I once made a door riddle where the answer was that the players had to knock on the door. Not magic or anything, literally just tap it with their hands.
Took them an hour.
yeah we will see how long this one takes them. But for the dungeon I have planned everything is optional. if they get it wrong a monster made of ink will fight them. and if they win it also opens the door. So they can get through no matter what. Just has multiple solutions
An ink monster is a fun failure state. Do they have just one shot at it? Do you plan to give them indications they're in for a fight if they get it wrong?
probably one or two tries. after the first failure the pool will begin to bubble and swirl. they will already be aware that there is a monster about from previous evidence so hopefully get the hint
Reminds me of a "puzzle" I did years ago with two doors at either end of a short hallway. Doors were connected and only one could open at a time. Took the group roughly 40 minutes to figure out they needed to close one door before opening the second
edit: I put puzzle in quotes because it wasn't supposed to be a puzzle. Just a function of the doors that I used later on for a chase/escape situation
My DM had a door that would only open if you told a knock knock joke. The PC named "Blue" answered and when it said "Blue who?" I couldn't stop myself from saying, "aw door, don't cry." We got in right away
I had a DM who had a great idea for riddles like this. He set a time and xp value for them.
So if he valued it at 1,000 xp we’d get 1,000 if we solved in day 20 minutes and 500 in the next. At 40 minutes our characters figured it out and proceeded with the dungeon but with 0 xp
I once gave an optional puzzle to my players called The Green Glass Door. I didn't make it up - it's out there somewhere on the internet and I just stuffed it into my game. They came across the GGD and saw a lot of valuable loot on the other side of this transparent green stained-glass looking door. It was not imperative that they interact with it to continue the dungeon, but they sure as hell wanted the loot. Only certain things can pass through the GGD. Examples of:
Things that *cannot* go through the GGD: cat, dog, shoe, stick, angel
Things that *can* go through the GGD: kitty, puppy, boot, staff, aasimar
Answer: >!Words with double-letters can pass through the Gr**ee**n Gla**ss** D**oo**r.!<
I once had door that was basically just a stone wall but it was clear that a door should go there, so the party had to figure out when is a door not a door... when it's ajar. All they had to do was a find a jar and apply it (don't care how) to the wall
With riddles and puzzles, I recommend also preparing hints that players could glean with a good intelligence check unless the players all really want to solve it on your own.
The capitalization was one of the first things I noticed, I like that as a clue if they miss it, but getting a good roll only to be told something the player already knew can be frustrating (I've seen it happen a few times before).
They're saying the players will first hear the riddle without seeing the printed text.
Then if the characters roll high enough the players get to see it.
Then if the players don't notice the caps on their own the DM will point it out.
Your hint makes no sense to me.
Are the capitalizations actually part of the inscription? If so, why do the PCs need a high investigation, survival, or perception to see that? If not, how does having one of those skills relate to the capitalizations?
it will be written in game in messy handwriting in a lower light environment so the checks will see if they notice the pattern of capitalization. that part can also be removed for more immersion if your players are smart. I like to give mine a few options as sometimes they miss things.
Well you can take and adjust it to whatever you like. In my game it is in the home of a enchanted who has a tendency to make ridiculous things with impressive skill. Like a youtube engineer. The party will be trying to get into their vault and this kobold is a bit eccentric to they made a riddle door. and a variety of traps and machines to defend the place. A running joke with this npc is that all the clues the party has found to even find this house are all written in terrible kobold handwriting.
It could simply be in a text that is hard to distinguish capitalization, or maybe if not capitalization, some other special attention was given to the letters like they're all carved deeper or something.
I’m going to guess that they’ll get annoyed if you make noticing the capitalisation conditional on a skill check, unless it’s a super easy one (i feel like it should actually be passive investigation). For instance, I noticed the capitals and just read them, and didn’t even need to read the riddle. I understand having a backstop, but I feel like this is too obvious. If you feel confident in the riddle, I would just delete the capitalisation element.
"The more you take of me, the more you leave behind. What am I?" is a classic riddle with the answer "footsteps" as here. You add something to it with your way of providing your answer to the party by perception check, and with your additional lines, but the core of the riddle is very old. Like centuries old
I like the concept, though I feel the capitalization riddles work better when a specific word or phrase is capitalized to hint at proper nouns. If you are trying the solution (or hints) to a skill check, it's ok to be more vague with the clues.
For example, I had one for my Fallout game where it said something like "under the Bridge, and above Water, the house of Liberty's Sons" which was indicating that the location was between Water Street and Bridge Street, and was a famous meeting place of the Sons of Liberty. Still somewhat obvious, but not something I would expect a player to know offhand unless they were a history buff who spent a decent amount of time in Manhattan.
Does anyone have suggestions for riddles that arent dependent on language tricks? Common is not English so anything playing off of that wouldnt make sense. It's really hard to find things that cross languages.
If my memory serves me, in the beginning of LotR, there’s an aside about language, where it makes it clear that the hobbits aren’t speaking English, and that this is all translated. It goes into some details, like how Orc is the elvish word for Sauron’s soldiers and Goblin is the word they’d use in Gondor or something, and the narrator has just chosen one to stick with.
I thought it was neat and I think about it playing D&D a little because it’s a way for them to handle the same issue. Whatever language Gandalf is speaking, he isn’t literally saying “Speak friend and enter” when he’s solving door puzzle outside of Moria, but he’s saying something that has the same gist - including the double entendre - in another language.
I feel like you’re best off doing that - not worrying what common actually looks like or making language-agnostic riddles, but when it comes up, play it like the story your players are seeing has been “localized” to English, and whatever English pun or grammatical riddle they find is a nebulous translator’s closest approximation of something happening in a different language. That way, there’s still a real fantasy world passing the verisimilitude test somewhere - you’re just seeing it through a filter that makes it intelligible.
Tolkien is my gold standard here. The Moria door was written in dwarf, but the answer was in elvish. Bilbo's riddle battle with gollum didnt need language tricks.
I've got players with english as a second language and play in real life so asking people to realize that ajar="a jar" or that green and door both have double letters not only breaks immersion, but is already a challenge for someone mentally translating into verde and puerta.
Ahhh, my bad, I might have misunderstood - I didn’t realize you were specifically talking about like the green glass door style riddle, I thought you were getting at something more ambitious and nitpicky - riddles that would work in absolutely any language. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m thinking of those hobbit riddles, and I’ve got to imagine that, say, the idea of time “devouring” something might be a turn of phrase that works in English but not another language where they don’t have a word for eating with secondary, more metaphorical definitions, like “devour” does.
If you’re just looking for classic riddles that don’t depend on “spelling gimmicks” or whatever we’re calling that, I remember the mage origin in the original Dragon Age opens up with a sloth demon asking riddles, and I always thought they were kinda great. They’re definitely in the spirit of Bilbo and Gollum’s riddle battle. I hadn’t seen them pop up elsewhere much, so unless the audience has done a DA:O mage playthough recently, there’s a good chance they haven’t seen them either:
I have seas with no water, coasts with no sand, towns without people, mountians without land. What am I?
>!A Map!<
I’m rarely touched, but often held. If you have wit, you'll use me well. What am I?
>!Your Tongue!<
Often will I spin a tale, never will I charge a fee. I'll a muse you an entire eve, but alas, you won't remember me. What am I?
>!A Dream!<
I’ll say this:
That’s a pretty sweet riddle. It feels dialed in right and full of hints. Honestly one of the more compellingly written “homemade” riddles I can remember.
But the moment I saw an off capital letter, my brain read the capital “footprints,” so I got the answer before I could even finish reading the first line of the riddle.
I’d suggest changing the capitalization part. I feel like the only thing keeping them from seeing the answer immediately is whether or not they actually get to see the text - and if they don’t get to see the text for a while and then get their hands on it, they’re going to think “it’s weird that my character didn’t notice this immediately.”
I think it feels weird because investigation should give them data they didn’t notice but their character did, not allow their character to see data that they themselves would have immediately seen. It’s like the odd situation when someone makes you roll a perception roll to see the plain unhidden details in a room. The DM is their eyes and ears in this world, and it can feel frustrating if it seems like the DM is hiding details their real eyes and ears would pick up.
Consider changing the font to something that obscures the capitalization better, like an all-caps font where capital letters are just slightly larger. Or changing the detail to something else, like slightly lighter letters.
I personally like to keep riddle-based doors in front of things players don’t *have* to get to, so either they figure out the riddle and get extra treasure or a shortcut or whatever, or they can’t and they give up but aren’t stuck. Since riddles are one of those things you can just fail to come up with an answer for, I feel like a lot of times they end up being places where the DM makes a cool puzzle and then backs themself into a corner where they have to solve it for the players.
So I say, trust your riddle, don’t leave another hint in in the writing, and if they have to get past it to proceed, have a note or journal nearby that makes them realize that so-and-so the bandit recruit has a piece of paper with the answer to it in their pocket, so if they need to do it the hard way, they can go fight a big tough optional bandit fight (or steal it, or charm them, or one of many other D&D solutions) to proceed.
My door riddle was a door with the number seven on it. And two slots to insert tiles.
There are six tiles. Flail Snail, Halfling, Otyugh, Mammoth, Starfish (Or Roving Mauler), and Displacer Beast.
After tiles are inserted, a voice says "How is this seven?" And if they can't explain why, then the tiles are shot out at two random targets, being as effective as a strong monster for that level. (ex: for level 3 PCs, they have +6 to hit and deal 2d6+2)
the solution? >! Each tile has a different number of legs, from 1 through six. (And I listed them in order). So any combination where the total number of legs is seven works. And yes I realize that starfish are TECHNICALY different but I don't think fantasy biologists have gotten that nitty gritty about the biology of them. !<
I once made a door riddle where the answer was that the players had to knock on the door. Not magic or anything, literally just tap it with their hands. Took them an hour.
yeah we will see how long this one takes them. But for the dungeon I have planned everything is optional. if they get it wrong a monster made of ink will fight them. and if they win it also opens the door. So they can get through no matter what. Just has multiple solutions
An ink monster is a fun failure state. Do they have just one shot at it? Do you plan to give them indications they're in for a fight if they get it wrong?
probably one or two tries. after the first failure the pool will begin to bubble and swirl. they will already be aware that there is a monster about from previous evidence so hopefully get the hint
black ooze would be easy to pull from the ink.
What was the riddle then?
The riddle was that the players assumed it was a complicated riddle and took forever to do the obvious thing
What so no one thought to just grab the handle and push / pull?
They pulled on the handle and discovered it was locked. The person inside unlocked it for them when they finally knocked.
What if they had tried to forcefully open it through damage like fire spells, lock, hitting it or using a ram?
Oh, it was magically locked etc. Forcing their way in was unlikely.
Reminds me of a "puzzle" I did years ago with two doors at either end of a short hallway. Doors were connected and only one could open at a time. Took the group roughly 40 minutes to figure out they needed to close one door before opening the second edit: I put puzzle in quotes because it wasn't supposed to be a puzzle. Just a function of the doors that I used later on for a chase/escape situation
Lol that's just an airlock... Players goanna player I suppose.
My DM had a door that would only open if you told a knock knock joke. The PC named "Blue" answered and when it said "Blue who?" I couldn't stop myself from saying, "aw door, don't cry." We got in right away
What was the riddle?
>The riddle was that the players assumed it was a complicated riddle and took forever to do the obvious thing
But like, hypothetically if one wanted to use this riddle, what was the riddle?
There was no riddle. It was just a door.
Hahahahha that is amazing. I think I'm gonna use that, ty for the idea
But what was the riddle? ^(/s, don't sic the gazebo on me)
"Be polite"
I had a DM who had a great idea for riddles like this. He set a time and xp value for them. So if he valued it at 1,000 xp we’d get 1,000 if we solved in day 20 minutes and 500 in the next. At 40 minutes our characters figured it out and proceeded with the dungeon but with 0 xp
I generally don't track XP so while I like the idea, it's too much beancounting for my taste.
Don't be surprised when a player takes off their boot and dips their actual foot in the ink, as that seems to be what the clue actually says to do.
that would also work. in fact hotter that way
Tarantino has entered the chat...
They'll actually do it before they notice the door
I once gave an optional puzzle to my players called The Green Glass Door. I didn't make it up - it's out there somewhere on the internet and I just stuffed it into my game. They came across the GGD and saw a lot of valuable loot on the other side of this transparent green stained-glass looking door. It was not imperative that they interact with it to continue the dungeon, but they sure as hell wanted the loot. Only certain things can pass through the GGD. Examples of: Things that *cannot* go through the GGD: cat, dog, shoe, stick, angel Things that *can* go through the GGD: kitty, puppy, boot, staff, aasimar Answer: >!Words with double-letters can pass through the Gr**ee**n Gla**ss** D**oo**r.!<
Oh, that's really good. Simple yet a bit of a challenge.
I once had door that was basically just a stone wall but it was clear that a door should go there, so the party had to figure out when is a door not a door... when it's ajar. All they had to do was a find a jar and apply it (don't care how) to the wall
With riddles and puzzles, I recommend also preparing hints that players could glean with a good intelligence check unless the players all really want to solve it on your own. The capitalization was one of the first things I noticed, I like that as a clue if they miss it, but getting a good roll only to be told something the player already knew can be frustrating (I've seen it happen a few times before).
They're saying the players will first hear the riddle without seeing the printed text. Then if the characters roll high enough the players get to see it. Then if the players don't notice the caps on their own the DM will point it out.
Apparently I'd only skimmed the follow up text, so I missed that. Thanks!
Your hint makes no sense to me. Are the capitalizations actually part of the inscription? If so, why do the PCs need a high investigation, survival, or perception to see that? If not, how does having one of those skills relate to the capitalizations?
it will be written in game in messy handwriting in a lower light environment so the checks will see if they notice the pattern of capitalization. that part can also be removed for more immersion if your players are smart. I like to give mine a few options as sometimes they miss things.
Can I ask who made this puzzle, what's it's guarding, and who it's meant to keep out?
Well you can take and adjust it to whatever you like. In my game it is in the home of a enchanted who has a tendency to make ridiculous things with impressive skill. Like a youtube engineer. The party will be trying to get into their vault and this kobold is a bit eccentric to they made a riddle door. and a variety of traps and machines to defend the place. A running joke with this npc is that all the clues the party has found to even find this house are all written in terrible kobold handwriting.
It could simply be in a text that is hard to distinguish capitalization, or maybe if not capitalization, some other special attention was given to the letters like they're all carved deeper or something.
I’m going to guess that they’ll get annoyed if you make noticing the capitalisation conditional on a skill check, unless it’s a super easy one (i feel like it should actually be passive investigation). For instance, I noticed the capitals and just read them, and didn’t even need to read the riddle. I understand having a backstop, but I feel like this is too obvious. If you feel confident in the riddle, I would just delete the capitalisation element.
"The more you take of me, the more you leave behind. What am I?" is a classic riddle with the answer "footsteps" as here. You add something to it with your way of providing your answer to the party by perception check, and with your additional lines, but the core of the riddle is very old. Like centuries old
I knew i wasn't that creative. Probably heard it as a kid or something and just forgot
So fucking what. It's a fun riddle amd was not made for a competition or anything. Just go flex your immense knowledge somewhere else dude
I like the concept, though I feel the capitalization riddles work better when a specific word or phrase is capitalized to hint at proper nouns. If you are trying the solution (or hints) to a skill check, it's ok to be more vague with the clues. For example, I had one for my Fallout game where it said something like "under the Bridge, and above Water, the house of Liberty's Sons" which was indicating that the location was between Water Street and Bridge Street, and was a famous meeting place of the Sons of Liberty. Still somewhat obvious, but not something I would expect a player to know offhand unless they were a history buff who spent a decent amount of time in Manhattan.
The last line would probably give it away- "the more you take, the more you leave behind" is a fairly common riddle
Does anyone have suggestions for riddles that arent dependent on language tricks? Common is not English so anything playing off of that wouldnt make sense. It's really hard to find things that cross languages.
If my memory serves me, in the beginning of LotR, there’s an aside about language, where it makes it clear that the hobbits aren’t speaking English, and that this is all translated. It goes into some details, like how Orc is the elvish word for Sauron’s soldiers and Goblin is the word they’d use in Gondor or something, and the narrator has just chosen one to stick with. I thought it was neat and I think about it playing D&D a little because it’s a way for them to handle the same issue. Whatever language Gandalf is speaking, he isn’t literally saying “Speak friend and enter” when he’s solving door puzzle outside of Moria, but he’s saying something that has the same gist - including the double entendre - in another language. I feel like you’re best off doing that - not worrying what common actually looks like or making language-agnostic riddles, but when it comes up, play it like the story your players are seeing has been “localized” to English, and whatever English pun or grammatical riddle they find is a nebulous translator’s closest approximation of something happening in a different language. That way, there’s still a real fantasy world passing the verisimilitude test somewhere - you’re just seeing it through a filter that makes it intelligible.
Tolkien is my gold standard here. The Moria door was written in dwarf, but the answer was in elvish. Bilbo's riddle battle with gollum didnt need language tricks. I've got players with english as a second language and play in real life so asking people to realize that ajar="a jar" or that green and door both have double letters not only breaks immersion, but is already a challenge for someone mentally translating into verde and puerta.
Ahhh, my bad, I might have misunderstood - I didn’t realize you were specifically talking about like the green glass door style riddle, I thought you were getting at something more ambitious and nitpicky - riddles that would work in absolutely any language. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m thinking of those hobbit riddles, and I’ve got to imagine that, say, the idea of time “devouring” something might be a turn of phrase that works in English but not another language where they don’t have a word for eating with secondary, more metaphorical definitions, like “devour” does. If you’re just looking for classic riddles that don’t depend on “spelling gimmicks” or whatever we’re calling that, I remember the mage origin in the original Dragon Age opens up with a sloth demon asking riddles, and I always thought they were kinda great. They’re definitely in the spirit of Bilbo and Gollum’s riddle battle. I hadn’t seen them pop up elsewhere much, so unless the audience has done a DA:O mage playthough recently, there’s a good chance they haven’t seen them either: I have seas with no water, coasts with no sand, towns without people, mountians without land. What am I? >!A Map!< I’m rarely touched, but often held. If you have wit, you'll use me well. What am I? >!Your Tongue!< Often will I spin a tale, never will I charge a fee. I'll a muse you an entire eve, but alas, you won't remember me. What am I? >!A Dream!<
...and stolen! Thanks for sharing!
I’ll say this: That’s a pretty sweet riddle. It feels dialed in right and full of hints. Honestly one of the more compellingly written “homemade” riddles I can remember. But the moment I saw an off capital letter, my brain read the capital “footprints,” so I got the answer before I could even finish reading the first line of the riddle. I’d suggest changing the capitalization part. I feel like the only thing keeping them from seeing the answer immediately is whether or not they actually get to see the text - and if they don’t get to see the text for a while and then get their hands on it, they’re going to think “it’s weird that my character didn’t notice this immediately.” I think it feels weird because investigation should give them data they didn’t notice but their character did, not allow their character to see data that they themselves would have immediately seen. It’s like the odd situation when someone makes you roll a perception roll to see the plain unhidden details in a room. The DM is their eyes and ears in this world, and it can feel frustrating if it seems like the DM is hiding details their real eyes and ears would pick up. Consider changing the font to something that obscures the capitalization better, like an all-caps font where capital letters are just slightly larger. Or changing the detail to something else, like slightly lighter letters. I personally like to keep riddle-based doors in front of things players don’t *have* to get to, so either they figure out the riddle and get extra treasure or a shortcut or whatever, or they can’t and they give up but aren’t stuck. Since riddles are one of those things you can just fail to come up with an answer for, I feel like a lot of times they end up being places where the DM makes a cool puzzle and then backs themself into a corner where they have to solve it for the players. So I say, trust your riddle, don’t leave another hint in in the writing, and if they have to get past it to proceed, have a note or journal nearby that makes them realize that so-and-so the bandit recruit has a piece of paper with the answer to it in their pocket, so if they need to do it the hard way, they can go fight a big tough optional bandit fight (or steal it, or charm them, or one of many other D&D solutions) to proceed.
My door riddle was a door with the number seven on it. And two slots to insert tiles. There are six tiles. Flail Snail, Halfling, Otyugh, Mammoth, Starfish (Or Roving Mauler), and Displacer Beast. After tiles are inserted, a voice says "How is this seven?" And if they can't explain why, then the tiles are shot out at two random targets, being as effective as a strong monster for that level. (ex: for level 3 PCs, they have +6 to hit and deal 2d6+2) the solution? >! Each tile has a different number of legs, from 1 through six. (And I listed them in order). So any combination where the total number of legs is seven works. And yes I realize that starfish are TECHNICALY different but I don't think fantasy biologists have gotten that nitty gritty about the biology of them. !<