A couple weeks ago – I can’t be bothered to remember when – I addressed the question of puzzles in RPGs by just stating, outright, that puzzles suck. And they do. Puzzles – the sorts of things that people understand as puzzles – really don’t work in the context of tabletop RPGs unless you’re willing to suspend a lot of disbelief and break some of the important bits of the game to fit them in. And if your players – or some of your players – aren’t willing to come along for that particular ride, they aren’t going to have any fun solving your latest cryptogram puzzle or trying to figure out to get the bulette, the halfling, and the potatoes across the river in a boat that can only hold one of those things at a time.

And for the first f$&%ing time ever, people actually MOSTLY understood what I was getting at. I barely had any morons screaming at me for declaring puzzles terrible or any other morons pointing at my article and saying “see, this is PROOF all puzzles in RPGs are bad.” Oh, sure, there were a few. But they were tiny, easily ignored little comments and quiet voices that no one bothered to argue with. People actually GOT what I was saying. That if YOU and YOUR GROUP like puzzles and ACCEPT the inherent limitations, you can have fun with puzzles. And if YOU and YOUR GROUP can’t handle the inherent limitations and HATE puzzles anyway, there’s no good, fun way to put them. And you shouldn’t bother.

I’m f$&%ing stunned. I honestly expected to spend this entire Long, Rambling Introduction™ here in the follow-up screaming at morons who thought I was justifying their own stupidity. I’m honestly not sure what to do now. Hell, I’m not even sure if I NEED a follow up. I mean, I did leave a sequel hook there suggesting that people who DON’T want to use puzzles should consider using something else instead. A word that starts with ‘p.’ And I’m sure people would pissed off at me if I didn’t provide a pertinent payoff. And man, wouldn’t that be a PROBLEM?

The word was ‘problem.’ I was going to explain the difference between solving puzzles and solving problems. But, frankly, without any sort of anger to drive me, I’m not sure I can get through an entire article. How does one right an article like this without anyone to yell at? It’s too undirected. Too open. Too unconstrained.

I’m not even sure how to begin.

Math Versus… I Don’t Know… Psychology or Something?

Okay, I guess I should start by explaining the difference between a puzzle and a problem. We agreed last time – which I still can’t get over – we agreed that a puzzle is a test of ingenuity or cleverness in which a question must be answered or a goal must be achieved, but the way to achieve the goal or answer the question isn’t obvious. The problem is, that definition is a bit too broad. Because, honestly, everything is a puzzle under that context. At least until you figure out the solution. But if we’re going to draw a line between puzzles and problems – which I’m saying aren’t puzzles – we need to be more precise. So, here’s the thing: a puzzle generally has one or more – but always a small number – of specific solutions. That is, the person presenting the puzzle has a solution in mind and the goal is to deduce, discover, or otherwise figure out that solution.

Puzzles are basically like math problems. Math problems have one answer. Or, when you start getting into things like quadratic equations and calculus, a set of specific answers. And when you come up with an answer, that answer can either be right or wrong. And frankly, that’s why puzzles have all of the constraints they have.

Think back to that example about the gargoyles guarding the door in that video I linked from Dead Gentelmen Productions’ JourneyQuest webseries. Two gargoyles guarding two doors. One always lies. One always tells the truth. How do you determine which door is the safe one to proceed through? Well, if you’re Glorion the fighter in that series, you slay one gargoyle and then ignore the other one protesting about how you DIDN’T just slay his friend. And then you throw the other gargoyle through one of the doors and see if the gargoyle lives or dies.

That’s an example of a Gordion Knot solution. And that name is based on an old myth about this city that had trouble picking kings and relied on crazy prophecies like “whoever shows up next Tuesday driving a blue cart will be the next king.” Seriously. One of their dumb prophecies involved a complicated knot of rope tied around a lynchpin. Whoever could undo the knot was going to rule the city, according to some oracle. Well, along comes Alexander the Great. He takes one look at the knot, takes out his sword, and cuts the rope to pieces. And because he was waving a sword around, everyone said that totally counted on a technicality and made him king.

Now, both of these situations represent both puzzles and problems. Glorion had a goal: he had to find the door that wouldn’t kill him. Alexander had a goal: he wanted to be king without having to go through the grisly business of killing enough people to end any arguments. Both had obstacles. Glorion had two identical doors, one of which would kill him. Alexander had a difficult to untie knot that he didn’t feel like working out. But Glorion and Alexander both rejected them as PUZZLES. They saw them only as PROBLEMS.

A puzzle is a problem with a CORRECT solution. A problem is a puzzle in which ANY SOLUTION will do.

That’s probably pretty clear, right? I mean, I don’t have to explain further. I’m not used to being agreed with and I’m not worked up into a frenzy, so I’m not really sure when to stop explaining. I guess I’ll just move on to the next section.

Games Versus Real Life

Now, here’s the thing: in most real-life situations when we have a goal and something keeping us from that goal and there isn’t an immediately obvious way of circumventing that obstacle – that’s what a PROBLEM really is – in most real-life problems, it really doesn’t matter how we achieve our goal. The goal is the important thing. That’s why we rarely encounter puzzles in the real world except in situations in which we’ve purposely chosen to do puzzles. Like when we’ve finished reading the comics in the newspaper. Or when we’ve bought a book of Sudoku puzzles. Or when we’re playing a Professor Layton game. Or when we’re at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Or when we’ve entered a contest.

In all of those situations – in real puzzle situations – we have to voluntarily agree to limit our behavior. Yes, we could just fill in random numbers and symbols in the Sudoku grid and say we technically “filled all of the boxes,” but we didn’t find the correct solution, did we. We aren’t really playing the game.

In almost all cases, puzzles are voluntary diversions. They are games. They work because we agree to play by their rules. But table-top role-playing games aren’t games, are they?

Umm.

Okay.

Wait. They are games. But they are a different kind of game. They are an open-ended game. They are purposely designed to mirror the same sort of open-endedness that real life purports to offer. Personal agency and free will are basically at the core of the game.

That means, to build a puzzle into a role-playing game, you have to do one of two things. Either, you have to get to the players to agree to suspend that core of open-ended free-will in the game for the sake of the puzzle OR you have to create a situation in which the characters in the game will agree to conform to the puzzle’s rules just like people in real life conform to such rules.

For example, Bilbo Baggins and Gollum agreed – in the story – to abide by the rules of the age-old riddle contest tradition. And your players might be willing to play a Jump-the-Pegs puzzle in a tavern to win free rooms. But if your players have to solve a Rubik’s Cube-like puzzle box to disable a magical cataclysm and it’s getting down to the wire and they aren’t getting anywhere, expect them to start looking for ways to just take apart the cube and reassemble it already solved. Unless, of course, that attempting to disarm the device in that way will actually set it off because of an ancient, magical, GM-imposed failsafe.

Because that IS a third option for designing puzzles. You can either convince the players to agree to break the rules of the RPG to enjoy the puzzle OR you can get the characters in the game to agree to play by the rules of the puzzle in the world OR you can create a puzzle that has to be solved by the rules because of the nature of the puzzle or the world.

The Problem with Making Anything Foolproof

If you want to include a puzzle and you don’t like the idea of getting the players to just stop playing an RPG to solve a puzzle and you can’t get the characters to just buy in to the puzzle’s rules, you can try to create puzzles whose rules can’t be broken. For example, if the heroes get into a riddle contest with a powerful sphinx, they can expect the sphinx to enforce the rules violently. And a magical bomb might react somewhat explosively to any attempt to disarm it except by deducing the proper code.

But, as Douglas Adams once observed:

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

And players in table-top role-playing games are ingenious fools. Stymied by the riddle, they might simply decide to slay the sphinx. And they might expend enough of the powerful aces up their sleeves to win, however hard you might make that fight. Or they might overestimate their chances and leave you with a dead party and a ruined campaign. Neither outcome is ideal. Meanwhile, they might take that magical bomb and stuff it inside their bag of holding and then hold the bag of holding under a lake to fill the extradimensional space with water to contain the explosion. Or they might just slap it with a dispel magic spell. Or they might teleport it to somewhere were it can’t hurt anyone.

And then you’ve got a problem. The problem is that you have to decide how to deal with their crazy Gordian Knot solution. And you can’t get emotional about it. Lots of GMs do.

Here’s the thing: when your players try to cut the Gordian Knot, they are doing so for one of two reasons: either they think they are actually coming up with a smart answer OR they are refusing to engage with the puzzle on its terms. And, in either case, if you fight them too hard on it, you’re going to upset them.

What do I mean by fighting them? Oh, come on! You know exactly what I mean. I mean telling them that the sphinx is obviously too powerful for them to fight and they’d better solve the riddle and then having it make a “warning attack” that hits on a ridiculously low number and does ridiculously high – but not fatal – damage to prove the point. Or telling them that they suddenly notice the magical bomb has a “astral quicksilver switch” that will cause the bomb to detonate if anything causes it to leave this plane of existence, even temporarily. BEFORE it leaves the plane of existence. The sort of thing that involves you suddenly changing the rules to force the players to discard their clever solution. Or anything that even looks like you’re suddenly changing the rules.

Players who think they are being smart are a bit sensitive to having the goal posts moved. To the point where even imposing a preplanned limitation you designed into the puzzle might be construed as moving the goal posts. And players who are trying to brute force through the puzzle are doing so because they don’t want to solve your stupid puzzle. They are frustrated by it. In either case, any limitation on their solution might be seen as a frustrating contrivance.

In other words, if the players do come up with a good Gordian Knot solution to your puzzle, assess it fairly like you would any other action, and if it could work, let it work. And give them the prize for solving the puzzle. Because RPGs are about solving problems, not solving puzzles anyway. And when it comes to solving problems, anything goes.

Wow. Okay. I got a lot of words out there without having to be angry about anything. So, let’s try another section. Let’s get away from puzzles and actually talk about problems and how to create them.

Causing Problems

A problem is just a puzzle that hasn’t been designed with a solution in mind. And, as such, it tends to have a lot fewer constraints on how it can be solved. So how do you design a good problem?

A good problem starts with a goal: something the players want. It might be a treasure, a bit of information, the object of a quest, or just passage from one location to another. It really doesn’t matter. Now, figure out a reason why they can’t just have the thing they want. What’s in their way? The treasure is locked inside a treasure chest. The bridge across the river has collapsed. The goblin doesn’t want to give them the information. And that’s it. Congratulations, you have a problem!

No. Seriously. I mean it. A problem is just a goal with something in the way. And if that sounds familiar, that’s because that’s also basically just the definition of any encounter ever. And this is the crux of the issue I’ve run into whenever I start talking about puzzle design with people. After I get done pointing out that puzzles don’t really fit into table-top RPGs in most cases because they require either the players or the characters to willingly accept contrived constraints or else require the GM to second guess the players and impose constraints on what they MIGHT do, the response is always, “I don’t mean puzzles like that. I mean open-ended stuff, like how to get past a series of alarms and traps and security monsters.”

Well, that’s just one or more f$&%ing encounters. And that’s what you design. Design the goal, design the obstacles, and then see what the players do and react accordingly.

“But, Angry,” they whine, “that’s not a puzzle!”

I KNOW! THAT’S WHAT I’M SAYING!

After going back and forth with people a lot about this sort of crap, what I’ve discovered is that people don’t actually know what they want. And I’m honestly stymied. Or, at least, I was. And then I realized what was really missing from this formula. What really turns “encounter design” into “problem design.” And it comes down to two things that some people might call opposite things. Because they are. Those things are clarification and obfuscation.

Okay, this is finally starting to flow. I just needed to get worked up about something. And apparently, hyperbolically repeating an argument I remember having is enough. Let’s keep it going. Next section!

Baffling Them with Bulls$&%

Realistically speaking, most encounters are pretty straightforward. There’s something you want over there, and there’s a monster between you and the thing. All you have to do is decide how to deal with the thing in front of you – for example, kill it – and then implement that strategy. So, what turns an encounter into something that someone might call a problem to be solved? Obfuscation.

Imagine, for example, the thing between you and the treasure is something you can’t – or won’t – kill. Imagine, for example, it is an orphaned puppy that has been trained to guard the treasure. And your character has some stupid moral objection to killing orphaned puppies. Now you have a problem to solve. And that, right there, is how you build a problem. Here’s the process.

Start with the goal. Now, place the obstacle. Now, figure out the most obvious or most likely strategy for bypassing the obstacle to reach the solution. Now, ask yourself why the heroes can’t just do that. Come up with an answer and, bam, you have a problem. It’s as simple as that. The party wants the treasure. But the treasure is guarded by a monster. Why can’t the party just kill the monster? The monster is protected from harm by a magical charm. It can’t be hurt. Now that’s a problem. The party has to cross the river. Why not just use the bridge? Because there is no bridge. Why can’t they just swim? Because the river has a swift-flowing current. Why not use a boat? There is none.

But you don’t have to stop at one level of obfuscation. You can keep complicating a problem by adding more levels of obfuscation. Why not just sneak past the monster? The monster has an excellent sense of smell. And there are no hiding places. Why not distract the monster and get it to run away? It’s chained up close to the treasure. The more layers of obfuscation you add, the harder the party will have to work to overcome the obstacle.

There’s also two different ways to add layers of obfuscation to a problem. As above, you can think through different strategies and add layers of obfuscation to each of those strategies. Or you can obfuscate the obfuscations. I’ll talk about that below. Because before you can obfuscate your obfuscations, you also need some clarity.

Of course, it IS possible to take this too far. It is possible – and it’s actually f$&%ing easy – to make a problem completely impossible with too many layers of obfuscation. Once you have a super sensitive, invincible guard creature that can’t be moved, and that has ranged attacks that glue down anyone trying to run past it, there’s very little a clever party can do about that without access to a disintegration spell.

To avoid making your problems impossible, you have to limit how many layers of obfuscation you add to a problem. Once you’ve added two or three, you’ve probably created a very difficult problem for most parties. If your party is particularly clever, you might learn that you can add three or four. Hell, you might have to. But at that point, you’re adding so many obfuscations you might as well just start constraining the solution and design puzzles instead. In fact, your players might want exactly that.

Beyond limiting your obfuscation, the other thing you have to do is clarify your problem. At least, for yourself.

Clearing Up Your Confusion

Obfuscation is a great thing for your players, but it’s a terrible thing for you. See, once you actually get down to running the situation in the game, your players are going to be proposing all sorts of different solutions and you need to be able to fairly assess the outcome of each potential situation. And the players are going to open their big-ole grab bags of character abilities and spells and magical items and obscure feats from sourcebooks you forgot you allowed at character generation. And your players are going to be using crazy things like logic, reason, and experimentation to arrive seek a solution. And that means there are going to be a lot of questions you have to answer. And those answers have to be accurate and consistent.

How long is the animal’s chain? How is it invincible, exactly? Does it instantly heal damage done? Does it shrug off all damage? What’s the source of the magic? Can it be dispelled? How is the chain fixed to the ground? Can the animal be charmed? Befriended? How big is it? How heavy?

The point is that, once you’ve figured out the basic goal, the basic obstacle, and the basic obfuscations, you’ve got to build a very clear picture in your head – or on paper – about how those things work. You need as much information as possible. You should, at the very least, be able to come up with a good prose description of the situation. Imagine that your scene is going to end up in a published adventure and that the particular problem you’re designing is going to be depicted on the cover of the adventure. Describe it to the artist.

Is there a mechanism that keeps the door locked? How does it work? Is there a trap? How does the trap work? What triggers it? What does the damage? Where and how is it concealed? What is it made out of? You have to be ready to answer any question, no matter how strange. And, because you’re creating an open-ended problem, YOU can’t decide what details matter and what details don’t. The players’ solution will be built from the details they ask for.

Okay. Still going strong. Let’s add another element to the mix. Obfuscation allows you to create problems and make them more difficult. Clarity empowers you to deal with potential solutions. But if all you do is obfuscate and clarify, your players only have what they bring with them. And that limits the puzzles they can solve.

Blocks to Push, Levers to Pull

When it comes to riddles and puzzles, you can help your players by giving them clues, right? Well, when it comes to open-ended problems, you can also help your players. But, instead of giving them clues, you can give them tools. You can give them blocks to push and levers to pull. That way, they aren’t limited just to the spells and abilities on their character sheets and whatever else they have in their brains.

When I say blocks or levers, I am referring to game elements that exist in the scene – or that can be found in a nearby scene and brought into the scene – that the players can use to build a solution. And they generally fall into two types. The ones that are obviously useful and the ones that are apparently useless.

Obviously useful tools are tools that interact somehow with the obstacle or one of the layers of obfuscation. For example, in the situation with the guardian orphan puppy with the excellent sense of smell, there might be a worn, chewed tennis ball covered in puppy saliva in a corner of the room. Or they might be puddles of highly stinky mud scattered around the room that might mask someone’s scent. Obviously useful tools are obviously purpose-built for the problem in question. And they often suggest a solution. Or at least part of a solution.

Apparently useless tools are less obviously useful. Which is why I call them that. They are generally game elements that the GM throws into the problem with no sense of how they might be used. For example, in the puppy’s yard, the GM might include a birdbath that provides a perch for an obnoxious bird that occasionally emits loud, hornking noises and that panics if anyone gets too close to it. Might it be useful in coming up with a solution? Who the hell knows. Such things are thrown in at random.

Obviously useful tools obviously reduce the problem’s difficulty by helping the party overcome parts of the obstacle. But they can also complicate the problem. A clever GM can build a complex problem by adding layers of obfuscation to the obviously useful tools. For example, those stinking mud puddles that mask a stealthy character’s scent? Imagine if they are volcanic mud-pits. They are extremely hot. Any character coated in the mud will be badly burned. To make use of such a tool, the party will have to overcome a different layer of obfuscation. Of course, another obviously useful tool can be added to the scene to help overcome the new layer of obfuscation. And that tool might have a layer of obfuscation as well.

If you repeat this process enough, you can build an entire point-and-click adventure game.

Apparently useless tools are a little trickier to work with. Every apparently useless tool actually makes the problem harder to solve. And that’s because players tend to assume that anything included in a game has a specific purpose and they will treat an open-ended problem like a close-ended puzzle if there are too many things with no obvious purpose. The players might assume that, when you included the hornking bird, you assigned it a specific use in the scene and they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure that out rather than just ignoring it and seeking another solution. In a sense, apparently useless tools are a layer of obfuscation in themselves. However, they can also add just the right level of complexity and fun to an otherwise simple, straightforward problem.

Whatever tools you add to a scene, though, it’s important to also understand exactly what your tools can do and how they work. Why does the bird hornk? What makes it hornk? How does the puppy feel about the hornking? Can the bird be killed? Will the puppy try to protect the bird? Will the bird try to protect the puppy? Yes, these are serious questions.

Nothing illustrates this s$&% better than the recent Legend of Zelda: Link to the Wild game on the Wii Switch. That game completely ruins the Legend of Zelda formula by throwing away carefully designed puzzles and well-made dungeons in favor of the same open-world crafting-and-survival-and-play-it-your-f$&%ing-way bulls$&% Ubisoft s$&%s out in three different annual franchises. Except LoZ: LttW actually does it pretty well. For example, in some places you encounter these switches that require electricity. Because, it’s Zelda. So, of course you have to build f$&%ing Redstone circuits. Now, you COULD solve the puzzles near those switches to connect a circuit from a source of power to a switch. OR you can just pile up a bunch of metal weapons between the battery and the switch.

And that works because, while the designers couldn’t be a$&ed to do some actual f$&%ing solid scenario design which USED TO BE A F$&%ING ART, they DID spend a lot of time deciding exactly how everything in the goddamned game works. Like deciding which things were made of metal and deciding that metal conducts electricity.

And that’s the key to giving your players tools – useful and useless. KNOW how those tools work in the world.

Yeah. Got some actual shouting in. I’m going to use that momentum to bring this baby home.

Don’t Get Attached to Your Problems

Building puzzles and problems and encounters actually isn’t THAT difficult. And honestly, most GMs don’t have as much trouble with it as they think they do. Seriously. I mean, it’s not as if it’s hard to come up with a goal, then put something in the way of the goal, and then figure out why the most obvious solution won’t work. And it doesn’t take much creativity to come up with fun useful and useless tools for the players to f$&% with. And to combine with their own giant-a$& pile of useful and useless tools provided by the game system. Where GMs do f$&% up is in trying to come up with the mechanical expression for all of that crap. How to assign stats and rules to that s$&%. But, as I’ve said, the important thing is to KNOW how the rules work – that is, how to f$&%ing adjudicate an action – and to know how the s$&% in your world actually works. Then, you can pretty much work out the interactions in the game, just like Legend of Zelda: Farcry Edition.

But there IS one last thing that lots of GMs f$&% up. They have this feeling that if the players aren’t expending enough resources or taking enough damage or making enough die rolls, they don’t deserve to solve the problem. The thing is, with these sorts of riddles and problems, if you’re adjudicating fairly, lots of solutions can come down to just one single die roll. Or no die rolls at all. Or a single spell might serve as the lynchpin to the entire solution. And I’ve seen GMs lose their goddamned minds over that. Or start adjudicating UNFAIRLY. Or start inventing reasons why the players’ solution DOESN’T WORK. Because they don’t think the players have earned their victory.

That’s the thing with problem-solving. Most of the actual problem solving happens inside the heads of the idiots solving the problems. The work, the challenge, is in figuring out the right tool or tools to use. What appears to be a very complicated stealth challenge might be completely solved with the application of a single sleep spell and a sneak attack. And that leads to a pissy little GM screaming on social media about how they can’t make good puzzles and problems because the players keep wrecking them with one clever spell.

That’s called SOLVING THE F$&%ING PROBLEM, DIPS$&%! That’s how it’s supposed to happen. Open-ended problems are OPEN. By their nature. The solutions themselves can be very simple or very complicated to execute. And complaining about that is completely misunderstanding the whole f$&%ing point. But then, lots of GMs think that the game isn’t actually challenging unless someone is losing hit points or rolling a die.

The entire point of putting an open-ended problem in front of your players instead of a constrained puzzle is to allow them to freedom to creatively use their tools – the ones in the scene and the ones on their sheet – to take apart the problem as easily as their dumb, squishy player brains allow.

In short: build the problem properly, adjudicate it fairly, and if the players manage to solve it with one spell or die roll, they win. And that’s working as f$&%ing intended.

But I know I’m talking to a wall here. Because the sorts of GMs who need this advice are also the sorts of GMs that lose their goddamned minds because sleep is a spell in the game that can totally wreck what is SUPPOSED TO BE a combat encounter. The same sort of shrieking baby who screams metagaming if the players lob Molotov cocktails at the trolls in the cave. And, at this point, I’m not going to get through to those morons.

But thank God they exist. Otherwise, I’d probably never get worked up enough to finish an article like this.

Anyway, I have to go take my blood pressure medication now.