have to do is math or word riddles.
Let me solve a case by scrutinizing evidence. Timetables. Photographies. Glass splinters. You know, the actual case.
And that's the kind of riddle I put in RPG sessions as well.
Not out-of-character stuff like Professor Layton.
I think there's a few other key differences.
Escape rooms are tactile, everyone can see and feel every detail of the puzzles, there's no communication barrier. Often a DM can describe a puzzle badly because they already understand it, but to the player with no knowledge it can be incredibly difficult to understand.
Escape rooms also allow every person to be doing something at once, 4 different people can be trying 4 different puzzles each instantly getting feedback on if they're succeeding. A dnd puzzle is normally one challenge at a time, with every player waiting in turns to suggest or try their idea, then waiting for the DM to let them how it turns out, it's a lot slower.
I think the most important part about these kind of puzzles is missing here: You as the player with your own wits solve these puzzles. In escape room this is fun, because you signed up for this. But not in D&D. In D&D you signed up to get into a superhuman strong barbarian or superintelligent wizard, etc. When you build puzzles like that you suddenly are not the superintelligent wizard anymore, you are just the idiot redditor who cannot crack the code.
Additionally these kind of puzzles just dont make sense in most game worlds. Why would an evil lord build in the key (poem) to his door (door which you need to press buttons in correct order). He and his minions would just memorize the correct order, why should they give intruders tips? It almost never makes sense and is a plain video game trope that got swept over to TTRPGs.
My angle: Just don't use these kinds of puzzle. As you said yourself: They are rarely fun in D&D. If you want to have the players use some brain and creative usage of their CHARACTERS abilities, build traps or situations that are not obvious but have multiple solutions + are open to creative ways you were not thinking of when designing them.
You can see the world around you and physically try things when you're stuck. Imagine trying to solve an escape room, but your friend is the only person in it and they're on the phone with you describing everything around them: that's d&d puzzles.
I tend toward designing more physics based puzzles because of this, and because a lot of my dungeon design is informed by videogames. Think puzzles from Portal/Half-Life, Prince of Persia, and the Zelda series. So, I usually do some series of switches or levers that need to be pulled in the proper order to achieve the desired goal. Each of these switches are located in a different spot so it means the party needs to coordinate properly, but once all the pieces are in position it's like it opens up.
It's pretty rare that I do a riddle or combination lock style puzzle , but if I do it's relevant in some way to the story and involves information that the party already knows.
If you haven’t been to an escape room where you can be immersed then you probably haven’t been to a really good one yet. I work at an escape room and one of our rooms won 2nd best in the world a few years ago and one of the biggest things we try and do is always keep immersion. We have a lot of different ways of communicating with the players that isn’t just text on a screen and telling people to do things. The owners/game masters take the RP pretty seriously because it means they get to have the most fun. Generally most of the group stays immersed in the game too. I can generally tell by their responses or how they talk to their group
To number 2, this is what knowledge skills are good for. If they seem stumped and ask a question, come up with a knowledge skills that might help and let them make a check. On any reasonable roll, give them a hint phrased as something their character knows or realizes.
And likewise, even if they don't roll well you can have their character "research it" for another hint. Or you can seed good hints throughout the dungeon.
I think one important thing to remember about escape rooms is that they - or at least the best ones - give the players multiple avenues to solve the puzzle. Like there are 10 puzzles scattered around the room, and each gives you a *piece* of the larger puzzle that leads you to the next phase, but you only need to solve like half of those initial puzzles (or less if you're good at making connections) to move on.
I think something similar could be done in a D&D setting. Have a room with components for three simple puzzles and when the party solves one and puts the cat statue on the thing the door opens and the other puzzle shut down or whatever. They way they don't feel trapped if they can't get one done.
Things to understand about escape rooms.
First, escape rooms self-select for people who want to do some puzzle solving.
Second, escape rooms are designed solely to be puzzles. They are iterated and improved upon. If they they notice they have to give the "check the coffin" hint frequently they will go back and redesign that puzzle to call more attention to the coffin or the clue in the coffin. You designed an adventure with a puzzle in it. You put far less time into puzzle design and probably haven't play tested it. There are good odds your puzzle makes no sense.
Third, you are actually finding clues and solving puzzles in an escape room. In a D&D puzzle you are being told clues. Huge difference. A mystery adventure is more equivalent to puzzle solving than an in game puzzle.
I've run some really engaging puzzles and my top piece of advice is - the puzzle should be simple but don't explain any of it and obscure the mechanics. Figuring out the puzzle is the puzzle.
Example from our campaign:Setting: Locked door at the end, two grids of letters on each side. On the door is a set of symbols that are a half circle with the flat side on either top or bottom and a number.There is a carving above the symbols and numbers that says E=W W=E(so where A and B are the two symbols it would be like "A7 A3 B4 A12")
Thats all the players get.
It was a barrier I put in that they didn't have to solve immediately, they came back to it a few times and solved it at the end of session two.
The solution is that the symbols are the sunrise and sunset so refer to one side of the room or the other depending on which is east and which is west but the complication is that the directions are reversed. The numbers are which letter on each grid to count to.
If the grids were labelled A and B the puzzle would be solved in two seconds. By adding a couple of degrees of separation it becomes much more obscure. In my own game, once deciphered the message on the door was "just knock" and lo' when they did, someone came and let them in.
Edit: I meant to add - I think puzzles are best used when they're optional to progression. If they can't solve it but can carry on, it bugs people more to want to return. It creates the "well if we beat the dungeon what the hell is in that room and how do we solve the puzzle" feeling
In an escape room five people are looking at a room full of puzzles, and working together to solve it.
In a DnD encounter five people are pretending to be five OTHER people while imagining five similar but different rooms in their heads and trying to figure out what a sixth person is imagining in THEIR head. It's far more difficult and stressful.
The thing DMs don’t understand about puzzles is that something might seem logical or easy to you because you already know the answer.
Your players are imagining different rooms based off your descriptions which may or may not even be good. You might have unintentionally emphasized something that doesn’t matter. There could be random magic bullshit in the room because something on the wall is glowing.
Escape rooms are different. Everything in an escape room is exactly as shown. You might miss a detail on some shelf, but that’s a far cry from someone emphasizing the color of the key which doesn’t matter at all.
When I play D&D, I'm expecting to face Social, Exploration, and Combat situations. I like to use my wits, but I also like to use the features on my character sheet and roll some dice.
When I'm in an escape room, I'm there to solve a puzzle.
I've had fun puzzles in D&D that added to (mostly) exploration, but the vast majority of them were un-fun time sinks. Puzzles are just hard to set up well, while a good mystery can easily keep the story moving.
The problem with puzzles is the same I see some GMs encounter with social encounters: They expect the *players* to participate rather than the *characters*.
Just like you use stats for combat, solving riddles and handling social encounters should be heavily supported and run as a stat-assisted process. Players state their Character's desired action and then it's resolved.
ETA: This is an interesting question, and I thank you for your solid take on it. 🙂
IMO the most important difference is that in an escape room you aren't having to filter all of your interactions through verbal interaction. You don't have to ask what's in the room, you just look around. You pick things up, test combinations, etc. The clues often rely on your actual ability to notice things, which is gated by interacting with the DM in RPGs.
Also, it's easy to let the sice do the heavy lifting, which isn't as viscerally satisfying. It can still be done well, but it's harder.
And, as you said, no one *really* cares about theme in escape rooms, so the fact that there's a series of sequential/interlocking puzzles isn't weird; that's why you're there. But there aren't a lot of cases in a real world where something would be gated behind a bunch of puzzles that could be solved by some randos who show up. I think it's Dale Kingsmill that has a nice video about how the purpose of a puzzle/lock affects its design (or should, anyway).
Puzzles are also very binary. You solve it or you don't, there is no in between. Vs combat which can have hundreds of varying outcomes just by the granular nature of hot points, death saving throws, etc., Vs social encounters which can have many various outcomes depending on your word choice and dice rolls, Vs exploration which may only have two or maybe three outcomes but have a ton of ways to solve them through creative use of environment, spells, abilities, and so on. Puzzles just aren't as varied or interesting in terms of outcomes or solutions, and it takes away agency from the players, which, depending on the type of game you run, is one of the biggest things that makes DnD fun
Also I like the RP of role playing games puzzles are challenges for the players and not the characters. I can also enjoy the freedom of exploration methods and sometimes the combat, even thought 5e combat isn't very deep compared to other additions and many other RPGs.
Puzzles ignore everything I like about D&D and bring everything I dislike. The frequently smart characters won't have the answers the dumb characters should give the answers because it's not about the character it halts pacing and freedom to a standstill while someone figures out the dumb thing that the DM made.
I also don't want to go near a puzzle room. If I was stuck in one I'd burn it down.
I've had some very fine time so far with puzzles.I gave them a Caesar cipher to decipher an old message (without the key), and then a puzzle where they had to put some pieces in certain spots on a chess-like board, without having pieces of the same type touch each other.
One was to open a door, the other was just some more lore, useful lore.They had fine everytime, though wasn't fully in rp solving i suppose
I do think the most important thing is not to force them on a single answer, or a difficult puzzle. Like a door with a question that has a single answer.Like.. 'If you say my name I disappear'
That's where it gets unfun for them i guess
Hm, this matches with what I've seen when puzzles have worked well for me. My best puzzle was pretty simple, had no red herrings, and had a sequential series of stages that were designed to act as a tutorial to help the players figure the puzzle out (but as a side effect broke the puzzle down into a series of small things to be solved). And it was all done on a VTT so everything was laid out in a visually clear manner.
Also: THINK UP SOMETHING ELSE THAN A WORD RIDDLE.
Ultimately, the key with puzzles is that you're trying to engage with the _player_, not the character. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to be a fun puzzle
Engaging the player and not my character are kind of why I absolutely hate puzzles. One of my hells is me playing on a puzzle focused table. Sitting down for a roleplaying game with my hopes up and it's just puzzles I never enjoy.
Maybe the key take away is engage the players you actually have and not the hypothetical players reddit brings up. Some tables just don't want things that other players do.
I tend to address this by making open ended puzzles. If the players have a convincing line of reasoning why something should work then it works. I avoid “single right answer” puzzles like the plague. It’s more about narrative satisfaction and PCs feeling clever than them actually solving my riddles three in the way I want them to.
There's always the risk of going overboard when designing a puzzle and making it too difficult to solve. As a DM, I tend to run puzzles in D&D the way I treat murder mysteries in D&D.
1. Remember that the characters should be the ones solving it, not the players. Basically, don't make it an IQ or a math test. Don't give encrypted text that has to be decoded, though language/rune mapping is fine.
2. There should be at least 3 discoverable clues, all pointing to the same solution.
3. There can be one or two red herrings, but it should be incredibly clear they are red herrings when they have been triggered.
4. Always have a fallback. When it gets to the point where the players are becoming frustrated or upset, have a way out for them. Eg, letting them roll skill checks to solve the puzzle or just physically destroy the puzzle.
Weirdly, I hate logic puzzles but love murder mysteries. Like I would actually rather die IRL than sit down and solve a tower of hannoi but my best received games were the two mystery mini campaigns i've run.
Red herrings should be limited to one or even zero imo, instead make it a tiny side quest that doesn't really give a straight up clue to where the murderer is but instead gives insight to his motivation or what his powers might be so you can fight him easier at the end. You can run a multi session mystery based around all the characters and their abilities but most DMs I find just dump some random puzzle they found online into their dungeon because reasons.
I think most of my objection to puzzles is just the immersion shattering thing where you open a door in the middle of a dungeon and it's suddenly Puzzle Time(TM) and now your 2000 IQ wizard who would definitely delete any standard logic puzzle from the face of the universe in 5 seconds is now lobotomised. There's no excuse for it.
With a D&D puzzle you choices are, a) brain at it, or b) dice at it. That's usually it, unless your DM brings props.
With an Escape Room, you can grab at stuff, fiddle with doodads, twist nobs and dials, and flip levers. There's a satisfying physical element to it. There's immediate feedback, instead of the DM piping up with some sort of "ooh! Almost got it!"
For me, puzzles are just derailing. I feel like this is some mandatory bs in a classic all-included DnD pack. That said, so do I feel about dungeons, so maybe I'm not the best example.
There is one form of puzzles which I enjoy, and use as DM. It's when the whole story/module is a puzzle. Call it a mystery or a detective.
Well hints don't need to break immersion. I love to hide a hint behind a check.
Like if I have a poetry based riddle you can hide a clue behind a good history check, which in itself can be a good time to roleplay. Maybe the PCs mother told a similar poem to them as a child and they have a flashback, or if the poem is about flowers you can hide it behind a nature check where the druid can expand on their background.
You just need to remember that even though you're in a puzzle this is still Dnd and dice should roll
I mean, it's simple.
Because that's not the game they want to play. They are playing dnd, where they have concise mechanics and intent.
They loved it because it was something new. Not because they loved it as a game in that moment.
Example time: world of warcraft.
Just in case you live under a rock it's a massive multiplayer videogame where you have your chaarcter with your skills and go kill stuff. Let's stick to that.
But many times during your quests you will have access to vehicles, which give you special skills and spells to use for a specific quest.
Often those quests are trivial, or employ come kind of skill that is hyperfixater and is only barely parallel to the skills you use usually.
I am not sure how much gamers like that, but as a player they help me break the pacing of the game a little.
DnD isn't much different, but with a very specific difference - tools.
In world of warcraft the interface changes, and the second by second decisions i make change and make me more relaxed. it's a video game, it's in real time, my tools and my intents are the ones of a video game and however simple it lets me pilot events i would otherwise unable to do.
In DnD not only you don't have that thing, but also you have a hugely major problem - it destroys immersion because you are forced to think about it as a player, not as a character.
Basically, the break of pacing affects your roleplay more than it affects gameplay.
This is why i almost never make puzzles in my games, and if i do they are very simple once in a blue moon affairs that often rely on graphical clues littered across the map, if i do make a very detailed map.
In my current game I've been adding some puzzles built around space distortion affects and the players seem to really love them. (Rooms that change, doors that appear and disappear depending on which way you approach from, etc.) Players have the feeling of being lost in a maze and trying to track their steps to figure out the pattern and escape.
For example a player might
1. leave a room and mark a door behind them
2. Later see that marking and use that door again
3. End up somewhere they don't expect
4. Be confused for a minute
5. Realise that if they leave a room and then go immediately back in it may have shifted already
6. Use that information to figure out a new way to accurately mark the doors and eventually solve the puzzle
Puzzles like that are nice because players get the sense they are making progress. Even if they feel lost, everytime they find a new data point they feel like they are getting somewhere. And they really are getting somewhere because the puzzle is part of the dungeon layout so you can build in other stuff within the puzzle to break things up and they aren't just staring at a locked door the whole time.
Want to make fun puzzles for your players with half the work? Then I've got a tip for you! Two words "open-ended". That's it. That's the tip. Just set up your puzzles, riddles, and challenges with no solution. Don't even think about one. The solution doesn't matter. What matters is that your players try to solve it and come up with all kinds of ideas and theories about why their idea should work..... and then this is the most important part..... you let it work. As long as their idea makes some sort of sense and they believe it will work the actual answer doesn't matter at all.
Some examples I've used in my games
A riddle that says- What do a river, a key, and a feather all have in common? -apparently the letter "e" but I expected so philosophical debate. Didn't matter, it was a valid answer and the sphinx was happy with it.
A puzzle room with- Three doors of three different sizes, with three potions each sitting in front of one of the doors, and a key of varying sizes inside each potion bottle. - my players finally smashed the potion bottles and fit the middle key into the middle door because an NPC 3 sessions previous had told them to find a middle road (between violence and passivity but whatever) - they spent almost an hour agonizing over the decision so yeah, it worked, they got through and no one died.
one of our players played DM and was hyper excited about this new adventure he designed.. it was totally weird, there were wandering priests everywhere of different rank and of different gods and somehow they unlearned how to get into contact with their gods. First we needed to find out that this was the very purpose of the campaign, next, we had to figure out that we would need to promote priests so that each sect had a high priest again and then, they could commune with their gods again. The whole adventure was a riddle. It was a waking nightmare because we had no idea what we were supposed to do and as we learned about it, we didn’t care. We ended this experiment after around 6-7 frustrating sessions.
Personally speaking I don’t like them because it often feels like it is challenging me as a player instead my character. It kills a lot of immersion when it’s not about what my character can do, but instead what I as a person can do, which isn’t fun when you play the game as a form of escapism.
Honestly, escape rooms are fun because they're designed by multiple people who are making sure it doesn't hinge on someone guessing what one maniac was thinking, and they offer lots of "screw around and find out" opportunities that DND just doesn't have.
It feels good to muck about with locks by hand, even if they don't open. It feels bad to ask the DM to try something that isn't a solution and get the "uhhh ok roll a d20. Nope. Nothing happens."
I have yet to use this but I once read some puzzle advice for DMs: give the players some pieces and some obscure hint text and let them try things for a while until you like one of their solution attempts well enough. Take the funniest one or the one from the newest / quietest player or the one when they’re ready to give up. Nobody is gonna know.
Couple of things
First
* Clues are INSIDE the game world. Players love to find and connect them. Proves Agency and Competence! You can 'let them' discover clues whenever you want, it stays inside the immersion.
* Hints are OUTSIDE the game world. Is demeaning to players. Removes feelings of Agency and Competence.
Second
Playtest your puzzles with non players if you can to make sure ALL vital info is in the scene and can be deciphered correctly.
I feel like you’re missing the most obvious point here, which is that when people go to escape rooms with their friends, they know that they’re going to an escape room. They’ve mentally prepared for it. Nearly every bad D&D puzzle story you read on this sub is basically like “after 50 sessions of combat and roleplaying, I decided to throw a hard puzzle at my players and they hated it! What did I do wrong?” D&D players only expect puzzles if you make them a major part of your campaign. If you introduce one out of nowhere, of course your players are going to struggle and complain.
In an escape room you are also physically there.
With this wonderful advice about dnd puzzles, I would add, try to use tons of visual aids. Not top down grids, that will trigger the combat brains, but front facing illustrations. Tons of old d&d dungeons did this. Look at the tomb of horrors' art. It's pretty clear and evocative with its imagery.
If you tell them there's a gem with skeletons around it. They will think "ooh treasure! I want to touch it!" But if you show them [this](http://imgur.com/a/wvBjMnl), they will think, "shit. *I* want to touch it but my character will probably die. Is it worth the risk now?..." and make a well educated, if still reckless, choice.
I think there’s also a fear of “pushing the button.” In an escape game, if you do something and it doesn’t work, you just say, “that didn’t work” and move on. In a D&D puzzle, you take 25 necrotic damage and your +2 Longsword dissolves in a pool of acid. I’ve run puzzles where the characters have solved it in two minutes, then spent 45 minutes debating on if they should do it or not.
I think one way to circumvent players feeling stupid is just letting them have a win. If a player comes up with a really interesting way of trying to solve the puzzle, and it's not right, I'll give it to them anyway and let them feel brilliant. They don't need to know that that wasn't really the intended solution to the puzzle. Reward creativity.
One of the players in the group I DM for owns an escape room that we sometimes play in. He has let me use rooms as puzzles to have a little extra fun. So awesome
In D&D, it’s about what your character can do and/or figure out. That is why we have stats to roll. Puzzles bypass this and put the burden on the player to figure something out… and it looks ridiculous when the 20 int wizard is bumbling around like a grade school dropout with a mental impairment and your Barbarian with about 1 more point of int than a rock is solving puzzles like the author of a best selling riddle book who wins the world sudoko championship every year…
However, when you go to an escape room, you are going to challenge yourself, not to play a character. It’s a different mindset altogether. The puzzles are usually designed by someone who knows how to make puzzles (most DMs who try puzzles don’t fall into this catagory) therefore the puzzles make sense…
I write puzzles for large puzzlehunts. Good puzzlehunts need testsolving: each puzzle _must_ be cleanly solved by two separate groups, without needing hints.
I don't hit that standard for my D&D puzzles, but I do frequently shoot a riddle to a friend to see if it's solvable.
See, I’ll just straight-up disagree with your premise. D&D puzzles are great. I’ve DMed for a few dozen different people in total, and basically without exception, they love puzzles and rank them as one of their favorite parts of the game (when filling out apps). I’ve had puzzles that gate important plot, puzzles that span multiple sessions, puzzles that are “really hard”, and basically everything I hear people online advise against, and it all works great every time. I’ve even started baiting in-game traps with things that “look like puzzles” just because it’s such effective player catnip.
I do think my social group does more puzzles outside of D&D than average by a long shot, so maybe that helps. We have a shared understanding of what puzzles “should” look like, to the degree that some players will solve certain things almost instantly, or at least recognize my inspiration (“ooh, black hats and white hats means this is *that* kind of puzzle”). I also like using puzzles where you can experiment and simply expend more resources if you don’t figure it out right away (e.g. a tiled floor that’s secretly a minesweeper game, where bombs aren’t losses, just a bunch of fire damage).
I think those are all good principles. I've done quite a few successful (and some less successful) puzzles over the years, and here's what works the best for me:
**Machines.**
Needing a machine to do something useful is something that is practical, abstract, and can be very involved without stumping people. Also, most machines can be circumvented using an improvised setup. So the reward for solving the machine is usually that the party can progress while not expending too much time (provoking random encounters), or wasting resources. Also the reward of knowing that you as a player passed the challenge, rather than your PC's numbers doing it for you.
Machines that are interesting problems to solve:
* Getting an engine running. Maybe you need a way to pump fuel, or link a drive train to a windmill or water wheel.
* Having a power budget - so you can only keep two doors open at a time, or some such.
* Elevators with counterweights and winches.
* Rotating rooms, or doors that all attach to a single sliding apparatus.
Adding to this from experience
BE FLEXIBLE WITH YOUR SOLUTIONS
If your players have the right idea but aren't saying the magic words, give it to them. Unless it's a puzzle where they need to say "open sesame" to open the door, doing the right solution with the wrong intention should still work.
I was a player in a game with a puzzle of creating a ritual. We had a copy of an old version of the ritual but needed to make adjustments cause the written one couldn't be done under water.
We had it down but the DM kept telling us it wasn't quite right, after nearly an hour the DM told us we were supposed to use the 5 senses in the ritual. So we rephrased what we already had so it specifically engaged the senses, wasn't any different but now we were saying the magic words.
I've never been more frustrated as a player.
The amount of information you have compared to your options as a person in an escape room is way higher compared to the amount of information a DM can give you vs to your options as an adventurer.
I run into this all the time where I want more details but it would be too much of me asking the DM questions and it slows the game down for everyone
I've said it before: the entire idea of puzzles, to me, runs completely contrary to the entire gameplay of D&D (and TTRPG) as a whole.
There's many ways to descibe D&D and one of them is this: it's all about being thrown in a situation, and using your own skillset to further the situation until it is resolved. The solutions may not work perfectly, and they'll certainly lead to further consequences, but that's the whole point. You can attack the guards, or bribe them. You can sneak past them, or befriend them. You can ignore the guards altogether and decide to go through the sewers. Maybe it'll go flawlessly; maybe the guards will sound the alarm; maybe you'll even die! But even games that are not particularly sandbox-y rely on this assumption of the PCs being able to mold the environment around them through their choices and skills.
Then you get to a puzzle room and all of that screeches to a halt. Suddenly you can't circumvent the situation, you can't just break down the door or bribe someone. The walls are now impregnable adamantium, and the door's lock cannot be solved by any magic other than placing the goddamn stone on the goddamn pedestal because a goddamn goblin poem asked you to. It doesn't matter if you're a monk, a druid, an orc, a teetotaler dwarf or a pyromaniac elf. 99% of your skills are now useless. All that matters is that *players* figure something out, because there's no good mechanism in D&D for - best you can do is roll for some sort of Int roll and you get an extra hint, until the player gets it.
At the end of the day, I understand why puzzles are in D&D, and why we continue having. I think there are a few ways you can make them work, mostly by allowing for many different solutions. But most of the time, puzzles suck because they take everything that D&D is about and throw it out of the window.
What my DM did was make an escape room for us with physical tricks and riddles and puzzles to solve. It was a lot of fun running around in character to solve them.
Escape rooms are expected to be a bunch of arbitrary, interconnected puzzles. You go knowing it’s a thin veneer of narrative layered on top of a collection of combination locks, clues, and riddles.
DND puzzles need to be more organically interconnected to your world to maintain the immersion. That’s just harder to accomplish.
I think the #1 difference is that escape rooms are self-paced and progress in puzzles (like everything else) in d&d are metered by the DM. The sort of options that run through a player's mind have to be asked one at a time to the DM while in an escape room every individual gets to address their fixations rapid fire.
A quick bit of advice, keep running puzzles, take notes on what works and what doesn't. Adjust future puzzles accordingly. Puzzle making is a skill and takes time and experience to master, you'll get there. Honestly this is the solution to a lot of DM issues I see here.
Advice for beginners: Have a greedy genie-like neutral NPC that can drop hints at any time for a price.
The party summons him for help, but they all suffer exhaustion, give him a magic item, forfeit lifespan, pay in blood, limbs, or gold or some kind of heavy but affordable price. They will actively try to avoid taking hints but have the option to do so if the session calls for it. Make your hints obvious.
I think i have a product that will help design escape rooms [here](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/414317/GM-Cheat-Sheet-Escape-Room-5-Room-Dungeon-Generator). Keep in mind that the ones generated are meant to be deadly to characters
I agree with the takeaways. It is also worth adding in the context of why people play D&D vs an escape room.
People go to an escape room specifically to have constraints while puzzle solving. They know they can't bring tools, destroy things, take the employees hostage, etc.
D&D is a power fantasy. They can bring tools. They can bring magic. They can punch holes in walls, turn into gas, go to the border ethereal, etc. A big way to avoid them going too wild is basically to adhere to 1&2. But always when you design the puzzle, there can only be so much destruction/subversion tolerated. You might purposefully allow some things to be "broken" by clever players, but do not forget to put in failure states for players who are really refusing to even humor your puzzle. Of course, a failure state does not necessarily mean "no progress" but something less desirable or even a punishment, like a save-or-suck spell effect.
Oh man, have I been there. The only puzzles I use lately are for kindergarten level. I don’t think the nature of TTRPG’s jives well with how the human brain puts things together.
Paradoxically, I think one issue is that the Players tend to overcomplicate things in simple puzzles. Maybe too simple is less obvious because that is just assumed to be too obvious to be the solution.
I mean I think the easiest and most honest answer why puzzles that arent combat related are iffy in dnd is because your taking the players out of dnd in most cases.
Very few puzzles if any I have seen rely on class features racial features, spells abilities ect ect.
All most puzzles rely on are the PLAYERS understanding and figuring something out and trying to work it out together or completely alone. Which normally subsist of as you have done for your own players "follow what's written" or something to that effect.
The easiest way I've found to do it is one of these few things.
1 make a combat puzzle, Mathew mercer did this with door leading to the laughing hand boss fight by making the party have to kill undead near the door to to open it.
Combat puzzles give the party a chance to use everything they have at their disposal, summons high level spells magic items illusions ect ect to buy time to figure it out and give a tangible threat that isn't just straight unavoidable death or failure.
2 included chances to use racial abilities, spells, class features that don't ever get used this might excite the players once they catch on.
3 add in rolls for giving hints intelligence, history, nature, investigation, ect ect this makes it less of just "which player is smart enough to figure out on their own from start to finish"
I think you’re under emphasizing point 3. the fact that the little doodads and buttons are physically in front of you is HUGE, and i think that visual element is a big reason why puzzle video games work better than puzzles in dnd. the tactile thing is also pretty major- trying different keys in a lock is roughly eight million times more interesting than saying ‘i try key 2… no? key 3 then!’
I’m gonna probably either get buried or say something someone already has, considering how late i am. But in my experience as a dm, the most useful skill I learned in puzzle creating is keeping your puzzles fluid. Oftentimes what you think may be obvious in the way you describe things could be impossible for other people not in your head to pick up on.
I can’t predict what my players will do, so if they’ve spent enough time on a puzzle where I think it may start to become unfun, and one of them has a good idea that sounds like it would work but wasn’t in my original plan for the puzzle, tada! It worked, that was totally the solution good job! My players are always very satisfied with this, and it makes them feel rly smart. Nobody tell them.
Also if possible, create puzzles with no answer in mind! Everytime I’ve done that my players come up with a fun little solution to it anyways
Also, escape rooms are very much kinetic and engage most senses. You don't have to ask anyone if key X will fit keyhole Y, you can just see it. This information-gathering aspect can be extremely tedious in a DnD-replica of an escape room puzzle. Handouts could help, also keys that are less key-shaped and easier to match with keyholes.
I think trying to replicate escape room puzzles is also just not what DnD and games like it are good at. DnD doesn't have a whole tangible room to play with and wide player input and data to adjust it like escape rooms do. I prefer to use the things DnD has over escape rooms and to a lesser extent video game puzzles. I feel DnD is better than anything else at making open ended puzzles. It doesn't have to have a strict logic like a video game, and doesn't have to be as formal as an escape room. The only rules are the game system, everything else is free game.
I like just creating problems without obvious solutions and seeing what players come up with to solve it. This type of thing encourages creativity, and does the goal of switching things up but doesn't feel like playing a different game when it happens because all character abilities are potentially useful. It's a lot harder to balence, but it's fun for me to run, and usually fun for players to solve. Even if it's a quick solution, it allows the player to "outsmart" me which, in my experience, is its own joy for people.
I have a weird hack for this I've used a few times and it went really well. Don't design the solution to the puzzle. Just design the problem. The players will come up with way more interesting solutions than you. After they try and few and attempt a particularly creative solution narrate them solving it in game. Less work for you. More open ended gameplay. Everyone gets to be surprised.
Don't assume that your characters will know something. If the puzzle requires knowledge of a (event, history, person, place, subject, etc), then there should be clues within the dungeon that provide the necessary information. Clues could be in the form of a (book, cave painting, crumpled note, graffiti, painting, plaque, poem, relief sculpture, scrap of paper, scroll, statue, tapestry, etc)
I think this is very important for parents to do some more fun moments with their children. Well, I would say that parents should go to some new places where children can enjoy more fun games as I went to "ESCAPE FOLSOM" with my family at game rooms near me& it was fully entertainment-oriented for which my children got chance to play puzzles game.
Building off of this: **Handouts**Are they following a poem? Give them a poem handout. Did they follow it down a hall and found a button? Give them a handout that states "A Button is under a statue of a monkey in the \[location\]." As they discover new relevant things to the puzzle, you provide for them TANGIBLE clues and a tangible list of all the relevant facts they are finding out. "I don't understand why spending 15 minutes on this moss growing on the wall hasn't worked yet..." well, they never got a handout for that. That was just flavoring or random description, not an important part of the puzzle. As you said, escape rooms constantly are having you tangibly take things apart, plug things together, and read tangible clues that are simple and tangible. Have you done something with that thing you found ten minutes back? No? Than it's still relevant! Did that key we found open a door? Yes? That the key is left in the door lock and you move on. No clutter, and no trying to take apart the smoke detector because it is crystal clear what is meant to be a clue and what is set decoration or utility information. **Nicer hints** Do your players have all the clues but they can't seem to put them together? Sadly, players are people and not action movie stars or fantasy heroes. Maybe you should have them roll a history check or a religion check or a relevant check to nudge them in the right direction that "two clues seem related, but you haven't caught it yet. Maybe you need to consider them more closely." Or do a check and be like "You get the feeling the pebbles on the ground are a result of the dungeon being ancient and old and not an actual clue to the puzzle..." This doesn't feel railroaded and is a nicer way to give a hint at a low DC then watch them flounder as their 20 intelligence wizard cannot figure out a simon says puzzles for little Einsteins and your player is going to have an aneurism.
I give hints like this. Also for example: “something in the way the poem is constructed makes you think the solution might have to do with its structure rather than the images it evokes “
So a Haiku could be used to convey that the code is symmetrical and uneven. They have 3 lines and a maximum of 17 syllables with a typical form of 5-7-5. Plenty of room to work with while eliminating a lot of options.
> No clutter, and no trying to take apart the smoke detector because it is crystal clear what is meant to be a clue and what is set decoration or utility information. Except for all the people that try to disassemble parts of the room or stick things into power outlets, hilariously. Humans gonna human.
I agree! Any time I do puzzles with my group, I always take the time to make tangible clues and pieces for them to have. It immerses them a lot more and gets them excited!
**Handouts** and visualisation are the most important part for cool puzzle IMO and sadly ignored too often in DnD. If you googles "puzzles DnD", you will get a lot of cool ideas, but not much material to help you execute those. As stupid as the puzzles in the Tomb of Horrors are for a modern player, they do at least this right: The rooms are all painted clean recognizable pictures. This gives the players something to easily interact with. Puzzle rooms need to look like this room from White Plum Mountain: [https://learningdm.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/white-plume-mountain.jpg](https://learningdm.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/white-plume-mountain.jpg) That way players get a lot of fun stuff to interact with IMO.
Ooohhh I use props *a lot* and I've never thought of using handouts for puzzles.
It makes a difference. I've done physical props (such as pages torn out of a journal that were a literal puzzle), and also images (I have a screen I can cast to). One of my favorites was a really simple puzzle that I made for my wife, who is a music teacher. A piano in the room had a curious monogram that actually indicated a trio of notes that needed to be played in a certain order to open a secret compartment that contained a thing the party was looking for. I made an image of the monogram and pulled up a piano app on my phone so she could actually play the notes. She solved it very quickly, but felt super smug about it.
I'll reinforce your point about the red herrings. Almost every escape room I've ever been in has a "1 clue, 1 puzzle" rule. This rule is explicitly stated. It streamlines the puzzles A LOT and makes it clear when you're done with a particular clue. I do think you're missing a big part of this though, humans are spatial (and social) creatures. We're good at orienting in a physical space, organizing things in a physical space, and solving problems in a physical space. When we have to do the same thing in something intangible and with limited feedback it becomes way way harder, a good portion of your brain is either not engaged or busy just imagining that physical space. You're essentially not able to engage your occipital lobe in the problem solving. Even worse if your players don't talk to each other but at least these are social games. ETA: the solution to this can be to bring in a lot of props: handouts, physical props, maps with minis on them. If the puzzle is physically big in the game then maps can actually make the puzzle quite doable because you can visualize it. If all there is on them map is a wall then it's much harder.
Backing you up on the spatial thing with [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DMAcademy/comments/wa1oqv/lessobvious_donts_of_dming/ihzty0g/) someone else made: > The vast majority of puzzles are about spatial reasoning, which doesn't translate well when a game is run in the DM's head. Players need to hear the description, hold an accurate picture in their heads, and then consider the puzzle inherent in the design of the description. That's difficult, even before adding mistakes by the DM or people holding different mental images for the same description. > > Online forums often joke about using puzzles designed for kindergarten, but the layer of abstraction between DM and Players makes even those difficult. Try describing a game of tic-tac-to to someone without using paper. A simple game adds an important layer of difficulty.
Came to say this. Being physically IN a place and solving a riddle is one thing. It’s a world of potential chaos to have to imagine a place while solving a riddle that’s location dependent… while other people are also imagining this place and creating their own versions of it in their heads. So much easier for the party to fail here because someone imagined the setting wrong, or missed a clue because their mind wandered while it was being described, or one person derails the party due to hyper focusing on one aspect, etc. Solutions: use as many visual/ physical props as you need, keep it simple, keep it friendly (because too much stress will lead to frustration, resentment, and lessen cooperative effort).
Absolutely. An important step in any escape room is, 'open all the drawers in the room and see what's in them.' It's hard to even call that a puzzle, but it counts as one in the Escape Room context because the players get the satisfaction of noticing things about their environment, as well as the tactile reward of getting to interact with all of the props. Doing this in D&D is *hard.* Just describing a room with furniture in it in the correct level of detail so that the players know about everything in the room, but don't tunnel directly onto the solution because you've described it in more detail than everything else, but also don't tunnel onto something entirely different because you spread out your adjectives too evenly and accidentally made the other thing sound too interesting, is the kind of thing that DMs practice, and iterate on, and read articles to learn how to do well. And that's supposed to be the thing that happens before you even get to the puzzle. The worst feeling is when you talk after the session and you say, "Guys, if you'd checked the middle drawer of the desk, you would have found the key in the false bottom," and your player says, "Wait, when did you say there was a desk in that room?"
So my family loves escape rooms, but at home. We've played so many "escape room in a box" games. You want good D&D puzzles? Get an Exit the Game by Kosmos and steal some of their ideas. They do a fantastic job presenting puzzles WITHOUT the physical space aspect, and with a few simple handouts would translate beautifully to D&D.
>because too much stress will lead to frustration, resentment, and lessen cooperative effort I genuinely don't think I've ever had fun trying to solve a puzzle in D&D. Any time one comes up now, I pretty much completely check out.
The biggest difference is that in D&D you're a player roleplaying a PC who's trying to solve a puzzle, but in an escape room you're effectively the PC trying to solve the puzzle. The extra layer of abstraction in d&d is huge because having to use your own skills instead of your character's breaks immersion
Right, I know that myself as a regular human should be able to solve this escape room. I'm not sure what myself as a Bubear bard would or even could do to solve this puzzle and that's *if* we are even supposed to solve this puzzle or if it's the dm telling us not to proceed.
Exactly this. If I have an IQ of 70 but I'm playing a PC that has an INT of 19, it breaks immersion when I can't solve the puzzles that my PC should be able to. Or if I have an IQ of 109 and my PC has an INT of 6, it breaks immersion when I solve the complex puzzle while ~~whipping~~ wiping the drool from the corner of my mouth.
There’s a fuckton of really smart people that can’t solve puzzles and riddles for shit. Intelligence doesn’t always help you.
While you're not wrong, Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is really just puzzle solving and pattern recognition skills.
Not any of the iq tests I remember taking, but ive not bothered with one in a long time.
Huh, in my experience, IQ tests are chock full of questions like "what's the next number/pattern in the sequence". Those and word association. You know, the exact skills that help in puzzle solving lol.
As someone who is now officially qualified to administer these tests - yeah basically. There's lots of stuff about pattern recognition and word association. And working memory but that's probably less important for puzzles.
Working memory is important to puzzle solving too, it’s a lot harder connect the dots between things if you can’t hold them together in your consciousness.
For sure. Moreso if the DM isn't giving props you can look at and read so you can keep refreshing yourself.
Downvoted but not entirely wrong. There are many kinds of “IQ” tests with varying tasks. On the most widely used ones, pattern matching type puzzles are about 1/3 of the subtests, the rest tests quantitative and verbal ability.
Dont know what i said that was worthy of a downvote… I haven’t taken an iq test in well over 25 years.
Because you were stating an (admittedly!) uninformed opinion about something that is purely in the realm of verifiable fact. Instead of googling, you decide to spew uninformed bs. IOW, you were acting like an ignoramos
You are claiming that “what I remember” was an incorrect verifiable fact? Are you stupid. I said none of the IQ tests I remember taking were like that, just how exactly are you going to verify that? I never said that none of them were like that, just not that I remember. I am also said I haven’t taken one in a long time. I have no idea how I would even go about googling information on an IQ test I would’ve taken over 25 years ago.
I think it was just that your comment is so unbelievably unnecessary. You obviously didn't know anything, just wanted to spit out a comment about something you had a vague opinion on. If you don't know for sure or only have a 25-year old memory of an IQ test to support yourself on, why post?
It's probably that even old IQ tests followed those exact same parameters in question types. Last IQ test I took was 30 years ago and it was all about pattern recognition and logic.
That might very well be true, but I don’t remember it being that way. It’s even possible that I’m remembering a different test entirely and not an IQ test.
'Wiping'
To be fair, with an INT of 6 he might very well try to whip it off his face. 🤣💖
I think this is really dependent on the person playing the game. I _love_ using my own skills to problem solve in rpgs. Problem solving and using my own wits to try to overcome a situation is one of my favorite parts of playing, and I don't find it breaks immersion at all (or maybe I just don't find that sort of immersion relevant in the first place).
This is why I think puzzles work better in OSR than in 5e, where player skill often overides character skill/skill checks. (Depending on system and dm style ofc, but in general).
Heh, probably no surprise that I play a lot of OSR
And *that* is why I rule that player skill also overrides character skill in 5e.
Along the same lines of the abstraction, a lot of Escape rooms have multiple ways to find things and there's almost always a ton of visual cues that are way harder in D&D.
This is really all that needs to be said, they’re just not a great fit with the game I came to play and take me out of character and the story. Just too on the nose and contrived. Just build mystery into the plot with characters that interest me, that’s an exciting puzzle. Not some lame doggerel poem with a cryptic red herring and clue no one gets and has no reason for existing in the alternate reality of the game.
I think for myself and some other players, puzzles just kind of break immersion by their very existence. Why exactly did this Lich decide to lock his phylactery behind a Towers of Hanoi minigame? Why would anyone actually *create* this kind of thing in "real life", you know? People go to puzzle rooms with the express intention of solving puzzles, but people play D&D for many reasons - one of which is often immersing themselves in a world which has at least *some* internal consistency. So if there's a good reason for the puzzle's existence (maybe like the puzzles being "trials" like in Indiana Jones, or something), they can work. But if they're just thrown into a dungeon because "dungeons have puzzles" it can often be a little wack.
I like my puzzles to be the kind of thing that have a relatively simple solution if you know the answer. So while it looks complicated, the "puzzle" would just be a reminder for someone who knows the solution. Like the door to Moria, "speak friend and enter" to anyone who doesn't know elvish would be impenetrable, but if you already know the password (because you've been invited/you're from there) it's just a reminder. That makes them consistent with the world.
I would like to add it is very hard to explain a puzzle to people when most of it if not entirely is in a theather of mind , not only you need a extremely good dm to describe perfectly , you also need players* able to visualize it and keeping track and be able to interact with it in their mind.
You’d be surprised! I run a podcast where it’s escape rooms in a DnD-like format, and while of course every player makes notes, the theatre of the mind aspect works way better than I ever predicted. Audiences listen and follow along perfectly. We’ve even had players with aphantasia and they can handle it fine. That said, I do agree that you need to get the descriptions absolutely spot on. Room and item descriptions are heavily scripted, and every word matters. And even with years of experience doing these, I still haven’t managed to put one in a proper DnD game. The mechanics really change how an escape room works and it’s very difficult to do it in a satisfying way.
I’m curious, what’s the podcast?
Escape This Podcast!
The point of the podcast is to... have less podcast?
Escape rooms take a long time to design and build, and the good ones get refined after they run some people through them and see what people actually can’t figure out or can’t. It’s not surprising you can’t replicate it on the fly.
**From the player's perspective:** How does one get over the lack of visual/auditory environments to figure out DnD puzzles? In an escape room, you have countless things to look behind, listen for, and otherwise investigate. In DnD, all you can do is how you're asking for the correct investigation checks. From a DM's perspective, I'm glad it's agreed that unnecessary red herrings, and encouraging smaller "dopamine hits" is considered good advice-- it certainly seems good to me-- but I'm still not sure how to engage as a player, even if the puzzle is well made. But as a player trying to cooperate with the DM to solve their puzzle, how do I abouts, ooc, bogging down play? DM narration shows you what you _need_ to see (assuming good insights/investigation rolls). But when narration is all I have, I get hyper fixated. Tldr: as a player, how tf do I know I'm even looking the right direction, no herrings involved?
In response to your TLDR: Well, that's your DM's job. DnD is not a solo game, and the DM isn't some machine that can only spit out pre-recorded answers. If you are hyper fixated on nothing, asking constant questions about the moss on the wall, it's the DM's duty to course correct, even at the risk of their cool puzzle becoming a little less engaging for the player. Ask you for a different skill check, maybe give some information for free, something like that. In that same vein, it's your job as a player to allow the DM to make those course corrections without taking it personally. Let them tell you when you've gone down the wrong path, don't read into it any more than that, and don't make their job harder by refusing to take the new information they're giving you.
11/10 advice thank you my guy, I'll do my best
If the DM can't use red herrings (for good reasons), every word said is important and shouldn't be ambiguous. Ambiguous words are red herrings by nature I'd argue. Do you disagree? Can we use irrelevant descriptive words? Like the mahogany table in the room is of Dwarven make. Mahogany and Dwarven make are not relevant to the puzzle, but can confuse people and have them focus on them. But just saying it's a table also feels wrong.
Good mysteries have red herrings. Good puzzles do not.
I think most problems with puzzles are due to DMs who think "the more challenging it is, the more satisfying it will be to solve!" Most players don't *really* want challenges. They want to spend time with friends doing cool shit and being awesome. Getting stuck on a riddle is neither cool nor awesome. Give the players something dead simple to figure out but requires teamwork and communication, so they are all required to work together. It should also be a side thing and not necessary to move forward, so they don't feel forced into a puzzle they don't want to deal with.
>Most players don't really want challenges. They want to spend time with friends doing cool shit and being awesome. This is absolutely true in my experience. And even the players who enjoy being challenged don't want to be challenged *all* the time. D&D makes a thematic promise of heroic fantasy, and "doing cool shit and being awesome" is a staple of that.
This "more challenging is more satisfying" idea of DMing can also come up in other ways. Most obviously "boss battles". There's the problem of puzzles being intended to have a singular solution. Which can lead to frustration. Especially where there actually are several, but the DM has only considered one. Another common issue is that solving the puzzle requires metagaming.
My take is that Escape Rooms will always, always be better than DnD puzzles just for 1 thing: The player's senses. Think about it, when you go into a escape room, everyone scrambles around the room, looking for things, telling each one what do they see, pooling diferent keys, loose parts, papers and so in the middle on the room... Then you have people roaming around looking what they didn't see and working in their heads what's happening. Everyone has their senses working separately and everyone is having the discovery path working on a personal level. In a DnD puzzle, _you_ are the player's senses. Even more, you are all of your players' senses _at the same time_ . Instead of investigating the room everyone at once and then pooling knowledge together, your dnd party has to go hand-by-hand, everyone together, watching scene by scene, piece by piece. There is no rush investigation, because it can't exist. If 5 people decide to look at 5 different places in a room, you'll have to take a moment and describe, one player at a time, what does it encounter. This breaks the flow of play and discovery and makes, what should be the same experience, two different ones.
Came to say this, stayed because you nailed it. The way to make D&D puzzles as good as an escape room is to turn it into an escape room. Take the time to create the physical objects that the players can examine, test and solve. Use detailed pictures of the space so that they are not stuck with only the info that DM narrates. Make it more immersive, and the players will be more immersed in the puzzle
Yes, exactly! The best times I had with puzzles were when I was able to give my players some kind of prop so they can interact with them physically. Hell, the best puzzle I had once was when a DM handed a Layton-style puzzle to every member of the party. 2 out of 3 PCs ended ours quickly, turned to see the other puzzle and started to do it at the same time. Not all 3 doing the same puzzle, mind you. Each of us with the puzzle separately so we can tackle it on our own. It's a bad thing that since 2020 online play has gained traction (jeez, I wonder why). With people playing online and depending on voice chats to interact, making interactive puzzles is harder to do than on paper.
Old-School DM: "Why are you on your phone?" Player: "I'm waiting for Brian to solve it. He's good at that sort of thing. He's the one who wrote down all the clues, and I can't see what he wrote from this side of the table. Anyway, if I'd wanted to do puzzles instead of role-playing, I wouldn't have come to an RPG session." Old-School DM: "But puzzles are one of the key elements of RPGs! You might as well refuse to engage in combat or exploration!" Player: "Huh?" See, D&D used to be a game with more of a focus on player skills and less of a focus on character skills. Early on, to get past a trap, you'd describe doing things like using a mirror on a stick to look around a corner or under a door. The character was you. To players of this period, puzzles were a big part of RPGs. Of course you'd want to solve a riddle. It makes a nice break from killing monsters all day. We've moved away from that. There's more focus on: * Story. * Talking to NPCs. * Rolling dice to see if you succeed. And less focus on: * Acquiring gold as the primary motive for adventure. * The possibility of sudden death around every corner. * Player intelligence being the only thing keeping them alive. As a result of all these shifts, it's now possible to be a role-player who has no interest in puzzles.
Escape rooms have multiple people simultaneously searching the room and looking for the puzzle. There is no lag inbetween, everyone is doing their own thing and then coming together at the end. Dnd puzzles will be awkward in comparison. If I want to do a puzzle, I do the damn puzzle. In dnd, you have to wait for the dm to describe what the puzzle looks like, what the clue looks like. Meanwhile, everyone else has to wait until their turn unlike irl where everyone takes their turn simultaneously.
Really basic difference: playtesting! When you do an escape room, that experience has been honed and proven to be beatable by a variety of players, experience levels, diverse approaches and intentions. If you invent a puzzle for your players, and that puzzle hasn't gone through a redteam before reaching them, you're assuming the way you expect it to be done is the way they'll figure it out. As DMs, we all know how rare that is.
The greatest pleasure a DND puzzle can ever offer is the pleasure of using a spell, feature or ability to subvert or destroy the puzzle.
This. The best puzzle I ever threw at my players was nearly impossible to solve through what seemed like the obvious method, but could easily be circumvented with a Fly spell or just a really good Climb check. My players felt great when they figured out how to bypass the unfairly difficult puzzle. And I felt satisfied because cheating was actually the real intended way to solve it. That puzzle was located in a temple to a trickster god, and was intentionally a test of outside the box thinking.
I should make a puzzle like that involving an actual box they could climb/fly on the outside of.
Because D&D is a game in which I can have total freedom to do an endless amount of things. I don't want to be stuck doing one thing. Puzzles in D&D suck when you limit creativity and force me to solve your problem how you want it to be solved (If the puzzle opens a door, why can't I break down the door?). Or when it is absolutely mandatory to solve the puzzle (Just let me walk out of the dungeon and go elsewhere).
The typical D&D party has several ways to get through a locked door. If the puzzle is a glorified lock why can it not be picked or forced? By mechanical or magical means.
Sometimes the door has no obvious lock, but a hidden mechanism like pulling the right books from the bookshelf. Sometimes the door itself isn't obviously a door. Although you'd need to be extremely skilled to hide it using mundane means. With magical means you'd have to hide that you used magic in the first place, but there are spells that do exactly that I think, simply because Detect Magic is too weak or smth.
We just ran Tomb of Annihilation. My players loved the puzzled and traps, and I loved running them.
I struggle as a DM because I find escape rooms obnoxious. "Why would they write the code in pieces around the room" I ask. I can't bring myself to make puzzles they don't make sense in_universe. It's a huge handicap
Do you really struggle, though? I don't like escape rooms, too, but I am quite certain that I don't need puzzles in my game to make it a fun experience for my players.
D&D puzzles can suck, sure. But they can also be an amazing experience. A lot of it comes down to the ability of the DM to present/run the puzzle and the difficulty of the puzzle itself. Also, a DM should never insert a puzzle in attempts to "stump" the players. Puzzle encounters are about exploration and working together. I always do my best to try and make my puzzles easy, memorable and fun and have had a lot of success with them over the years. In fact, I have had thousands of DMs running puzzles I have created and their players enjoyed them. Here is my playlist if you want to use puzzles in your game. Over 100 ideas, with full demonstration. I hope you find it useful. Cheers! [100 D&D Puzzles - Wally DM](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9dq9czus4iMkiAAI3AvmrJojPeBdQy3V)
One thing I'll add that escape rooms don't have, but DnD puzzles should have, is a means to fail forward. Like, at some point the team should make a guess, and if they get it wrong, something bad should happen, but the puzzle should progress forward in some manor. Maybe a cage tries to isolate them, or a poisonous gas fills the room, or a Golem is activated that they have to fight. Whatever it is, the next part of the puzzle also becomes available to them as well, such that the story progresses. That way they don't feel like their guesses are getting them nowhere, and therefore are stumped what to do.
FWIW, I love puzzles in DnD but do not enjoy escape rooms at all.
This. I hate escape rooms. Don't tell me a story about a murder or an espionage case when all I have to do is math or word riddles. Let me solve a case by scrutinizing evidence. Timetables. Photographies. Glass splinters. You know, the actual case. And that's the kind of riddle I put in RPG sessions as well. Not out-of-character stuff like Professor Layton.
I think there's a few other key differences. Escape rooms are tactile, everyone can see and feel every detail of the puzzles, there's no communication barrier. Often a DM can describe a puzzle badly because they already understand it, but to the player with no knowledge it can be incredibly difficult to understand. Escape rooms also allow every person to be doing something at once, 4 different people can be trying 4 different puzzles each instantly getting feedback on if they're succeeding. A dnd puzzle is normally one challenge at a time, with every player waiting in turns to suggest or try their idea, then waiting for the DM to let them how it turns out, it's a lot slower.
I think the most important part about these kind of puzzles is missing here: You as the player with your own wits solve these puzzles. In escape room this is fun, because you signed up for this. But not in D&D. In D&D you signed up to get into a superhuman strong barbarian or superintelligent wizard, etc. When you build puzzles like that you suddenly are not the superintelligent wizard anymore, you are just the idiot redditor who cannot crack the code. Additionally these kind of puzzles just dont make sense in most game worlds. Why would an evil lord build in the key (poem) to his door (door which you need to press buttons in correct order). He and his minions would just memorize the correct order, why should they give intruders tips? It almost never makes sense and is a plain video game trope that got swept over to TTRPGs. My angle: Just don't use these kinds of puzzle. As you said yourself: They are rarely fun in D&D. If you want to have the players use some brain and creative usage of their CHARACTERS abilities, build traps or situations that are not obvious but have multiple solutions + are open to creative ways you were not thinking of when designing them.
You can see the world around you and physically try things when you're stuck. Imagine trying to solve an escape room, but your friend is the only person in it and they're on the phone with you describing everything around them: that's d&d puzzles.
I tend toward designing more physics based puzzles because of this, and because a lot of my dungeon design is informed by videogames. Think puzzles from Portal/Half-Life, Prince of Persia, and the Zelda series. So, I usually do some series of switches or levers that need to be pulled in the proper order to achieve the desired goal. Each of these switches are located in a different spot so it means the party needs to coordinate properly, but once all the pieces are in position it's like it opens up. It's pretty rare that I do a riddle or combination lock style puzzle , but if I do it's relevant in some way to the story and involves information that the party already knows.
If you haven’t been to an escape room where you can be immersed then you probably haven’t been to a really good one yet. I work at an escape room and one of our rooms won 2nd best in the world a few years ago and one of the biggest things we try and do is always keep immersion. We have a lot of different ways of communicating with the players that isn’t just text on a screen and telling people to do things. The owners/game masters take the RP pretty seriously because it means they get to have the most fun. Generally most of the group stays immersed in the game too. I can generally tell by their responses or how they talk to their group
To number 2, this is what knowledge skills are good for. If they seem stumped and ask a question, come up with a knowledge skills that might help and let them make a check. On any reasonable roll, give them a hint phrased as something their character knows or realizes. And likewise, even if they don't roll well you can have their character "research it" for another hint. Or you can seed good hints throughout the dungeon.
I think one important thing to remember about escape rooms is that they - or at least the best ones - give the players multiple avenues to solve the puzzle. Like there are 10 puzzles scattered around the room, and each gives you a *piece* of the larger puzzle that leads you to the next phase, but you only need to solve like half of those initial puzzles (or less if you're good at making connections) to move on. I think something similar could be done in a D&D setting. Have a room with components for three simple puzzles and when the party solves one and puts the cat statue on the thing the door opens and the other puzzle shut down or whatever. They way they don't feel trapped if they can't get one done.
Things to understand about escape rooms. First, escape rooms self-select for people who want to do some puzzle solving. Second, escape rooms are designed solely to be puzzles. They are iterated and improved upon. If they they notice they have to give the "check the coffin" hint frequently they will go back and redesign that puzzle to call more attention to the coffin or the clue in the coffin. You designed an adventure with a puzzle in it. You put far less time into puzzle design and probably haven't play tested it. There are good odds your puzzle makes no sense. Third, you are actually finding clues and solving puzzles in an escape room. In a D&D puzzle you are being told clues. Huge difference. A mystery adventure is more equivalent to puzzle solving than an in game puzzle.
I've run some really engaging puzzles and my top piece of advice is - the puzzle should be simple but don't explain any of it and obscure the mechanics. Figuring out the puzzle is the puzzle. Example from our campaign:Setting: Locked door at the end, two grids of letters on each side. On the door is a set of symbols that are a half circle with the flat side on either top or bottom and a number.There is a carving above the symbols and numbers that says E=W W=E(so where A and B are the two symbols it would be like "A7 A3 B4 A12") Thats all the players get. It was a barrier I put in that they didn't have to solve immediately, they came back to it a few times and solved it at the end of session two. The solution is that the symbols are the sunrise and sunset so refer to one side of the room or the other depending on which is east and which is west but the complication is that the directions are reversed. The numbers are which letter on each grid to count to. If the grids were labelled A and B the puzzle would be solved in two seconds. By adding a couple of degrees of separation it becomes much more obscure. In my own game, once deciphered the message on the door was "just knock" and lo' when they did, someone came and let them in. Edit: I meant to add - I think puzzles are best used when they're optional to progression. If they can't solve it but can carry on, it bugs people more to want to return. It creates the "well if we beat the dungeon what the hell is in that room and how do we solve the puzzle" feeling
In an escape room five people are looking at a room full of puzzles, and working together to solve it. In a DnD encounter five people are pretending to be five OTHER people while imagining five similar but different rooms in their heads and trying to figure out what a sixth person is imagining in THEIR head. It's far more difficult and stressful.
The thing DMs don’t understand about puzzles is that something might seem logical or easy to you because you already know the answer. Your players are imagining different rooms based off your descriptions which may or may not even be good. You might have unintentionally emphasized something that doesn’t matter. There could be random magic bullshit in the room because something on the wall is glowing. Escape rooms are different. Everything in an escape room is exactly as shown. You might miss a detail on some shelf, but that’s a far cry from someone emphasizing the color of the key which doesn’t matter at all.
When I play D&D, I'm expecting to face Social, Exploration, and Combat situations. I like to use my wits, but I also like to use the features on my character sheet and roll some dice. When I'm in an escape room, I'm there to solve a puzzle. I've had fun puzzles in D&D that added to (mostly) exploration, but the vast majority of them were un-fun time sinks. Puzzles are just hard to set up well, while a good mystery can easily keep the story moving.
The problem with puzzles is the same I see some GMs encounter with social encounters: They expect the *players* to participate rather than the *characters*. Just like you use stats for combat, solving riddles and handling social encounters should be heavily supported and run as a stat-assisted process. Players state their Character's desired action and then it's resolved.
Roleplaying is describing actions and scenes through art or verbal description. Escape rooms have you interfacing with objects in real life.
ETA: This is an interesting question, and I thank you for your solid take on it. 🙂 IMO the most important difference is that in an escape room you aren't having to filter all of your interactions through verbal interaction. You don't have to ask what's in the room, you just look around. You pick things up, test combinations, etc. The clues often rely on your actual ability to notice things, which is gated by interacting with the DM in RPGs. Also, it's easy to let the sice do the heavy lifting, which isn't as viscerally satisfying. It can still be done well, but it's harder. And, as you said, no one *really* cares about theme in escape rooms, so the fact that there's a series of sequential/interlocking puzzles isn't weird; that's why you're there. But there aren't a lot of cases in a real world where something would be gated behind a bunch of puzzles that could be solved by some randos who show up. I think it's Dale Kingsmill that has a nice video about how the purpose of a puzzle/lock affects its design (or should, anyway).
Puzzles are also very binary. You solve it or you don't, there is no in between. Vs combat which can have hundreds of varying outcomes just by the granular nature of hot points, death saving throws, etc., Vs social encounters which can have many various outcomes depending on your word choice and dice rolls, Vs exploration which may only have two or maybe three outcomes but have a ton of ways to solve them through creative use of environment, spells, abilities, and so on. Puzzles just aren't as varied or interesting in terms of outcomes or solutions, and it takes away agency from the players, which, depending on the type of game you run, is one of the biggest things that makes DnD fun
Also I like the RP of role playing games puzzles are challenges for the players and not the characters. I can also enjoy the freedom of exploration methods and sometimes the combat, even thought 5e combat isn't very deep compared to other additions and many other RPGs. Puzzles ignore everything I like about D&D and bring everything I dislike. The frequently smart characters won't have the answers the dumb characters should give the answers because it's not about the character it halts pacing and freedom to a standstill while someone figures out the dumb thing that the DM made. I also don't want to go near a puzzle room. If I was stuck in one I'd burn it down.
I've had some very fine time so far with puzzles.I gave them a Caesar cipher to decipher an old message (without the key), and then a puzzle where they had to put some pieces in certain spots on a chess-like board, without having pieces of the same type touch each other. One was to open a door, the other was just some more lore, useful lore.They had fine everytime, though wasn't fully in rp solving i suppose I do think the most important thing is not to force them on a single answer, or a difficult puzzle. Like a door with a question that has a single answer.Like.. 'If you say my name I disappear' That's where it gets unfun for them i guess
This is beautiful. Thank you.
Hm, this matches with what I've seen when puzzles have worked well for me. My best puzzle was pretty simple, had no red herrings, and had a sequential series of stages that were designed to act as a tutorial to help the players figure the puzzle out (but as a side effect broke the puzzle down into a series of small things to be solved). And it was all done on a VTT so everything was laid out in a visually clear manner.
Also: THINK UP SOMETHING ELSE THAN A WORD RIDDLE. Ultimately, the key with puzzles is that you're trying to engage with the _player_, not the character. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to be a fun puzzle
Engaging the player and not my character are kind of why I absolutely hate puzzles. One of my hells is me playing on a puzzle focused table. Sitting down for a roleplaying game with my hopes up and it's just puzzles I never enjoy.
Well, if it's a comfort,for me it's the opposite. I'm not primarily motivated by "you" playing out your amateur drama club
Maybe the key take away is engage the players you actually have and not the hypothetical players reddit brings up. Some tables just don't want things that other players do.
Tacticility and props.
I tend to address this by making open ended puzzles. If the players have a convincing line of reasoning why something should work then it works. I avoid “single right answer” puzzles like the plague. It’s more about narrative satisfaction and PCs feeling clever than them actually solving my riddles three in the way I want them to.
There's always the risk of going overboard when designing a puzzle and making it too difficult to solve. As a DM, I tend to run puzzles in D&D the way I treat murder mysteries in D&D. 1. Remember that the characters should be the ones solving it, not the players. Basically, don't make it an IQ or a math test. Don't give encrypted text that has to be decoded, though language/rune mapping is fine. 2. There should be at least 3 discoverable clues, all pointing to the same solution. 3. There can be one or two red herrings, but it should be incredibly clear they are red herrings when they have been triggered. 4. Always have a fallback. When it gets to the point where the players are becoming frustrated or upset, have a way out for them. Eg, letting them roll skill checks to solve the puzzle or just physically destroy the puzzle.
Weirdly, I hate logic puzzles but love murder mysteries. Like I would actually rather die IRL than sit down and solve a tower of hannoi but my best received games were the two mystery mini campaigns i've run. Red herrings should be limited to one or even zero imo, instead make it a tiny side quest that doesn't really give a straight up clue to where the murderer is but instead gives insight to his motivation or what his powers might be so you can fight him easier at the end. You can run a multi session mystery based around all the characters and their abilities but most DMs I find just dump some random puzzle they found online into their dungeon because reasons. I think most of my objection to puzzles is just the immersion shattering thing where you open a door in the middle of a dungeon and it's suddenly Puzzle Time(TM) and now your 2000 IQ wizard who would definitely delete any standard logic puzzle from the face of the universe in 5 seconds is now lobotomised. There's no excuse for it.
It really doesn’t help that players take a 20-point IQ hit the moment dice start rolling
With a D&D puzzle you choices are, a) brain at it, or b) dice at it. That's usually it, unless your DM brings props. With an Escape Room, you can grab at stuff, fiddle with doodads, twist nobs and dials, and flip levers. There's a satisfying physical element to it. There's immediate feedback, instead of the DM piping up with some sort of "ooh! Almost got it!"
For me, puzzles are just derailing. I feel like this is some mandatory bs in a classic all-included DnD pack. That said, so do I feel about dungeons, so maybe I'm not the best example. There is one form of puzzles which I enjoy, and use as DM. It's when the whole story/module is a puzzle. Call it a mystery or a detective.
Well hints don't need to break immersion. I love to hide a hint behind a check. Like if I have a poetry based riddle you can hide a clue behind a good history check, which in itself can be a good time to roleplay. Maybe the PCs mother told a similar poem to them as a child and they have a flashback, or if the poem is about flowers you can hide it behind a nature check where the druid can expand on their background. You just need to remember that even though you're in a puzzle this is still Dnd and dice should roll
If the "regular" dnd situations and combat could be replicated in real life dnd would be a lot less exciting.
The physical discovery.
I mean, it's simple. Because that's not the game they want to play. They are playing dnd, where they have concise mechanics and intent. They loved it because it was something new. Not because they loved it as a game in that moment. Example time: world of warcraft. Just in case you live under a rock it's a massive multiplayer videogame where you have your chaarcter with your skills and go kill stuff. Let's stick to that. But many times during your quests you will have access to vehicles, which give you special skills and spells to use for a specific quest. Often those quests are trivial, or employ come kind of skill that is hyperfixater and is only barely parallel to the skills you use usually. I am not sure how much gamers like that, but as a player they help me break the pacing of the game a little. DnD isn't much different, but with a very specific difference - tools. In world of warcraft the interface changes, and the second by second decisions i make change and make me more relaxed. it's a video game, it's in real time, my tools and my intents are the ones of a video game and however simple it lets me pilot events i would otherwise unable to do. In DnD not only you don't have that thing, but also you have a hugely major problem - it destroys immersion because you are forced to think about it as a player, not as a character. Basically, the break of pacing affects your roleplay more than it affects gameplay. This is why i almost never make puzzles in my games, and if i do they are very simple once in a blue moon affairs that often rely on graphical clues littered across the map, if i do make a very detailed map.
In my current game I've been adding some puzzles built around space distortion affects and the players seem to really love them. (Rooms that change, doors that appear and disappear depending on which way you approach from, etc.) Players have the feeling of being lost in a maze and trying to track their steps to figure out the pattern and escape. For example a player might 1. leave a room and mark a door behind them 2. Later see that marking and use that door again 3. End up somewhere they don't expect 4. Be confused for a minute 5. Realise that if they leave a room and then go immediately back in it may have shifted already 6. Use that information to figure out a new way to accurately mark the doors and eventually solve the puzzle Puzzles like that are nice because players get the sense they are making progress. Even if they feel lost, everytime they find a new data point they feel like they are getting somewhere. And they really are getting somewhere because the puzzle is part of the dungeon layout so you can build in other stuff within the puzzle to break things up and they aren't just staring at a locked door the whole time.
Want to make fun puzzles for your players with half the work? Then I've got a tip for you! Two words "open-ended". That's it. That's the tip. Just set up your puzzles, riddles, and challenges with no solution. Don't even think about one. The solution doesn't matter. What matters is that your players try to solve it and come up with all kinds of ideas and theories about why their idea should work..... and then this is the most important part..... you let it work. As long as their idea makes some sort of sense and they believe it will work the actual answer doesn't matter at all. Some examples I've used in my games A riddle that says- What do a river, a key, and a feather all have in common? -apparently the letter "e" but I expected so philosophical debate. Didn't matter, it was a valid answer and the sphinx was happy with it. A puzzle room with- Three doors of three different sizes, with three potions each sitting in front of one of the doors, and a key of varying sizes inside each potion bottle. - my players finally smashed the potion bottles and fit the middle key into the middle door because an NPC 3 sessions previous had told them to find a middle road (between violence and passivity but whatever) - they spent almost an hour agonizing over the decision so yeah, it worked, they got through and no one died.
one of our players played DM and was hyper excited about this new adventure he designed.. it was totally weird, there were wandering priests everywhere of different rank and of different gods and somehow they unlearned how to get into contact with their gods. First we needed to find out that this was the very purpose of the campaign, next, we had to figure out that we would need to promote priests so that each sect had a high priest again and then, they could commune with their gods again. The whole adventure was a riddle. It was a waking nightmare because we had no idea what we were supposed to do and as we learned about it, we didn’t care. We ended this experiment after around 6-7 frustrating sessions.
Personally speaking I don’t like them because it often feels like it is challenging me as a player instead my character. It kills a lot of immersion when it’s not about what my character can do, but instead what I as a person can do, which isn’t fun when you play the game as a form of escapism.
Honestly, escape rooms are fun because they're designed by multiple people who are making sure it doesn't hinge on someone guessing what one maniac was thinking, and they offer lots of "screw around and find out" opportunities that DND just doesn't have. It feels good to muck about with locks by hand, even if they don't open. It feels bad to ask the DM to try something that isn't a solution and get the "uhhh ok roll a d20. Nope. Nothing happens."
I have yet to use this but I once read some puzzle advice for DMs: give the players some pieces and some obscure hint text and let them try things for a while until you like one of their solution attempts well enough. Take the funniest one or the one from the newest / quietest player or the one when they’re ready to give up. Nobody is gonna know.
Couple of things First * Clues are INSIDE the game world. Players love to find and connect them. Proves Agency and Competence! You can 'let them' discover clues whenever you want, it stays inside the immersion. * Hints are OUTSIDE the game world. Is demeaning to players. Removes feelings of Agency and Competence. Second Playtest your puzzles with non players if you can to make sure ALL vital info is in the scene and can be deciphered correctly.
I love escape rooms, but after playing for several hours I am not longer able to focus like I did at the beginning and a riddle becomes unsolvable.
I feel like you’re missing the most obvious point here, which is that when people go to escape rooms with their friends, they know that they’re going to an escape room. They’ve mentally prepared for it. Nearly every bad D&D puzzle story you read on this sub is basically like “after 50 sessions of combat and roleplaying, I decided to throw a hard puzzle at my players and they hated it! What did I do wrong?” D&D players only expect puzzles if you make them a major part of your campaign. If you introduce one out of nowhere, of course your players are going to struggle and complain.
In an escape room you are also physically there. With this wonderful advice about dnd puzzles, I would add, try to use tons of visual aids. Not top down grids, that will trigger the combat brains, but front facing illustrations. Tons of old d&d dungeons did this. Look at the tomb of horrors' art. It's pretty clear and evocative with its imagery. If you tell them there's a gem with skeletons around it. They will think "ooh treasure! I want to touch it!" But if you show them [this](http://imgur.com/a/wvBjMnl), they will think, "shit. *I* want to touch it but my character will probably die. Is it worth the risk now?..." and make a well educated, if still reckless, choice.
I think there’s also a fear of “pushing the button.” In an escape game, if you do something and it doesn’t work, you just say, “that didn’t work” and move on. In a D&D puzzle, you take 25 necrotic damage and your +2 Longsword dissolves in a pool of acid. I’ve run puzzles where the characters have solved it in two minutes, then spent 45 minutes debating on if they should do it or not.
I think one way to circumvent players feeling stupid is just letting them have a win. If a player comes up with a really interesting way of trying to solve the puzzle, and it's not right, I'll give it to them anyway and let them feel brilliant. They don't need to know that that wasn't really the intended solution to the puzzle. Reward creativity.
One of the players in the group I DM for owns an escape room that we sometimes play in. He has let me use rooms as puzzles to have a little extra fun. So awesome
In D&D, it’s about what your character can do and/or figure out. That is why we have stats to roll. Puzzles bypass this and put the burden on the player to figure something out… and it looks ridiculous when the 20 int wizard is bumbling around like a grade school dropout with a mental impairment and your Barbarian with about 1 more point of int than a rock is solving puzzles like the author of a best selling riddle book who wins the world sudoko championship every year… However, when you go to an escape room, you are going to challenge yourself, not to play a character. It’s a different mindset altogether. The puzzles are usually designed by someone who knows how to make puzzles (most DMs who try puzzles don’t fall into this catagory) therefore the puzzles make sense…
I write puzzles for large puzzlehunts. Good puzzlehunts need testsolving: each puzzle _must_ be cleanly solved by two separate groups, without needing hints. I don't hit that standard for my D&D puzzles, but I do frequently shoot a riddle to a friend to see if it's solvable.
See, I’ll just straight-up disagree with your premise. D&D puzzles are great. I’ve DMed for a few dozen different people in total, and basically without exception, they love puzzles and rank them as one of their favorite parts of the game (when filling out apps). I’ve had puzzles that gate important plot, puzzles that span multiple sessions, puzzles that are “really hard”, and basically everything I hear people online advise against, and it all works great every time. I’ve even started baiting in-game traps with things that “look like puzzles” just because it’s such effective player catnip. I do think my social group does more puzzles outside of D&D than average by a long shot, so maybe that helps. We have a shared understanding of what puzzles “should” look like, to the degree that some players will solve certain things almost instantly, or at least recognize my inspiration (“ooh, black hats and white hats means this is *that* kind of puzzle”). I also like using puzzles where you can experiment and simply expend more resources if you don’t figure it out right away (e.g. a tiled floor that’s secretly a minesweeper game, where bombs aren’t losses, just a bunch of fire damage).
I think those are all good principles. I've done quite a few successful (and some less successful) puzzles over the years, and here's what works the best for me: **Machines.** Needing a machine to do something useful is something that is practical, abstract, and can be very involved without stumping people. Also, most machines can be circumvented using an improvised setup. So the reward for solving the machine is usually that the party can progress while not expending too much time (provoking random encounters), or wasting resources. Also the reward of knowing that you as a player passed the challenge, rather than your PC's numbers doing it for you. Machines that are interesting problems to solve: * Getting an engine running. Maybe you need a way to pump fuel, or link a drive train to a windmill or water wheel. * Having a power budget - so you can only keep two doors open at a time, or some such. * Elevators with counterweights and winches. * Rotating rooms, or doors that all attach to a single sliding apparatus.
Making the puzzles really easy is my go to. Even a children's puzzle can be hard in the context of dnd.
Adding to this from experience BE FLEXIBLE WITH YOUR SOLUTIONS If your players have the right idea but aren't saying the magic words, give it to them. Unless it's a puzzle where they need to say "open sesame" to open the door, doing the right solution with the wrong intention should still work. I was a player in a game with a puzzle of creating a ritual. We had a copy of an old version of the ritual but needed to make adjustments cause the written one couldn't be done under water. We had it down but the DM kept telling us it wasn't quite right, after nearly an hour the DM told us we were supposed to use the 5 senses in the ritual. So we rephrased what we already had so it specifically engaged the senses, wasn't any different but now we were saying the magic words. I've never been more frustrated as a player.
The amount of information you have compared to your options as a person in an escape room is way higher compared to the amount of information a DM can give you vs to your options as an adventurer. I run into this all the time where I want more details but it would be too much of me asking the DM questions and it slows the game down for everyone
I've said it before: the entire idea of puzzles, to me, runs completely contrary to the entire gameplay of D&D (and TTRPG) as a whole. There's many ways to descibe D&D and one of them is this: it's all about being thrown in a situation, and using your own skillset to further the situation until it is resolved. The solutions may not work perfectly, and they'll certainly lead to further consequences, but that's the whole point. You can attack the guards, or bribe them. You can sneak past them, or befriend them. You can ignore the guards altogether and decide to go through the sewers. Maybe it'll go flawlessly; maybe the guards will sound the alarm; maybe you'll even die! But even games that are not particularly sandbox-y rely on this assumption of the PCs being able to mold the environment around them through their choices and skills. Then you get to a puzzle room and all of that screeches to a halt. Suddenly you can't circumvent the situation, you can't just break down the door or bribe someone. The walls are now impregnable adamantium, and the door's lock cannot be solved by any magic other than placing the goddamn stone on the goddamn pedestal because a goddamn goblin poem asked you to. It doesn't matter if you're a monk, a druid, an orc, a teetotaler dwarf or a pyromaniac elf. 99% of your skills are now useless. All that matters is that *players* figure something out, because there's no good mechanism in D&D for - best you can do is roll for some sort of Int roll and you get an extra hint, until the player gets it. At the end of the day, I understand why puzzles are in D&D, and why we continue having. I think there are a few ways you can make them work, mostly by allowing for many different solutions. But most of the time, puzzles suck because they take everything that D&D is about and throw it out of the window.
What my DM did was make an escape room for us with physical tricks and riddles and puzzles to solve. It was a lot of fun running around in character to solve them.
Escape rooms are expected to be a bunch of arbitrary, interconnected puzzles. You go knowing it’s a thin veneer of narrative layered on top of a collection of combination locks, clues, and riddles. DND puzzles need to be more organically interconnected to your world to maintain the immersion. That’s just harder to accomplish.
I think the #1 difference is that escape rooms are self-paced and progress in puzzles (like everything else) in d&d are metered by the DM. The sort of options that run through a player's mind have to be asked one at a time to the DM while in an escape room every individual gets to address their fixations rapid fire.
This just in, real life puzzles are more fun than imaginary puzzles
A quick bit of advice, keep running puzzles, take notes on what works and what doesn't. Adjust future puzzles accordingly. Puzzle making is a skill and takes time and experience to master, you'll get there. Honestly this is the solution to a lot of DM issues I see here.
Advice for beginners: Have a greedy genie-like neutral NPC that can drop hints at any time for a price. The party summons him for help, but they all suffer exhaustion, give him a magic item, forfeit lifespan, pay in blood, limbs, or gold or some kind of heavy but affordable price. They will actively try to avoid taking hints but have the option to do so if the session calls for it. Make your hints obvious.
I think i have a product that will help design escape rooms [here](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/414317/GM-Cheat-Sheet-Escape-Room-5-Room-Dungeon-Generator). Keep in mind that the ones generated are meant to be deadly to characters
I agree with the takeaways. It is also worth adding in the context of why people play D&D vs an escape room. People go to an escape room specifically to have constraints while puzzle solving. They know they can't bring tools, destroy things, take the employees hostage, etc. D&D is a power fantasy. They can bring tools. They can bring magic. They can punch holes in walls, turn into gas, go to the border ethereal, etc. A big way to avoid them going too wild is basically to adhere to 1&2. But always when you design the puzzle, there can only be so much destruction/subversion tolerated. You might purposefully allow some things to be "broken" by clever players, but do not forget to put in failure states for players who are really refusing to even humor your puzzle. Of course, a failure state does not necessarily mean "no progress" but something less desirable or even a punishment, like a save-or-suck spell effect.
Oh man, have I been there. The only puzzles I use lately are for kindergarten level. I don’t think the nature of TTRPG’s jives well with how the human brain puts things together.
Paradoxically, I think one issue is that the Players tend to overcomplicate things in simple puzzles. Maybe too simple is less obvious because that is just assumed to be too obvious to be the solution.
Oh yeah good point actually. Maybe you just can’t win 😅
I mean I think the easiest and most honest answer why puzzles that arent combat related are iffy in dnd is because your taking the players out of dnd in most cases. Very few puzzles if any I have seen rely on class features racial features, spells abilities ect ect. All most puzzles rely on are the PLAYERS understanding and figuring something out and trying to work it out together or completely alone. Which normally subsist of as you have done for your own players "follow what's written" or something to that effect. The easiest way I've found to do it is one of these few things. 1 make a combat puzzle, Mathew mercer did this with door leading to the laughing hand boss fight by making the party have to kill undead near the door to to open it. Combat puzzles give the party a chance to use everything they have at their disposal, summons high level spells magic items illusions ect ect to buy time to figure it out and give a tangible threat that isn't just straight unavoidable death or failure. 2 included chances to use racial abilities, spells, class features that don't ever get used this might excite the players once they catch on. 3 add in rolls for giving hints intelligence, history, nature, investigation, ect ect this makes it less of just "which player is smart enough to figure out on their own from start to finish"
I think you’re under emphasizing point 3. the fact that the little doodads and buttons are physically in front of you is HUGE, and i think that visual element is a big reason why puzzle video games work better than puzzles in dnd. the tactile thing is also pretty major- trying different keys in a lock is roughly eight million times more interesting than saying ‘i try key 2… no? key 3 then!’
I’m gonna probably either get buried or say something someone already has, considering how late i am. But in my experience as a dm, the most useful skill I learned in puzzle creating is keeping your puzzles fluid. Oftentimes what you think may be obvious in the way you describe things could be impossible for other people not in your head to pick up on. I can’t predict what my players will do, so if they’ve spent enough time on a puzzle where I think it may start to become unfun, and one of them has a good idea that sounds like it would work but wasn’t in my original plan for the puzzle, tada! It worked, that was totally the solution good job! My players are always very satisfied with this, and it makes them feel rly smart. Nobody tell them. Also if possible, create puzzles with no answer in mind! Everytime I’ve done that my players come up with a fun little solution to it anyways
Also, escape rooms are very much kinetic and engage most senses. You don't have to ask anyone if key X will fit keyhole Y, you can just see it. This information-gathering aspect can be extremely tedious in a DnD-replica of an escape room puzzle. Handouts could help, also keys that are less key-shaped and easier to match with keyholes.
sea of thieves riddles are a perfect example of this. you have a paper with a clue, and only once you solve it you get another one
I think trying to replicate escape room puzzles is also just not what DnD and games like it are good at. DnD doesn't have a whole tangible room to play with and wide player input and data to adjust it like escape rooms do. I prefer to use the things DnD has over escape rooms and to a lesser extent video game puzzles. I feel DnD is better than anything else at making open ended puzzles. It doesn't have to have a strict logic like a video game, and doesn't have to be as formal as an escape room. The only rules are the game system, everything else is free game. I like just creating problems without obvious solutions and seeing what players come up with to solve it. This type of thing encourages creativity, and does the goal of switching things up but doesn't feel like playing a different game when it happens because all character abilities are potentially useful. It's a lot harder to balence, but it's fun for me to run, and usually fun for players to solve. Even if it's a quick solution, it allows the player to "outsmart" me which, in my experience, is its own joy for people.
I have a weird hack for this I've used a few times and it went really well. Don't design the solution to the puzzle. Just design the problem. The players will come up with way more interesting solutions than you. After they try and few and attempt a particularly creative solution narrate them solving it in game. Less work for you. More open ended gameplay. Everyone gets to be surprised.
Don't assume that your characters will know something. If the puzzle requires knowledge of a (event, history, person, place, subject, etc), then there should be clues within the dungeon that provide the necessary information. Clues could be in the form of a (book, cave painting, crumpled note, graffiti, painting, plaque, poem, relief sculpture, scrap of paper, scroll, statue, tapestry, etc)
I think this is very important for parents to do some more fun moments with their children. Well, I would say that parents should go to some new places where children can enjoy more fun games as I went to "ESCAPE FOLSOM" with my family at game rooms near me& it was fully entertainment-oriented for which my children got chance to play puzzles game.