Doing a riddle for a D&D one-shot I'm making. First time doing puzzles, so tell me if it's good or not

How so?

We've had three answers that basically work suggested already.

So make it more specific. Got it, thanks.

>I go well both with wine and with blade.

Any player would IMMEDIATELY know it's poison.

It's cheese!

You know, I thought so too, but apparently it's not that obvious.

Actually I thought it was Wesley Snipes.

My first thought was also cheese.

So did I

a man

More sexy sphinxes pls.

...

>strong cheese is very zesty, has a "sting"
>goes well with wine
>in almost all cases, needs to be cut to be brought to edible portions
>Nutritious and delicious, can bring people back to health
>very filling, and can make lactose-intolerant kings sick
It works!

>I have no point, but I sting. I go well both with wine and with blade. I make sick men rise and kings fall.

It's shit. No rhythm to it at all.

>I sting without point, pairing with wine and dagger- Sick men rise to my acquaintance, and kings fall before me. What am I?

It's still pretty easy though senpai.

Gotchu senpai.

That legitimately sounds better. Thanks. Although I thought to have it as a series of inscriptions on a crypt, that's why I divided it like this.

Does any of your party have ancient lore or some shit like that? Just have it be in a different language, have them roll to translate, and if they pass, read off that the inscriptions collectively mean something along the lines of quote previous.

I might do something like that. Although, based on the lore behind it, it would have to be something like Abyssal.

it's fine, 6/10 type stuff. just don't make it utterly crucial to your game (personally I don't like that with any riddle) and it'll be fine.
if they encounter it in passing guarding a minor treasure room, it'll be a neat bonus. if it's what's keeping them from entering the final room of the dungeon and killing the big bad, it's either pointlessly frustrating (if your players are retarded) or a weird anticlimax that actually takes away from your game (if your players aren't retarded)

It's an optional room, but it's guarding one of the clues the players have to find. The clues can be obtained in many other ways, though. So it's completely missable and not required.

Take this user's advice.

I once gave my players a puzzle to push an extremely large, magical boulder. The key was, they all had to push it together as a group.

It took them THREE HOURS. "From Any, none, from Many, Won. "

It was supposed to be a five minute head-scratcher so that the less talkative players would have a chance to give ideas while the party faces failed to do things their usual way.

I didn't account for them being abject retards.

Hmm... did you give them any kind of hints later? Like the rock jiggles a bit when more then one person pushes it?

Yes. That was there from the start. It didn't budge when one person moved it. It visibly budged more when two people moved it.

As I recall, two of them did try it at once, but then the paranoid person in the group talked them out of it as being a trap. (They'd lost an arm to a previous puzzle, so it wasn't entirely without precedent)

Wow, that bad? Didn't know I had to expect that. What's worse is that the party's made of people completely new to D&D and tabletops in general, however, I'm fairly certain none of them are retarded, and maybe the fact that they're not familiar with the typical murderhobo mindset may help.

Well, I think it's at least partly that the two smart, experienced people in the group were playing characters who were pointedly stupid/uneducated, so they weren't -willing- to solve the puzzle with their characters after the 'smart' character told them not to do it because it was almost definitely a trap and couldn't possibly be so simple.

>(They'd lost an arm to a previous puzzle
that dm ?

maybe it was just the necromancer's annoying familiar

I dunno, maybe. It was one of my first times DMing. I think I did a pretty good job all things considered, and where I mostly look back on that game and regret things, it's a lot more along the lines of that I encouraged murderhoboing by ensuring that the PCs relation to the story was tangential and detached. If I went back and redid the story, I'd lay the setting out for them and ask what area of it they'd like to pursue before we started, instead of placing them in the middle of a plotline I thought they'd enjoy and essentially have them railroaded from there.

But why "make sick men rise"? Is that like necromantic poison? is that a thing? That is what I don't get. As I'm typing this, is it supposed to allude to sick as in twisted? And rise as in ascend in station? I guess I answered my own question. Too ambiguous, would not use.

Honestly, I thought it referred to medicine. I think he should keep that line, since otherwise the riddle is just TOO obvious. Ambiguity can be good for a riddle, and three very clear, obvious lines to every one ambiguous one seems like a decent ratio to me.

The answer to all the clues has to be the same, why would one be medicine? Medicine is the antithesis of poison.

I mean you punished them for trying things, so of course in the future they wouldn't try too many things. They don't want to be punished again. Tell us how it happened, I would warn my players that something is going wrong before maiming anyone. I feel like that's too much of a surprise.

I know they all have to be the same, I was thinking along the lines of medicine following the idea that a lot of medicine that was historically used was really more along the lines of poison in smaller dosages, and vice versa, that poison was just as easily medicine in large doses. It's kind of a silly idea looking back on it, but oh well.

The only difference between medicine and poison is dosage.

It was a shifting block puzzle using giant granite blocks. They figured they could game the system by stopping one of the blocks from shifting when it was supposed to(An idea I was fully in favor of, I'd really rather reward innovative thinking than punish it). The warrior got the idea to go down, stand in the crevice between two oncoming blocks, and hold his arms out to stop them.

These were stonehenge sized pieces of rock, moving very quickly, and he rolled a 1 on the strength check. I wasn't trying to arbitrarily screw him, but it seemed like something so obviously dangerous, and such a horrible roll, I don't really know how I'd do a half-way point.

I should note that this was a high-fantasy type setting where you could get your arm back with healing magic, so it wasn't a permanent thing.

A lot of substances that are used for poison are used in medicine as well, that's what I was referring to, essentially meaning that poison and medicine are the same. And it's also foreshadowing/hint to check out the apothecary later on in the game.

Also, yeah, the ambiguity could be that "sick men rise" could mean patients recovering or morally corrupt people succeeding by poisoning others.

>>very filling, and can make lactose-intolerant kings sick
I interpreted "kings fall" as "kings make foolish choices". I know people who do silly things for cheese.

That's not really true, except in the trivial sense in which the only difference between water and poison is dosage. Any drug will fuck you up if you take too much of it, but poisons have a lot of properties you don't want in a medicine and medicines have a lot of properties you don't want in a poison. There's some overlap, but compounds that are really good at killing you do not necessarily have medicinal properties and compounds with medicinal properties are not necessarily really good at killing you (thankfully).

>I have no point, and yet I sting; I raise the sick and level kings
>I pair with wine as well as blade; I work in nature and in trade
>What am I?

Still cheese!

Like, the name of the adventure is out of character knowledge desu.

Also, a good way to do a riddle is to have multiple answers for said riddle/if they get especially close to the riddle, just give it to them

I would have guessed "The Truth".

>letting the game drag for 3 hours over a shitty puzzle you made with only one solution.
>Blaming your players for this

Yeah, I'll probably do that if they don't manage to solve the puzzle. I've heard of people making puzzles with no solution and just awarding the players if they like the answer, though that seems kinda lazy. And about the name - the characters might not know it, but the players do, and I don't think it'll be a big enough hint, seeing as they'll only hear it once several hours before they'll encounter the puzzle, so it'll just hopefully be on their mind, but not clearly enough to immediately remember.

You need to use the three clue rule whenever you have a choke point in the game that the players *need* to pass. This means that there needs to be three solutions to the issue and that those solutions are hinted at or apparent in some way.

For a riddle the solutions could be - solve the riddle, kill the riddle giver i.e. sphinx , smash down/circumvent the door in some way. Maybe a hidden door.

I'm happy with out of the box solutions too. Remember if they fail to guess the riddle sure they fail but that doesn't mean other ways around the riddle should fail.

You also need to work out a consequence for failure that doesn't impede progress entirely. For example the last simple puzzle I ran was to open a door in a 'warrior trial' type dungeon. If the players failed the puzzle they'd just trigger a magic trap for some damage/potential penalising effects going forwards.

For a riddle you may just revert to your two other options. So the riddle giver attacks..players can kill it/get around it or find that secret door mid combat.