>modern players want to roll an Intelligence check rather than actually solve puzzles or figure things out as players>yet they always want turn-based combat systems and would never settle for opposed Strength checks to see who diesWhy is this?
>>98844102Daggerheart solves this
>>98844102NGL, I'm too retarded to figure out most puzzles in a ttrpg. For whatever reason my brain just fizzles out when it comes to that shit, especially if it's a riddle or something since my answers are practically never what the GM is thinking of. I usually just sit back and let someone else handle the puzzles, even if my character is supposed to be the brainy one. So, yeah. I wouldn't mind being able to skip puzzles with a dice roll, though I recognize it's entirely on me and my deficient brain.
>>98844102I mean, I like a puzzle as much as the next person who likes puzzles. But this game is about whether your character has the ability to solve the problems, not you. You're just kind of steering them around, pointing them at things and deciding their behaviors. As characters who live in that (presumably) fantastical world, they just know or would think of things differently than you, which could mean that relying on their knowledge and intellect may just be the better solution.
>>98844143GMs commonly make the puzzles way too hard. Average or tough puzzles should be left for actual puzzle books or whatever and in a ttrpg a "put the square piece in the square hole" kind of a puzzle should already be considered a moderate challenge. I started making sure that any puzzles I include could probably be figured out by my dog, and the players still sometimes get stumped for a little while but then always solve them without taking too long, and they feel very smart about themselves. There's no point putting in hardcore puzzles into a ttrpg.I also (almost) always include some way of bypassing the puzzle, be it breaking the door or dismantling the mechanism. In D&D and similar derivatives it's never an INT check though, because INT is a wizard stat and wizards shall be fucked at every corner. I wouldn't mind an INT roll on a puzzle in a Call of Cthulhu game, though obviously I would suggest trying to solve it first for fun.
>>98844102I think puzzles are kind of boring, open ended tactical situations are a lot more interesting.
>>98844102>Only modern players do thatPeople who are too stupid or lazy always preferred to roll instead of solving puzzls. Stop pretending is anything new, it's just more common
>>98844102Are these "modern players" in the room with us now? If yes then I think the core of the problem is structure. Combat, at least in rpgs with tactical combat, has structure. Initiative, turns, specific actions to take, win/lose conditions etc, while puzzles, most of the time along with everything else lack this structure and tend to fall in the "roll skill/attribute combination to solve problem or not" category. This is both a game design problem and a GM problem but it's mostly a GM problem since they are way too lazy and stupid to actually provide a structured world governed by it's own procedures even if you provide the rules for it.>I can't be bothered to track the weight of each item my players pick up and remind them of their carry limits and encumbrance.>Why do modern players ignore encumbrance and end up carrying a shipping containers mass and weigt of temu adventuring gear?And yes this kind of approach bleeds into everything, from puzzles to social encounters and wilderness travel.See. The problem is you.
Puzzles that have only one solution often come down to trying to read the GM's or designer's mind. Those are boring, as at best the players are doing what you expected and at worst they simply fail.Open-ended problems where players come up with surprising solutions, that's where it's at.
>>98844311>Puzzles that have only one solution often come down to trying to read the GM's or designer's mind.Yes. There was a whole genre of games like that back in the ye olden times. They were very popular.
>>98844102Combat is fun. Trying to guess whatever you've decided on as the correct answer to your puzzle is not.
>>98844271And more common chiefly because of the larger playerbase. The bigger a pond is, the more likely someone's pissed in it.>>98844306>played college ball, you know.jpeg
>>98844331You know nothing of the wonders I've seen.
>>98844306NANITES
>>98844224>there is a glass key at the bottom of an acid lake, what do?>i try to solve the puzzle.>okay, roll Intelligence!>21.>you figure out you can drain the lake by boring into the lakebed from the next dungeon level down, then Levitate the key into the door to open it without touching the acid-coated surface.gets you right back to the character drama instead of dungeon exploration (i.e. filler) :)
>>98844102Combat is formulaic, ordered and understood equally.Meanwhile actual GM problems or riddles are entirely situational to their descriptive ability, don't have that clear formula to understand them, and THEN require the puzzle to actually be good and balanced but difficult.It'd be like running an encounter for three people who've never played DnD before. You don't get to explain the rules beforehand, or during it (as that's alike to explaining the problem), just tell them what works and what doesn't.Now most players will give it a crack, but between that and the need for verbal descriptions, mean the GM has to make something they can reliably describe in a way that the players can't be ambiguous about.Moreover, same as the hypothetical new guys need to be given dice to clue them in that they need to roll for things, the players do need to be given an indication on where to start on the puzzle, as otherwise the GM could be thinking of any solution, and it becomes more about reading the GM than PC's working a room.All that comes together to mean puzzles without int checks for clues need to be either relatively easy, or will be functionally unsolvable.Reality you should set decently complex puzzles, but then give your PC's an int/wis/know roll for clues periodically.
>>98844102Personally I find it more fun to solve the puzzle but I do think that players should be able to roll Intelligence checks to get clues/hints from the DM. That way you get both approaches at once, players exercise their brains and the character's stats have a meaningful impact on the situation.
>>98844102The same problem as with fighting game tutorials - instead of one specific solution, people prefer open ended answers where there is no expected course of action, just the goal you have freedom to achieve in any way.
>>98844102The whole point of rolling characters is they aren't you, and your real player ability and knowledge don't impact them.
>>98844353>>there is a glass key at the bottom of an acid lake, what do?solution has to be base
>>98844339I couldn't solve Monkey's Island 2 on hard for over a decade (other than through trying all items) because the game included an untranslatable pun in a puzzle and I wasn't playing in English.At the table, something like that simply isn't tenable.
>>98844102>modern players want turn-based combat systems rather than actually fighting to the death as players to see who diesWhy is this?
I've never seen thisThen again I'm perma gm and there's no way in hell you are getting through without figuring out which wire to cutYou only have 3 rounds left btw, get to cracking
>>98844353Are you just replying to random people?
>>98844102Nobody at my table has ever tried to skip the whole puzzle. The go-to justification is "I'm stumped, but my character should not be" and we let them roll for a hint/something their character should be thinking even if they aren't.Same difference more or less, but it keeps the mood.
>>98844271>People who are stupid or lazy always preferred to play the actual game as intended, instead of acting like rancid homopoof theatre kids.Fuck I wish it were more common to play the actual game these days, instead you fags are more common than ever.
>>98845022So you acknowledge that the intent of the game is that a player's character is what should be interacting with the world through their stats, but you still ignore that for this one specific aspect of play. Why? And why not for everything else as well? Those questions are rhetorical, every player know why - in the first case, because a certain subset of DMs love to feel like a smartarse while actually being incredibly stupid people who're shit at DMing, so rather than designing an actual encounter that functions within the rules of the game everyone is ostensibly playing - which you can't do - you look up some random puzzle online that's impossible to figure out with specific knowledge the players don't have, change a few words around to pretend you came up with it, and then sit there like a big smug poof; and in the second case because if you had to actually fight your players physically you'd lose every time, and if your players had to try to seduce your NPCs through you then you'd be forced to confront your repressed homosexuality.
>>98845030It's quite easily because there's a roleplaying aspect to the roleplaying game. The player who's playing the smart guy should be given a chance to roleplay as the smart guy ahead of just rolling out the smartness via dice.If you want to bring a sword to the table and flex your muscles you're entirely allowed to. There aren't any goblins to wrestle aforehand though.
>>98844353You're being cunty, but "key at the bottom of a pool of acid" is exactly the kind of open minded tactical situation I was talking about. There are a bunch of different solutions (lol) that could be implemented to get a key out of a pool of acid.As others have said, too often "puzzles" are just annoying pixel bitching or attempting to read the GMs mind.
>>98844102Because you suck at designing puzzles and your players don't want to deal with your bullshit.
>>98844102Probably because the puzzles are shit, poorly described, and fit poorly with the rest of the game. You could hand them a Rubik's cube and tell them to solve it before they can move on, but what would be the point? If I wanted to solve a Rubik's cube I'd dig out the one I own and solve it in my own time.
>>98844102Because your puzzles suck, dude.
>>98845311This is pretty much always the cause of this issue. And it very commonly stems from the GM doing a shitawful job of describing it and refusing to just show a picture of it because then it would be obvious what video game he copied it from.
>>98844102Combat is in-world immersive problem solving using your character's abilities.Puzzles are external problem solving usually using non-immersive methods since they are figured out using out-of-game knowledge of the players.This is often why people like OSR-style room searching 'puzzles' looking for clues, a diegetic act, but dislike most other puzzles, which are generally non-diegetic.
>>98844553This is unironically the actual best answer. However, most GM's just look up 'Puzzles for a dungeon' and plop it in while holding the answer key so they don't actually know how to give good hints to nudge the players/PCs to the answer without giving it away. Because of that they don't want to actually give hints.
>>98844108Lol shit game for retards that isn't even played by the people that put it out
>>98844878>and I wasn't playing in English.You deserve it
>>98844102Puzzles the player has to solve don't connect as 1:1 as combat does, because while a player can make their character do anything they could conceivably do, solving a puzzle relies on their own intellect, so their 200 IQ wizard is still limited by their own intelligence.
>>98846041I literally stopped putting puzzles in my dungeons after my players spent half an hour trying to figure one out and couldn't.
>>98844102Combat is fun, the puzzles you pulled out of a kid's book aren't.
>>98846129I'd just give them each an insight check every 10 minutes, I can't stand my players being bored because they don't think like I expect them to.
>>98846140I gave them a hint that each one of the seven symbols represented one of the schools of magic. What they couldn't figure out was that the wizard needed to cast Magic Aura on each of them to match the symbols. They just cut their losses and left the dungeon with whatever loot they could scrape up.
>>98844102I think there was some kind of Cthulhu based board game that came with one of those sliding tile puzzles. The GM would scramble it, hand it to the person who found it, and they rolled to see how many moves they could make on it per turn. They could then pass it to someone else who could do the same. The game was a steady race against time so spending turns fucking with a sliding puzzle was definitely a negative, so the best play was to just hand it over the best IRL puzzle geek to knock that shit out while the other guys advanced other elements.Do note, we collectively hated that god damn thing when it was used because it was solely something that slowed the game down and offered no real gameplay benefit besides some novelty bullshit. If you sucked dick at puzzles but your character had high value generation for slide moves, you wasted time. If you were good at puzzles but your character generated low slide values, you wasted time. If you were good at both? You still wasted time because a mission critical component was never locked behind that puzzle (usually a strong item of some sort or maybe it was some kind of curse).So, just because something exists that fills the role you want, doesn't mean it's a good idea.
>>98846154If you want to share what your puzzle was you'll need to give more context because from your description it's not clear what the point of the puzzle was or how the players were supposed to figure it out.
>>98846326It was in a circle on the floor with a obvious door at the center of it circle that if they solved it would have opened to reveal a staircase down deeper into the dungeon. They figured out that they had to cast detect magic to find out the tiles representing each symbol we're not charged with magic. What they couldn't figure out is that they had to place the magic Aura of each school on the matching symbol. I don't think that's too obscure because I came up with the idea in just a few minutes so I figured they were smart enough to figure it out but they weren't.
>>98846334And how were they supposed to solve that last step? Were there any hints nearby or previous puzzles that worked similarly? Or were the players just supposed to guess?
>>98844102
>>98844102>modern players want to roll an Intelligence check rather than actually solve puzzles or figure things out as playersNo, they want to play the role of their character, not use meta knowledge to solve problems. Bad players do what you describe; good players will either not bother if their character is too stupid or handle it in character if they aren't.>yet they always want turn-based combat systems and would never settle for opposed Strength checks to see who diesSome systems actually do this. rules-light stuff mostly. But the reason why you can abstract a puzzle and not combat is because most systems (excluding those that aren't about combat, like Dogs in the Vineyard or VtM, at least older editions) have a lot of mechanics for characters that revolve around combat, and you wanna use your character's abilities.It's a matter of which most people consider more fun to abstract. I'd rather abstract a puzzle into a skill check than combat into a single roll, because Combat is interesting. Things like resource management, elevation and cover, different weapons or spells, etc. There's (typically) more moving parts, and thus more to get invested in, rather than pulling up google to search for the solution to some shitty puzzle the GM dragged off of reddit. And, speaking from experience as a GM, players don't like doing puzzles. They're either too finicky and waste a whole session or too easy and aren't worth making players solve them.Also, I'd argue a good combat is in and of itself a puzzle that happens to involve several attack rolls.
>roll a check to find out if an attempt succeeds (solve a puzzle)>roll a check to find out if an attempt succeeds (attack a creature)have you tried not using dishonest framing, liar?
>>98846362The wizard knew the spell magic aura, I assumed if they had gone to the trouble of taking the spell in the first place that they would be thinking with that in mind.
>>98845627The pun doesn't even work in English because a monkey wrench is the wrong tool to use there, you'd use a pipe wrench.In my language, the tool would be called an "Englishman".
>>98846453>Bale-ful Polymorph
>>98845581false in both accounts and ywnbaw
>>98846581I don't know what magic aura is. The name of the spell alone tells me nothing, so I can't tell if your player was being a brainlet or if you didn't make it clear enough to them that this spell is applicable in this situation.Either way, this is why presenting players with an obstacle that has only one specific solution is usually a bad idea. People have different thought processes and different elements they consider when solving a problem so you can't assume that their process of solving your puzzle will be exactly the same as your process of designing it. It's better to give players challenges that have many solutions, even ones you didn't think of. In your example, an alternative solution could be to hijack the mechanism that opens the door and bypass the spellcasting step. Maybe some of the symbol tiles are loose and can be ripped out to reveal the mechanism underneath.Another option is to let the symbols be charged by more than one spell that your players have access to. That way you are giving them a choice and you are not relying on them stumbling upon that one exact spell you had in mind, which they could be forgetting about in that moment due to tunnel vision.Finally, if your players come up with a solution that you did not consider but which is sensible enough, just let them solve the problem that way. TTRPGs are not video games. Elements in your world don't have to be locked into one specific way of functioning. There is much room for improvisation, both for the players and the GM. Giving players opportunities to solve problems their way is much better than making them stumble around for ages because they refuse to land on that one specific solution you came up with and which potentially makes sense only to you.
>>98846845The spell Magic Aura makes a mundane object radiate magic as if it were a magical object. The conventional use for the spell is to fool shopkeepers into thinking the mundane item you're selling them is a magic item. That's nowhere in the spell description that's just the way I've seen a used most of the time. The idea that they should cast Magic Aura on each symbol with the matching school seemed straight forward to me. If they would have even tried casting any spell of the matching school on the symbols I would have given it to them but there best idea was removing the tiles each symbol was on and rearranging them. I just didn't think that was close enough. They still had completed half the dungeon by then so they were more than happy with their loot. DESU some of the traps deeper in the dungeon might have killed one of them so they be out all their profits having to pay to get somebody rez'd. They were still relatively low level (5). I don't fudge rolls to save players or enemies. If 4d6 fire damage from a trap is enough to kill them that's what happened.
>>98846871This might be a case of a solution that only makes sense to you. From what you described, to me it does not seem straighforward at all.Were your players frustrated with the puzzle? Or were you frustrated with them taking too long? It seems they made a fair attempt at solving it (and 30 minutes for one puzzle is not that bad) and also they were happy with their overall progress so apparently they didn't mind too much that they failed to solve it. It seems more like you were disappointed that a scenario you came up with didn't go the way you had planned. I don't think that's a good reason to remove puzzles entirely.Puzzles could still be included in a dungeon with multiple ways to progress. You can give your players a choice of progressing through a path blocked by a puzzle or a different path blocked by a combat encounter. Or you can reserve puzzles for optional areas that are not required to progress but still offer some bonus loot if your players manage to solve them. What's important to keep in mind is that you should not be too in love with your own ideas. Put some puzzles in your dungeons but don't expect players to be able to solve all of them, just like there is the risk that they can lose combat encounters or die to traps. Unless you think designing challenges is a waste of time if there is a chance that players don't get to experience them or can't overcome them.
>>98847146I agree with most of what you're saying. This was 15 years ago so I don't remember exactly how I felt about it in the moment but I've improved as a DM since then. We actually don't track experience points at my table. They just level up every other session. This way there's always a sense of forward progression regardless of whether or not they fight every encounter or disarm every trap. These days I use traps even less often than I used to. There's nothing fun about the rogue failing a perception check and someone getting stuck at the bottom of a 30 ft pit if it doesn't kill them out right.
>>98846660Using a monkey as a wrench is not even the most absurd part of this puzzle. You also have to know that sticking a banana on a metronome will hypnotize a monkey and freeze it's body so that you can put it in your inventory. Adventure games died out for a reason and good riddance.
>>98847438I've played a couple. Some were more retarded than others. I still don't miss them though but they were very common when I was a kid (early 90s)
>>98844271When I'm not working, doing chores or tending to other commitments, I just want to listen to the dice go click clack, so during my leisure time I'll be stupid and lazy as much as I want.
>>98844102This phenomenon is actually a real thing and i find it interesting. You take two scenarios that are technically the same but you flavor one as a puzzle in description and another as a combat scenario and people will almost universally go for the second one trying to get past it.There is just something about our minds that just flips a switch naturally as breathing.
>>98844102>puzzleshit game design
>>98844353that's not a puzzlethat's an open ended situation
>>98844878>the sheer determination of not looking up a walkthrough for a decadeeven if you have given up, it's still impressive
>>98849491Not really impressive, I finished it on Lite when I was like 12, so I knew the whole story. We didn't have Internet access then to get a walkthrough. I just missed half the puzzles and consequently half the gags until I played it again properly some ten years later.
>>98844102Funny thing, I had a player who kept doing this even though my table likes practical puzzles. One time, he was challenged to a game of tic-tac-toe by an eldritch horror pretending to be a sorceress that he had to win, and of course he rolls intelligence after accepting the challenge. I told him "You should've rolled wisdom instead, because you just now remembered that tic-tac-toe is a solved game and this weirdo sorceress never loses"
>>98844102>>modern players want to roll an Intelligence check rather than actually solve puzzles or figure things out as playersOH I FUCKING ASSURE YOU THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT AND I REPEAT ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT A MODERN PROBLEM
