Find a large gap with two identical seeming bridges. Suddenly two men stand there and greet us

kek

>"are you the guard who stabs people when they ask tricky questions?"
>*gets stabbed by guard*

Except that's a tricky question and you have a 33% chance of getting stabbed, you fucking brainlet.

I prefer it when the puzzle only allows you one question/interaction. Otherwise it's too easy.

Then it didn't work, and it was stupid.

How the fuck is that tricky

Simple, hire orphans to ask them tricky questions, no danger to me and tells me who tells the truth

>the Wizard casts fly
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

If the first question wasn't tricky, you got stabbed for this one

There are three bridges, each with three guards.

One bridge will allow you safe passage.

The other will collapse under you, leaving no hope of survival.

The third bridge somehow deposits you back in the place you started, but now everyone who told lies tells truths, and everyone who told truths tells lies.

Each set of three guards knows what their bridge does, and what one other bridge does, but not what the third bridge does.

One group of guards tells only lies, the other two groups each have two lying guards and two truth telling guards.

One guard in each group speaks a foreign language and cannot possibly understand you or be understood by you, however the other guards in his group are capable of translating what he says, they will translate the guards answer every time a question is asked. They cannot however understand the guard from other groups that speaks a foreign language.

Also, one of the foreign speaking guards can understand you but pretends not to.

Each group of cards will answer only one question, unless you have already asked questions of the other two groups in which case they will not answer and will instead attack you.

Puzzles in general I think GMs should avoid. A lot gets lost in translation when it's communicated solely through verbal means. Really simple puzzles and riddles can work but when the GM starts going full-on Myst mode it almost always falls apart.

I have a d12 hit die, I can take it.

so... multi-track drifting?

Send in unseen servants on all bridges.

Also the stabby guard can lie if he feels like it

Meanwhile, I found a 'dwarven puzzle cube', and my DM handed me pic related.

Took me three sessions to solve the 35 piece monstrosity.

I light my torch and burn both bridges. GM plot armour will save the correct bridge.

Wait did he give that to you in person or did he hand it to you in game and you had to keep rolling to solve it?

He showed me a picture of it solved, then gave me the actual physical thing. In pieces.

>How goes it wary travelers
>I see you have entered my cave
>I should tell you that you will not find the way out on your own
>But if you follow me I will lead you to the exit
>As you can see infront of me there are two different paths
>The first leads up, and the other leads further down. You will not be able to tell which path you took by appearances alone.
>Either path you take, you will be find one of my cousins, who does not know anything of you, but does know his floor number.
>There he will greet you the same, and look the same, and will lead you to a similar path, which you must go down again.
>You will only ever escape if you can tell me or one of my cousins exactly which floor you are on.
>Every time you are incorrect you must go down the path again.
>By the way, you are currently on floor 0

this is actually pretty simple

because the water is BELLOW the bridge which would put them out?

Well either man that tell you this story is allways tell the truth and you should ask him, or he is allways lying and all that bridge stuff is bullshit and you can cross with any bridge. Except he lied about that he allways lie.

how is a straight up question tricky?

youtu.be/02gfh-h6mTQ

That isn't a tricky question though.

Wait a minute, both of them say this to us? Both the liar and the truth-teller?

In that case I wait for the logical paradox to fry this simulation and hack my coordinates so I'm on the other side of the gap when it reboots.

Ask them was 2 + 2 results in.

Continue magical quest to rescue David Bowie.

I like to use a variant of this with the following rules:
>3 demons, imprisoned.
>One lies, one truths, one randoms
>Players have four questions to identify which is which.
>Any they correctly identify, they dont have to fight when they run out of questions.
>Naming a demon counts as a question.
>In order of power they are Lair, Truth-y, and Rando.

This means the puzzle doesnt have one solution, but various solutions with different levels of utility. The random one also helps spur them on to just throwing stuff at the wall and putting it together at the end (if they can).

It also lets players who just dont give a fuck take the brute force option of going down the line accusing all of them of being the Random one to knock him out, then burning their last question some other way.

Kill them all, loot their corpses for clues, burn the cards and use the limitless amounts of hempen rope to test all of the bridges.

>saying your result and not your action
literally absolutely fucking disgusting.

This guard must be a total idiot

Leave from where we came in.

I just guess every time, it's just a 50% probability, sooner or later I'll guess correctly.

That's what makes it so secure.

I tell him we're currently on floor 0, and ask to be led out

Correct solution

You can't, he says so right at the beginning
If you keep guessing incorrectly it raises you chances of being incorrect. After going down the path twice, you only have a 25% chance of being correct. Then, if you guess wrong, it halves the chance of being correct again the next time you guess.
He asks you to go down the path first before guessing.

I guess I should be more clear

You must go through 2 flights first before being able to guess, and there are potentially an unlimited number of "cousins" (if I were to add this to a fantasy universe they'd all be the same person who just lied to you about where the paths lead), and unlimited number of floors. Also the party must travel together.

You beat the puzzle if you tell him that you're on floor 0.
If you fuck that up...
You tell the next guy you're on floor -1
The guy after that you say you're on floor 0
If there is a guy after that you say you're on floor 3
Then you tell the next guy you're on floor 2
Then the next guy you're on floor 1
Then finally you should be on floor 0
If that doesn't work tell the next guy you're on basement 7
Then basement 6 etc.
Ultimately keep track of how many guesses you have used in case it's specifically the term you use when you have gone down levels...
And if you can only escape on level 0 you just have to keep guessing exponentially higher terms before each number

>He asks you to go down the path first before guessing.
Then why did he say
>You will only ever escape if you can tell me or one of my cousins exactly which floor you are on.
>tell me

Wouldn't immediately telling him that you're on floor 0 after he divulges this still tell him?

Well if you end up at floor 0 you'd have to be able to tell him.

>if I were to add this to a fantasy universe they'd all be the same person who just lied to you about where the paths lead
Then if it's a lie you just cut his cheek and intimidate him into showing you the way out when you loop back around.

Unless they're a trickster god. Then you apologize and sacrifice the virgin of the party to them.

I just wanted to create a simple logic puzzle that would be challenging enough that it would be satisfying to beat, but not so easy that it would only take a moment to figure out.
It might be interesting to let the players figure out that on their own as a secondary solution.

I never got this shit

>what colour is my shirt?
>what shape has 4 equal sides and angles?
>is OP a fag?

>I don't know
>I don't know
>I don't know
Its quite easy to keep players from asking stupid questions. How do you know that these guardians are aware of anything besides your voice and the concepts of truth and lies?

>I just wanted to create a simple logic puzzle that would be challenging enough that it would be satisfying to beat
If that's a concession of a solution awesome.
I enjoyed trying to solve it, good job.

the puzzle doesn't work at all if you're allowed to ask any number of questions because you can beat it in the one-two shot of 'is op a fag' and 'is this the safe path', so you're usually only allowed to ask one question to the both of them, and sometimes only one question to one of them
this means that you could find out the lying guard really easily by asking some mundane question like 'what colour is the sky today' but you'd have wasted your question because you now can't find out which bridge/path/door/bologna sandwich is the right one to take

beyond that, it's not a terribly great or creative puzzle

shitty cop-out answers and shitty justifications for shitty cop-out answers

They can just jump into the water from the shore (or from anywhere less than halfway across the bridge)

Then you tell the fighter that both of them run past them/jump into the water

Good job fighter, you fucking blew it.

>If you keep guessing incorrectly it raises you chances of being incorrect. After going down the path twice, you only have a 25% chance of being correct. Then, if you guess wrong, it halves the chance of being correct again the next time you guess.
No, that's bullshit. To the first one I say that I'm on level 1, for example. If I'm wrong I know that I was on level -1 actually, so next time I either say 0 or -2. Every time I know that I was wrong and so I know what floor I'm actually at, so it's 50% chance every time.

>anyone that has seen Labyrinth

>Try to sacrifice the Wizard
>TPK
Good luck with that.

If you believe what you're being told, obviously the one speaking is the truth teller

>monster hangs a player using a tentacle
You must now play hangman for your friends life!
>the room starts filling with sand, all doors are locked, a pael in the wall opens to reveal a familiar game
You have 1 minute to beat me at connect four or the party dies!

Why does my gm think that these are puzzles?

And anyone that's seen Samurai Jack or Yugioh isn't going to trust they aren't both lying that one speaks truth.

Yeah that's what I would've done too, except I'd just kill both on the spot and cast levitation

because you're asking it with ulterior motives in mind (ie; gaining information based on the answer) You're trying to be clever, and now you've got a spear in your gut.

>casts Fly
>Floats past chasm
>casts Fabricate
>make my own bridge, complete with "no puzzlefags allowed"
>Casts Detect Thoughts
>Figure it out that way
>Casts Summon Elemental
>Send it across a bridge and see if it collapses
>Casts Dimension Door
>*telebords behind u :DD*
>Casts Dominate Monster
>Send one of THEM across a bridge, or just make them tell the truth
pssh, nuthin personell, puzzlefags.

He decides what's tricky

>gaining information based on the answer
So I'm only allowed to ask rhetorical questions?

>monster hangs a player using a tentacle
>You must now play hangman for your friends life!

te_ta__e ra_e

Do I even have to answer?

The trick is to feed one coffee until he gets the jitters and ask them obvious yes or no answers until you find which one is lying and which one is not

Crap, I thought I was being creative when I did that. Goddammit I hate being a brainlet.

>"Greeting travelers. We are the guardians of this path. One of these bridges will support you all the way to the end. The other will collapse halfway through. We know the correct path BUT! One of us speaks nothing but truth. The other speaks nothing but lies. You may ask us each one question and only one! Once you do that, you may pass."
But wait, who says all this? One of the guards? Then it's either the one who always says the truth, and then we know who to ask, or this whole thing is a heap of bullshit.

Stop playing 5e.

...

Do Women of Sevitan next time, Dodgson, I don't think that one's been on TV.

This shit is easy

Read carefully.

>What's one plus one?

>2

>86

>Guy who said 2,which is the correct path?

>The right one.

the bridge should still support them unless they were both liars.

>. You may ask us each one question
That's one to many questions.

I use my dwarven racial ability to detect the slope of the passage and tell whether we're going up or down, then guess accordingly.

nice

>Read carefully.
>You may ask us each one question and only one!

>If you keep guessing incorrectly it raises you chances of being incorrect.
That's where you're wrong, big boy. If I keep guessing we're on floor 0, I'll eventually escape because 1-dimensional random walks eventually return to the origin with probability 1. Still, the fastest way to do it is , the chance that you're out by the nth guess is 1-2^(-n).

That doesn't do anything, they're not each guarding a specific bridge.

Not him, but you can ask them *each* one question, right? Just ask that math question one time instead of two.

tell them my name, then ask them what my name is.

The Brute Force way is actually really effective. Ask each one if they're (strongest name), then ask the remaining two in the same order if they're (medium name), and then (weakest name).

Assuming they're in a random order there's 6 permutations so it's a 3/6 chance they'll ID them all (order SMW, SWM, and WSM), 2/6 chance they'll ID the stronger two (MSW and MWS), and a 1/6 chance they'll only ID the weakest (WMS).

No problem, I have way more than enough HP to survive a 1d6 stab wound.

Ask the math question once, if they give the correct answer ask the other guy which path then do the opposite of what he says. If they answer wrongly then just take the path the other recommends.

>only person to bring this up
>no replies
Fuck’s sake, tg.

The problem with most logical puzzles is that they rely on arbitrary restrictions to cut off anything but the one solution that the GM wants the players to use. Often leading to:
>Player "I try x"
>GM "You can't"
>Player "Why not ?"
>GM tries to come up with a reason on the spot.

That just frustrates players, as they keep coming up with solutions, only to be told that they won't work because they aren't the solution that the GM thought of. Worse still are when the one true solution requires the PCs to act out of character and/or doesn't make any sense.

Or it's a puzzle that the GM has obviously lifted from somewhere and, having heard it before, one of the players immediately knows the one true answer. Which either makes it boring because the player immediately speaks up or frustrating because the player decides that he wants to solve it some other way.

Lets go over how most of the parties I've been in would solve this:

Assumption: There is no other viable route across whatever the bridges cross.

We have no in-character reason to believe that the 'rules' of who lies and who tells the truth. Especially rules that convoluted. So we can't take any guards at their word.

Get the party member who can fly. Have him walk across a bridge. If it collapses, he flies back and we know that bridge doesn't work. If it teleports him back, we know that bridge doesn't work either. So we keep testing until he walks across the safe bridge.

If we don't have someone who can fly, we summon a minion.

If flying and minion summoning isn't an option, we consider forcing the guards to test the bridges. But, unless they give us a reason, we discard that option becase we aren't evil.

If all else fails, we find some method to randomly pick one of us to test the bridges. Worst case, we mourn his sacrifice afterwards.

One question: Why do we have to follow your rules ?

We then look for a way to bypass however the rules are enforced. We don't like being screwed around like this.

>I guess I should be more clear
You aren't being "more clear"

You are adding additional rules that you didn't mention before because someone solved it quickly with a solution that fits all the rules you gave, but isn't the one true solution.

>Why does my gm think that these are puzzles?

Because you keep coming back to his game.

They never asked which direction.

Second panel