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Originally Posted by KillerK
Thanks guys! This puzzle would be part of a campaign-ending dungeon crawl and certain pressure plates would have to be compressed at the same time in a particular pattern to open the door to the McGuffin. Stepping on wrong plates produces bad effects depending on the image/rune on each one (which would need Knowledge-ing or Deciphering to figure out what they mean) effects ranging from monsters being summoned, damaging elemental effects, confusion, and ability drain.
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Having an effect on failing isn't interesting unless the effect itself is interesting. Otherwise it's just a punishment. The punishment too should be interesting, for example: if the puzzles are supposed to be some sort of "test of strength", applying a strength drain on a failure while still opening the door would be an interesting failure. It'd be both thematically appropriate and isn't just a case of "wrong, try again" that is so often a thing. And if they fail and there are more riddles ahead, let them pass through that particular one.
Making things interesting is almost always a matter of presentation, and that's no less true in this case. Keep to a certain theme throughout the puzzles, let the mechanics of the encounters reinforce the narrative you're building.
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Clues would be interspersed throughout the dungeon to help the players figure out how to solve the puzzle if they get stumped/frustrated: what the runes mean/how to decipher them, clues about what the pattern is supposed to be, clues about what the damaging effects are if they get it wrong.
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Will the players know to search for these clues? Will they recognize the link between the clues and the puzzle if they come across the clues before the puzzle itself? Important questions to ask. You might want to consider foreshadowing the riddle somehow so the players know to find the clues as they move through the dungeon.
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I just remember some games, tabletop and CRPGs, that had fun puzzles and often in PBP the only obstacles are traps and combat, and an occasional riddle. It gets old after a while, no matter how cleverly the combat scenarios are set up.
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CRPGs are terrible places to draw inspiration from in terms of puzzles. Discounting the games which have
ie the player is able to type anything into the dialogue box, getting responses based on pre-programmed phrases |
a truly free dialogue system, riddles always have a few select options to choose from, all but one of which making at least partial sense. A custom made visual representation of a physical puzzle is also a super important factor is CRPGs, as are highlighted areas to look at: they give far more information than pure textual descriptions can, no matter how detailed the latter try to be.
Overall, be extremely prepared that the players will just try to brute force their way through the puzzle. And don't arbitrarily deny them ("The walls are made of adamantium! Sike!") either. You absolutely must instill a sense of motivation for the players to complete the puzzles. I know I probably sound extremely harsh on the idea of puzzles in tabletop games, but they are incredibly hard to do well.
General musing on the tropes of riddles: Riddles are an interesting feature in literature. As these sorts of roleplaying games are fairly new, they rely a lot on previously established tropes. Riddles happen to be a fairly iconic part of certain kinds of fantasy, namely because the Hobbit did it, as well as the sources from mythology. But in those works, the narrative is already determined: the answer to the riddle is known by the one in control of the characters. Thus, riddles are rarely in a story to make the audience wonder what the answer is: they're there to show the wit of the participants (I believe the Sherlock Holmes stories were rather revolutionary in that they made the audience wonder about the mystery along with Holmes, who just wasn't telling the audience everything - but don't quote me on that). And more often than not we know that the protagonist will succeed in solving the riddle. Riddles are more about the journey to solve it and what it tells about the people involved in it than it is about the answer. However, in roleplaying games riddles are there to test the wit of the player, completely reversing the point of the riddle: instead of the focus being on the process to find the answer, it becomes about the answer itself. The entire trope is turned on its head in the attempt to emulate it from literature and there's very little to be done to fix that. And that's why it's so dangerous to use.
The same does apply to general puzzles too, but in some different ways.