Puzzle Plotting

This week I’ve been working on a D&D one-shot (that is, an adventure that should ideally only take a single session to complete) for my youngest child’s birthday.  Which has, technically, come and gone, but we’re running a bit behind on such things, not to mention that I didn’t even realize that I was supposed to be doing it for a while there.  But now I know, and I’m trying to put together something that she’ll like.  Which is a tiny bit tricky, because she’s a bit different from my other children: she likes roleplaying more than combat, and she’d rather solve a puzzle or talk to an NPC than go slay a dragon.  So it takes a bit more finesse to make her happy.

In fact, designing puzzles for D&D is notoriously difficult, for two reasons.  The first is that it’s easy to make the puzzle too easy, and your players just blast through it.  It’s also, weirdly, easy to make it too hard, and then it takes forever.  So it can be basically impossible to predict how long it’ll take, which means you can’t necessarily guarantee that your one-shot will get done in one shot.

The second potential problem is that it’s easy to put your players in a situation where they just get stuck.  If they miss a clue, or they just have a mental block and can’t figure out a clue, all of a sudden your game grinds to a halt and there’s not much to do other than just tell the players what to do, which sort of defeats the point.  So it can be tricky to design something that is challenging without being impossible.

I’ve attacked this problem in a few different ways.  (And I’m going to keep it a bit vague just in case my kids actually do read this blog, which I find particularly unlikely, but better safe than sorry.)  First, I’ve designed a set of interlocking puzzles that can be done in any order, and it’s highly randomized.  So, at the first sign of getting stuck, I’m calling for some dice to be rolled, and everything will change.  Secondly, I’ve built in a bunch of “back doors” (basically, hinting structures) that will get revealed over time, so that the game will get easier as it goes on.  If it needs to.  And, if I’ve made it too easy, it won’t.  But then I can also use the randomization to change everything if the players start getting too close too fast.

Now, overall, this is a bit tricky to do in a natural fashion.  But, happily, D&D is a fantasy setting where anything goes, so I can make it work fairly easily—worse come to worst, I can always wave my hands a claim “a wizard did it.” But I’ve also come up with a theme that should make it make sense, even when it doesn’t make sense.  I can’t be more specific than that just yet; maybe I’ll post again once I’ve revealed things to my players.

I’m actually a bit excited for this.  It’s taking me a fair bit of work—inevitably, it takes more time to design a puzzle game than it does to play one—but I think it’s going to work out pretty well, and I’m pretty sure my kids won’t have too much trouble figuring it all out.  We’ll see how it goes.