What's the hardest puzzle/quest you made or your DM made you solve?

What's the hardest puzzle/quest you made or your DM made you solve?

tell us about it.

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I was the DM. Party was a dragonborn fighter, halfling druid, and a human cleric

The party was exploring some dwarven ruins

>party hits a dead end
>room with 3 golems
>flesh
>stone
>iron
>each has a stone in their chest
>the door at the other end has three slots
>golems are inactive

My thinking was for the party to fight them one at a time or maybe steal the gems

>the ruins were made of iron
>dragonborn decides that he's having none of that
>proceeds to melt a hole in the wall with breath attack (some google searches back the numbers up)
>there's stone behind the iron
>druid moves the stone out of the way
>fuckers created a tunnel around the locked door so they didn't have to fight the golems

Probably dickish to create an encounter like that but goddamn I'd never been prouder of them.

bump

It was a ring of 12 circles, each one surrounded by triangles pointing to and away from it, and a ring of triangles of alternating directions in the center. We had to touch the "correct" circles to break a seal.

We couldn't figure it out and had to burn a scroll of disjunction to break it. I asked him about it later on and he said "You were right to guess that it was a clock. However, the numbers were in base-2 and read counter clockwise. You had to touch them to make them add up to 27."

So simple yet so fucking cruel.

Dragonborn breath doesn't melt dungeon walls.

Wake up, sheeple!

>Murder Mystery event
>Usual GM is sick
>Her boyfriend steps in
>Know nothing about him, other than he's a dork
>He recreated a crimscene with fake blood splatter and everything
>Literally had to perform forensic investigation
>We knew nothing about investigation
>Used our character identities
>3 hours in and I'm measuring the angle of the blow to determine the killer's height
>Others are dusting for prints and collecting fibre samples
>Event goes well past midnight
>Finally gathered all the evidence
>Had multiple mistakes with mislabeled or misunderstood evidence along the way
>Finally discover it was the Italian film art director
>Think the night is over
>He's evasive in questioning
>He's hiding something and quickly confesses to the murder
>Spend another 3 hours investigating our suspects for a third time and eventually discover the truth
>The victim's husband had her convinced he was sterile (to make her feel better about being barren) and she stricken by madness (using gaslighting)
>He intended to divorce her claiming the grief of being unable to conceive was too great
>He'd secretly accidentally impregnated the maid
>He was going to remarry her in order to make their child legitimate
>Solve all of this finally
>Everyone is exhausted
>Realise we hadn't had anything to drink or eat all night
>Go outside and the GM has made a feast for us
>Eat happily knowing we'd solved something that could pass for an actual murder
>tfw usually we'd all be drunk and heading home before the mystery was solved
>Look around and only one person left before we finished
>Come to understand everyone had vastly more fun than we ever had before
>Don't want to crush our usual GM
>Ask if she'd work with her boyfriend in future
>The events became more popular and fun because of it
>Eventually get to know the guy
>He now runs an X-Com like WoD game with our core group

I made a non-euclidean dungeon once. Each room had 1-4 doors. Those doors were pointers to other roons that made no spatial sense. You could go north from room 1 to room 2 & then turn around and go tgrough that same door from the other side & be at room 3. There were like 20 rooms. Even after they started taking notes & drawing a map, they still had a hard time getting out.

the riddle of steel

/thread

As a DM, I never make puzzles that hard, unless they are classical math-based puzzles, the best of which is the Josephus Riddle.

Are you the guy whose villain hid in the 27th hour of the day?

A sphinx; the riddles were very bad puns.

I had one where the party ended up separated, locked in separate rooms. In one room there was a symbol drawn on the ceiling, other room had a blank canvas on the floor. If you touched the canvas you could draw freely, but drawing the wrong thing would result in the ceiling coming down one foot in both rooms and the canvas clearing itself. I had the group inside the room with the correct symbol turn around and texted them all the correct symbol. Then I gave the group in the room with the canvas a piece of paper. I kept the symbol simple, so it really wasn't too hard, but it was really entertaining as one side would misinterpret what the other side was trying to describe in between multiple castings of message.

That sounds awesome. Especially the crime scene bit. Was it, like, a full scale room?

I'm stealing this. This is great.

It's in a really big estate house

My greatest puzzle was incredibly simple for any normal party to see and solve, yet devious in its own right should they not.

A large domed chamber (half-sphere on its flat side) with the only obvious door being the one the party enters, which fades into nothing once the entire party has done so. The entire room is spell proofed, Magic cannot be cast on the walls, ceiling, or floor nor can it be used to escape the room. The room is completely devoid of light or air holes, yet air is still being supplied due to the machination of the room. Within it is nothing but a single entity and a note next to him. A single gnome stands in the middle of the room, naked, and covered in some oily substance.

The Gnome remains stationary, only noticing the parties entry and waves, it does not speak. The only other action it does is point at the note. Upon reading it "The Gnome is the key, but he isn't keen on helping you"

At this point the gnome bolts around and tries to steal things from the party (in reality he is looking for a set of dull rocks the party had found among some treasure) He is deaf and does not respond to any form of communication. The solution is to let him find the stones, once he is in possession of the stones he eats them and becomes a door.

If the party attacks and kills the gnome (he only has 5hp) 10 more gnomes appear in the room and repeat the same process of slapping, laughing, and being very annoying. Each gnome is programmed to take 1d3+1 items before eventually going for a stone. If the party has not realized this yet, they are doomed.

For every gnome that dies afterward, 100 more spawn, there is only enough room for 500 gnomes. Too many, the party suffocates under the amount of gnomes.

The lesson was to teach the party to not be murderous assholes to everything they see, and just observe their situations and act like normal people.

Only a few parties have survived this puzzle.

>>How do you bring a girl to orgasm?

What if there is a gnome in the party?

That was a pretty great thread. I'm curious for updates from the OP from there, with the idiots that pulled too many swords.

> Anyone actually playing a gnome and living for their heresy

Kidding, I've yet to have a party where someone plays one longer than a few sessions due to them playing like a retard and getting killed.

I hate shit like that. Some players have no concept of exhaustion mainly because their real life counterpart has never encountered it. But I hate it mainly because it's not being smart or wily, which the players probably think they are. I hate it because it encourages lazy problem solving, and lazy problem solving becomes a precedent for future problems. What's next, are they simply going to melt iron/move stone their way in a straight line to the heart of the dungeon?

light bondage and heavy petting

>What's the hardest puzzle/quest you made or your DM made you solve?
>tell us about it.


I can't remember which puzzle exactly it was, but it fucking stumped me. The rest of the group were all snotty and derisive of me and thought they had the answer too, but hilariously they too were wrong. I remember it had such a fucking obvious answer but I can't remember which puzzle it was, only that it was a Professor Layton puzzle.

>Greased up Deaf Gnome

Fuck you.

One time my party got kidnapped by slavers and were told to run through the Grand Coliseum of a Million Agonies. It was just a recreation of the Legends of the Hidden Temple.

The contestants were branded with animal corpses and forced to solve quizzes about previous sessions. After that I had them run though an obstetrical course filled with various puzzles I created based on rooms of the temple all while competing against other captured adventuring parties branded with other animal corpses. I even had a laugh track set up where I would just unpause one of my parent's taped sitcoms as one of the party members got a question wrong or failed a part of the course.

Sadly I lost the papers of the temple's layout and puzzles while moving out of my parent's basement.

Is this a ruse? Not a single part of this is intuitive or logical.

Nah he doesn't do reality distorting shit

The idea is there, but this is shit in terms of teaching a moral lesson of any sort, and shit overall. There is no reason that the party should allow the gnome to steal anything, nor would any sensible person playing any TRPG react to being actively stolen from with anything other than violence.

Then there's also the matter of how the puzzle lightly implies that the heroes will not get their item back. Also made worse from the fact that the gnome is greased up, runs, and is deaf. Meaning that your own lesson of getting them to not be murderhobos horribly backfires as all the methods of peace (Grabbing and taking the items back, talking it out, catching him, etc) are already out the window.

Then there's also the bit about the "Nuh uh you can't magic! It's magic" proofing the room, which is either a sign of a poor choice of game, or a sign of a control freak.

The overall message here seems to be "You should just let a gnome steal from you for literally no reason"

Overall: F

Ways to improve puzzle: Instead of the gnome stealing, have the gnome just become a door after a few rounds. Have the gnome be a threatening beast that looks like it's going to attack and be threatening, but is not. And finally, stop being a douchebag.

Kek I loved that thread

>The entire room is spell proofed, Magic cannot be cast on the walls, ceiling, or floor nor can it be used to escape the room.

Could I cast detect thoughts on the gnome?

The rocks--gnome connection should really be more explicit. Why did the party pick up some rocks, anyways? Where they at least given a hint when they got the rocks? Otherwise these anons have a fair point.

Mein Neger

>stop being smart and engage in my bullshit abloobloobloobloo

>fuggin her wit the benis

He hasn't heard about the team of dwarfs that mined their way through the hillside to beat Tomb of Horrors.

Jerking her penis harder than she jerks yours user..

I like my game to be immersive, so I build the world and then put the players in it rather than building it around PCs.
If they manage to use their abilities in creative ways I'm more than happy to let them (also makes for unpredictability which means funtime)
At the same time, just because they're my players it doesn't mean I won't let them run into an Orc Army at level 1 if they head to a Orc controlled region.

It wasn't so much a puzzle, as a difficult choice.

The party was rescuing a teenage girl from an incredibly dangerous location think the bug pit from King Kong youtube.com/watch?v=DTWYQhTT388, some dude's daughter. Anyways, things were bad, only two of the party have gone down there, they've traveled through this horrible maze of tunnels, a friendly npc's already been graphically ripped in twain and eaten by worm things, and two giant centipede monsters are bearing down on them. But they find the girl, alive.

She's in bad condition though. She's overall in bad condition, lots of cuts, bruises, tired, sore, etc. (so essentially low HP, she would probably die in 1 or 2 hits from anything), her left leg is missing below the knee, and she seems to be completely and utterly traumatized.

They only had 1 healing potion with them, but one of the dudes had a special ability where he could roll to try and cure a debility, but it had a chance of transferring the debility onto him. I gave them a choice, if she drank the healing potion, her HP would be restored to full, but she'd still be traumatized and missing the leg. If the potion was applied directly to the leg, it would grow back, but her HP would still be low (and traumatized). Additionally, he could do his magic cure debility thing to any one thing, but only one thing, which would also risk transferring it over to him.

Even assuming his curing thing worked, this meant that the girl would either be
>traumatized, probably fucked up mentally for life
>healthy, both physically and mentally, but an amputee, which would also mean they would have to carry her out, through this long dangerous maze, she wouldn't be able to go on foot
>mentally together and able to follow and run behind them on foot, but in bad shape, and very very fragile

They did end up saving her, kept her as an amputee, but not without a few more innocent NPCs dying horrible deaths. Well, mostly innocent NPCs.

It's not a ruse.

Honestly, it's not even that much of a dick move.

The reason being, the ONLY thing you can do to screw up is attack the gnome

The ONLY reason it's a dick move is if there's no indication prior that the "dull rocks" the gnome is looking for are part of a puzzle later on.

See, the Gnome is clearly established as part of the puzzle with the note. So the correct response is to try and decipher the Gnomes actions. Reasonably, you would stand there and let him rummage through your stuff while trying to help him search. I mean, it's not like he has a sack or is interested in taking anything you have EXCEPT for the dull rocks.

You'll note that it's only the next set of Gnomes actually take things.

So you don't even have the justification of the first Gnome ACTUALLY stealing anything to trigger attacking him.

Heck, even then OP said if the party "attacks and kills" so you could still do non-lethal damage to knock the gnome out and try to figure out what's up with him. Once they see there's no damage and no items missing, they could start to wonder what he was looking for. Presumably, this being a dungeon, the party would offer him a choice of random junk they picked up that "seemed" useless. I mean, OP didn't even make it something expensive and shiny or enchanted or unique, just some dull rocks.

I'm actually curious how he gets the party to pick them up in the first place.

ONCE AGAIN, THE FIRST GNOME "ATTEMPTS TO STEAL" UNTIL HE GETS TO THE ROCKS, ONLY THE SECOND SET OF GNOMES STEAL ANYTHING.

Killing NPCs for stealing from you is a perfectly reasonable response.

But even if you don't do that, so long as you don't end up killing the gnome the problem will resolve itself eventually when the gnome finds the dull rocks.

Hold Person, Sleep, Charm etc. I wonder what the Gnome is classified as. Summoned Creature?

The puzzle of trying to keep our crumbling group together.

>I made a dungeon where it's easier to melt through the walls than solve a puzzle

Wow, I bet you're the kind of DM who puts an adamantine door on the stone treasure vault (whose contents is less than the GP by weight of said door).

DM here.

I needed a narrative to hang a couple of cool encounters off of (it was a beer and pretzels kind of game), so I had my players journey by ship to a remote island, pick somebody up, and take him elsewhere. And kind of just ripped off Hamlet in the process.

Anyway my players figured it out pretty quickly, but they're good sports so they played along. Only one guy (we'll call him The Knight) figured out that I'd cast the four of them as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (the two characters from whose perspective none of the events of the play make any sense), but because PCs are suspicious to a fault nobody trusted Prince Hamlet as far as they could throw him.

So they wind up shipping him off to some other kingdom, and bearing a sealed letter that they make a point of never opening; in fact The Knight keeps it on his person at all times, and locks Hamlet in his cabin for the duration of the voyage. They also fend off an attack by pirates through some clever tactics, so the Prince isn't kidnapped and they arrive with him at Not England.

Anyway there they are, the four of them plus the Prince, presenting themselves before the King. The Knight hands him the sealed letter, and the King opens and reads it. The King looks up from the letter and asks which of them is the Prince, and Knight without missing a beat speaks up and says "I'm the Prince, that guy over there" he points to Hamlet "is my messenger".

Remember, since Knight kept a close eye on the letter Hamlet never got a chance to alter it to order the execution of "the bearers of this message". The original letter just reads "Please kill the Prince, Sincerely King Claudius".

I still to this day will not let him live it down.

Hey, you got the joke. You're just as dirty

>obstetrical course
What, they had to attend lessons on childbirth and pregnancy?

Made a puzzle where the team had to remove fuel rods from a reactor core. Basically was minesweeper rules and everyone had a blast using thier brains instead of rolls.

>You'll note that it's only the next set of Gnomes actually take things.
>So you don't even have the justification of the first Gnome ACTUALLY stealing anything to trigger attacking him.
Incorrect by that poster's own admission.

>At this point the gnome bolts around and tries to steal things from the party

Even if you want to make the argument he's only "appearing" to steal, that is just as bad as actually stealing, especially when all forms of communications are shut down.

Not only that, but this isn't even in a civilized setting, this is in a dungeon setting. A place with evil and cruel intentions that intends harm to the party, and the gnome is taking incredibly aggressive actions (stealing or appearing to) after reading a note that says "The gnome does not intend to help".

There's nothing about that puzzle that isn't made by a raging asshole. It's bad puzzle design 101 and frankly, defending it means you're kind of a shit person on the inside. Where it counts.

>implying the puzzle was hard to solve
>implying the party couldn't handle it

Kek

Or like everyone else my age, I was deeply enthralled with Family Guy when it started playing on Adult Swim until I realized it really wasn't THAT funny.

AND NEITHER ARE YOU.

Also that puzzle didn't sound intuitive. Who the fuck lets someone, much less a greased up deaf gnome, rummage through their things?

...what? Show me

pls explain? no homo

user, that was decades ago, back when Gary Gygax was alive and well enough to run games and AD&D was the newest edition, there's no greentexts of that shit.

Can't show you, but I'll give you more details.

Back when Tomb of Horrors was being run as a Tourney module, there were famously two groups, maybe the only two groups besides Gary's home team, that managed to successfully beat the tomb.

The first one, the party made nothing but dwarves, and based on the intel they got from the other teams, climbed on top of the tomb and dug straight down into the core of the labyrinth, avoiding all the traps and successfully getting the treasure and "winning".

The second team was a group that was familiar with the crown and scepter puzzle and how it worked. They got into the tomb of the demilich, and upon thinking about it for a moment, the party then took the crown and scepter, placed the crown onto the skull at the same time they touched the scepter to it. The famous resolution to this is the DM was so stunned, that he and the entire group went over to Gary Gygax himself and asked him if that would work. He thought about it for a moment and said "Yeah, there's no reason for it to not work."

That's also the reason why the crown and scepter have been rewritten so that they can no longer be removed from the throne room.

There's this show called "Family Guy." In the show there is a character that shows up on occasion, whose presence is part of the joke, called "Greased Up Deaf Guy" who is a greased up deaf guy that challenges people to catch them and actively mocks them when they can't.

It's not that funny.

>using thier brains instead of rolls
H-HERESY! M-MENTAL STATS ARE HERE F-FOR A P-PURPOSE!!1