They're Not Undead! They're Not Immune to Crits! Yaaay!

[the_gneech]

Well, tonight's session of jamesbarrett's D&D game was a mixed bag. We're going through the Dungeon Crawl Classics series module Iron Crypt of the Heretics, which is a sequel to The Blackguard's Revenge, which we also went through. These two modules focus on a) boatloads of undead, and b) lots of puzzles. The undead are fun for camstone's paladin 'cause he can smite 'em right and left, and are okay for lythandra's barbarian 'cause she does a boatload of damage even without critical hits. For sirfox's monk and my Celedras, they're a bit more of a problem, 'cause he can't inflict criticals, and I can't use my Skirmish damage against them.

So when, tonight, we encountered some driders, Josh and I both went, "Yaaay, things we can do extra hurt on!"

On the other hand, puzzles are always problematic in gaming, because if you're lucky the answer will be painfully obvious; if you're unlucky, you're going to spend the evening staring at each other and going, "Duh, I dunno, try this. Duh, I dunno, try that." Only rarely do puzzles challenge enough to satisfy, without being exercises in frustration. Unfortunately, by our choice of paths to take, we found ourselves facing two very tough puzzles, one right after the other.

The first was a pretty standard lever trap of the "you have to flip the various levers in the right order to open the door" variety, with the variation being that if you did it wrong you got zapped with a disintegration spell. Fortunately, jamesbarrett knows enough about dungeon design to have nerfed that a bit into just a boatload of damage, understanding full well how un-fun "You guessed wrong, roll up a new character!" is. Unfortunately, even with that nerf, we were loathe to experiment until we were fairly sure we had worked it out, for fear of using up all our healing ability before getting to the Big Bad Thing we knew was on the other side. Thus we spent a lot of time going around and around on various combinations on paper before we actually tried it a second time.

Then, after some relatively straightforward drider-slaughtering (in which every player got to do insane amounts of damage at least once, which is always satisfying), we were confronted with another puzzle in the form of what to do about the big ball of badness that we found. Every time there was violence, the thing grew, and (as there had been a lot of violence so far) it was already dangerously close to blocking us in. Much bigger and it would have started engulfing the party, the dungeon, and then the continent. (Just think of it as a cross between Katamari and a Sphere of Annihilation, and you're on the right track.)

So we figured that if bad juju made it grow, then good juju should make it shrink, and we spent the better part of an hour trying to heal it, turn it, sing it "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," whatever, all to no effect. Finally the NPC fighter/cleric cast a divination spell which told us we were carrying something that would negate it, and I happened to notice on our list of collected treasures a Portable Hole, which did the trick.

We were glad that worked, but also by this time we were all tired and a bit annoyed that none of the other stuff had worked -- which is an inherent problem with puzzles in an RPG. When presented with the premise "evil and violence makes this thing strong," the natural conclusion to us seemed to be that going all Vash the Stampede on it ("LOVE and PEACE! LOVE and PEACE!") should reverse it. "Throw a portable hole at it," on the other hand, came at us completely out of left field, even though it probably seemed perfectly obvious to the person designing the module.

On the ENWorld boards, in a thread about puzzles in D&D, I heard one house rule that I thought was interesting, which was that if the players spent more than 15-20 minutes of real time on a puzzle, the GM told them the answer to keep things moving -- and just didn't give them XP for it. That strikes me as probably being a good compromise ... after 20 minutes on any given piece of a single adventure, be it a puzzle or a combat, it does start to feel like work.

I haven't had it be that much of an issue when I run, partially because I don't use puzzles that much, and partially because when I do use puzzles, they're fairly simple ones. I think the most recent one that gave the characters a little trouble that I recall was when the PCs were up against an evil cleric surrounded by a force field -- and in that case the solution was actually just to pound on the force field until they knocked it down. The players still ended up a bit irritated by it, because they were looking around frantically for the "trick answer" when the actual trick was that there was no trick.

On the other hand, the reason I don't use puzzles is because they're so tricky to do right. I often receive compliments on my GMing skills, and I'm grateful for them, but part of my secret is that I edit out anything that I think is going to trip me up. ;)

-The Gneech

Comments

[the-lizard-rat.livejournal.com]

I never thought I'd see a Katamari and a Sphere of Annihilation in the same sentence. Two great tastes that have no business being anywhere near each other... ;) (There's a gnomish creation joke in there somewhere, but my brain is too tired to come up with it.)

I'd never heard of giving the answer like that and just not awarding the EXP... but then again I'm all about the hack and slash anyway so it's moot.

I've done the disintegration/lever trick before. It was a pick up game and we were just fartin' around for the night, so no one was too unhappy when the dice went bad and there was nothing left of the party. At all.

Lizard Rat out.
Tired Wolf in Albany NY

[jamesbarrett.livejournal.com]

Well, the real secret to the Ebon Egg was that it had to be cancelled out. The keying the word cancelled. Anything that could be used to negate it would have worked. A portable hole worked because it tried to move it elsewhere, thus negating it from where it was, and it resisted, thus burning itself and the portable hole up.

When the divination was cast, I wasn't able to tell you to go get the other thing, which by the very name of it would have given you answer, but instead had to give advice based on what you could do at that moment. The only thing on you, then, was the portable hole.

At least you didn't attack it and let it become sentient. The module did say to let you come up with your own solution but the things you tried I just didn't see as doing it, given the solutions they offered. As it was, it was a good thing you did destroy it because it was growing on it's own and would have become sentient on its own in just a few days anyway.

I was worried at how you were going to figure out how to destroy it actually. I didn't think you'd take nearly as long with the lock, but they did set it up that you would focus on the positions of the skulls and not just trying to learn the order. When you kept trying to make the skulls be one way or the other, I had to bit my tongue to keep from yelling out, "forget which is up or down and just turn them already."

Josh did verify more than once that the skulls moved the other ones despite which way it faced, which I kept hoping you would notice and realize meant which way it faced was irrelevant. Ah well. I wish I could have had the destruction of the Egg be more dramatic for you all, but sometimes saving the world is anti-climatic. -Frisk

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

o/~ driders of the storm... o/~

[hantamouse.livejournal.com]

I always thought a good puzzle was optional. Solving it would make the rest of the adventure easier, or reveal an extra treasure, but if the characters choked it wouldn't stop the game.

Would that work, or would the frustration still impact the game?

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

That depends on the group. For groups that do the standard "room-to-room dungeon clearing" it's probably fine. Our group is so plot-oriented, on the other hand, that if it's just a speed bump on the way to the monster at the bottom of the dungeon, it'll probably be ignored.

-The Gneech

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

*groan*

-TG

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

re: the skulls, it's also just a standard feature of lever puzzles that the answer is usually "all up" or "all down". So that's what we were aiming for. And usually that type of puzzle has some "you have to turn this one twice to get the order right," type of element, which is what got me fixated on the jade skull.

The problem with dungeon designers who were raised on computer games!

-TG

[jamesbarrett.livejournal.com]

Well, to be honest, it took me a while, as you all pondered, to realize myself that the one skull was up to indicate where to start. (and probably throw you off as well). Once that hit me, and realizing that each skull that got moved by another one became up as well, it occurred to me that the one up was the next one to turn. Since I made that realization without really thinking about what the solution actually was, I went ahead and had Nadira suggest it.

If the first mistake hadn't scared you off like it did, when you tried to turn them all up, moving the Jade skull twice, you would have realized that wasn't it either. I almost told you it wasn't then, but we (as a group) never quite committed to the actual doing of it. part of that was because I asked you specifically what you were about to do. I should have just went, "Okay, you try that, the Ruby skull turns, there's that baleful red light, and they all reset."

Maybe it would have saved some time, but I wanted to make sure you knew exactly what you'd done when I said it. As it was, this is the worst puzzle place I have, for a while. The lock was meant to be complicated and defeating the egg even I had to search the module to discover. At first, all I knew was "you can't fight it and kill it" which was bad enough. -Frisk

I'd've thought...

[sarek-ca.livejournal.com]

...singing "It's A Small World After All" would have solved the killer sphere problem with alacrity. But then I suppose, would be the question of what to do when the DM dies from having several people singing it at him at once. :)