Riddle Puzzles

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

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

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

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

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

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