How long would your last party have been delayed by a well placed word problem before solving it with lateral...

How long would your last party have been delayed by a well placed word problem before solving it with lateral thinking/violence?

>goat
>cabbage
wolf
>goat

>lateral thinking in TTRPG
Implies the rest of world are half wits.

The cabbage, goat, wolf problem, like all of life's problems, can be easily solved by the use of a trebuchet.

I could say "If red is 2, and blue is 4, what is yellow?" and their brains would explode despite that being a really simple riddle.

They would figure it out without resorting to violence.

Last session, they spent most of their time trying to master a set of interconnected elevator/falling damage traps, while fighting a minotaur. The falling damage honestly wasn't much, but they had to master it because it could be mastered.

It was a really fun combat, actually. They wound up in the spirit world's commodities market, fighting on a bunch of lily pads. Each pad had something piled in the center (gold, coffee, textiles, etc.) and rose into the air on a bubble, getting higher as more "investors" piled on. If it got too high, the bubble popped and that pad fell back down to pond level, knocking down and damaging everyone still on it. And there were other effects, like the way gold goes up when another market crashes.

It was a fun and silly fight, with the minis on small plates at different heights. They eventually defeated the market bull by luring him onto a coffee investment bubble; he was taken out by the crash.

That sounds fucking amazing.

They can't even open fucking doors that have anything more complicated than a handle.

Could be 6 or 8 depending on the pattern you're using.

I'll give you the same hint I gave them; the colors are irrelevant.

yeah, that could be a number of things given the existing patterns.

Here's the answer. 2, because the letter E is the second letter in red and yellow, and the fourth character in blue

So the colors are in fact relevant.

Previous session:
>Me: You interrupted the ritual half-way, so you're all still in the spirit world. Next time you'll have to find your way back.
>Cute warlock-player girl: Oh, wow! I can't wait for next time, I bet the spirit world's gonna be crazy! You're always so creative.
>Me: *sweating*

Nothing inspires GM creativity like that sweet combination of lust and panic.

It's obviously three, because red's Hex Code is FF0000 and blue's is 0000FF, which means you're counting the number of the first character.

With Yellow being FFF000, that makes it three.

He means that the word is important, not what it represents.

misleading word choice at best, then.
And like I said, it still could be any number of things if you're getting that obscure, as
illustrates.

That's the point, the colors are meant to throw you off.

You really should re-read what you wrote because that makes zero sense.

Not the colors, the hint.
Stating the colors are irrelevant and then planting the answer in the colors is at best misleading, at worst a broken puzzle.

What's the opposite of a hint?
That would be the best word to describe the hint given.

How so? There's two F's in red's hex code (F being the first character), and there's four 0's in blue's hex code (0 being the first character).

With yellow being FFF000, it has three F's (F being the first character), making the answer to the riddle three.

makes sense to me.

Shit, my bad, but I would honestly accept that answer even though it makes no sense in the setting.

Except there's one mistake.

FFF000 is yellow rose, not yellow, which is FFFF00. That makes the answer 4, not 3.

If they wanted a more obvious hint I would've said "Green is 23 but Verde is 25"

Goddamnit frank

That at least would have been a hint.
And not some kind of nega hint that specifies you not look in the area where the answer is.

...

I gave them an anagram which they successfully figured out, but they never did anything with it

Man, imagine how much anti-fun the players would have in a mathemancer dungeon