We start a dungeon crawl with premade characters

Did you ask what was supposed to happen?

>Scratching away the moss reveals dwarven writing, but no one chose the premade dwarf character.
>"If you had, the writing would be gnomish," the DM remarks.
For what purpose

Likely to add some level of implied mysticism or unknown scripture implying either the purpose of the dungeon or the method of entry that the GM smugly places just outside the grasp of the players.

It's generally for versilimitude. Of course, it's shit because it's nonactionable.

The guy is a douche, and is laughing at the player's inability to read his mind.

>implying either the purpose of the dungeon or the method of entry
...Which he is unable to accomplish by making up some mysterious inscription?

And even if you were that shit, why would you ADMIT to being worthless garbage in front of the whole table?

The hints are in the descriptions that OP didn't include.
But they were probably nonsense anyway. I'd be surprised if it wasn't:
>the statues, which had fallen from its plinth
Putting the statue back in place is CRPG puzzle solving 101. But it's a nonsensical trope that is asking for metagaming.
I still would play with that GM, he seems like he cares.

I mean the GM placed the inscriptions there for (((aesthetic))) or simply as set pieces. The fact they would be a different language if the party had a dwarf implies they were never meant to be read.

Yeah. So just make some shit up. Even ”it’s a dwarven name, one that you don’t know”. Instead of ”lol it’s le schroedinger’s text and your choices don’t even matter”

I agree. I was just stating the purpose in response to . I think we’re on the same page.

In my experience this is a really common problem. As a GM it's sometimes difficult to see which parts of your puzzles are actually obvious and which parts only seem to be to you since you have spent hours, maybe even days or weeks thinking them up. When you're that involved in the process it's important to get a breath of fresh air. Step away from your notes for a couple of days and then return to them, approach your puzzle like a player would and see if it still makes sense to you. Maybe even go through it step by step with someone who isn't actually in your group and see if they can figure it out and what they think needs to be improved, and so on.

Giving hints can be tricky as well. Your players ask you about the surrounding area and you tell them
>"As you look up, you see what appears to be a small lookout carved into the face of the mountain. It's barely visible from down where you stand. It's a small wonder you managed to see it at all..."
And you think that it should now be obvious to your players that they need to get up there to get in. But to them it likely just sounds like scenery. Then again, if you then add
>"You realize that it's probably connected to the rest of the fortress. You think to yourself that if you only could get up there, that would be a way inside..."
You also run the risk of your players getting all kinds of shitty over you injecting thoughts into their characters' heads. I definitely perefer this option, but for whatever reason, many people want there to be a very strict line defining what the GM has power over and what the players have power over, and if that's the case, then this option probably isn't gonna work.

To be fair. There is a lot of middle ground. Like for example, chucking some pointless dice behind the screen and saying, "Thanks to your [skill/background/intelligence/perception/keen elven eyes] you are able to notice/deduce/recall this more obvious hint" Which then lets you gracefully back away from the fuck-up of a poorly designed puzzle and turn it into a way of rewarding non-combat abilities/backstory/whatever.

>gracefully back away from the fuck-up of a poorly designed puzzle
Yeah, but I believe the puzzle ought to be figuring out how to achieve something. Not figuring out what to achieve.

>Not figuring out what to achieve.
I believe in players formulating their own objectives.

Yeah, but when the players have their objective and it's not clear how to proceed with the objective because everything they try is met with smug derision and/or failure they're going to start not caring about those objective a lot faster.

That's not an actual puzzle now though, is it? If the players say that they want to steal the treasure from the dwarven fortress, then sure, that's great. They've found their objective. But if, once they get there, they can't get in, there's no reason to force them into not only figuring how to do so, but also what the riddle they must solve to do so actually is.

How is this statement relevant?
>I want to get into place.
Figure out how.
>Can't figure it out
Oh well (rolls dice) you notice a thing.
>Oh, I know how I can use thing to get in. Glad I put those points into Notice Thing.

I try to make my puzzles following few simple guidelines;

If the puzzle has only a single answer or a single way to deal with it, then it needs to be ridiculously simple (the player´s rarely care, they typically feel good for solving things) or it's purely for optional stuff like, after clearing the dungeon and finishing whatever quest they were on, they find a simple riddle puzzle, solving it opens a secret chamber that might have some lore stuff and a magic item or two - if they can't figure out the riddle then no big deal, they wont miss much.

If the puzzle needs to be solved for the players to be able to proceed then i try to figure out multiple ways of solving the puzzle, including some way of bypassing it entirely and if the players come up with yet another plausible way to deal with it (one that i didn't anticipate) then i let the solve it that way, in the end the game keeps rolling on and the players are having fun.

My number 1 rule is to keep the party progressing. They can fail and die, but they should never be stuck. If it makes someone in the group think, "I'd rather be doing something else now", then I have failed. The whole point of tabletop, to me, is entertainment.

I mean, the story is petty similar to one of my first games so I don't see it being too far fetched. And it at least didn't contain NAT FUCKING 20 so it puts it ahead of most D&D stories that get posted.

I read it as the DM trying to express that the writing is not important. It's Dwarvish because it doesn't need to be read and there are no Dwarves in the party, if there were, the writing would be something else because it's not important. It's just surface detail.

>The whole point of tabletop, to me, is entertainment.
Dude, get the fuck out with your radical ideas.

But it's lame surface detail, the DM could have just as easily made some generic dwarven text about some guy and his achievements or whatnot and it would have had no effect on the puzzle, but man it would seem a lot cooler.

>and if the players come up with yet another plausible way to deal with it (one that i didn't anticipate) then i let the solve it that way
Yes, also this. As soon as the players attempts something that sounds reasonable I pretend like it was the intended solution all along.

Yup, playing "Guess what the DM was thinking when he came up with the puzzle" is rarely fun.

and as pointed out, progression is fun. Being stuck on a puzzle that's keeping the party from doing actual adventuring will simply cause the players to disengage, get bored and generally lose interest in the game.

What kind of fantasy world do you live in where only good GMs exist, and how can I travel there?

The first DM I've played under was exactly like this. He'd make bullshit up on the fly to desperately prevent you from succeeding at anything he didn't want you to.

For example, one time we docked at a port in an island. He began to say that everyone exited the boat- but, being a little savvy, I suggested that my character, a veteran soldier, stayed behind on the ship to guard it from intruders and such.
He began to make up reason after reason that my character should not want to stay on the boat, from needing to use the restroom to being tired to being sick and whatever else. But after much insistence (and solutions like "he'll just shit in a bucket while on deck") and the other players backing me up, he conceded.

While the rest of the party was doing business on the island, he cuts back to me in the ship, and how a courtesan was trying to seduce my character out of the ship. "Nay" I said, my character had a wife waiting for him back home and he was faithful. But no, I had to roll Willpower to resist, and a 15 wasn't enough so I left the boat.
The instant I stepped off, some hooded figures appeared and cut the anchor and sailed off. The fuckdemon is nowhere to be seen, having disappeared the second I turned to look at the ship, so I can't grab her for interrogation, and Spot check fails.

Then, I resort to using the grappling hook + rope I have, tossing it at the ship so that I could climb back onto it before it got away. Roll a 20, but no, he says that "it goes through the ship, like it was a ghost", and the ship disappears.
Thus, we're forced to spend 3 irl hours stranded there, trying to do several things that fail before we figure out exactly what he wanted us to do.

This is a tame example, but imagine having to put up with this kind of shit all the time.

That's when you start saying 'choo choo' and doing random shit to sabotage the DM's carefully laid plans.

Guys if you're going to do this for whatever reason, don't tell your player.

>>We get impatient and try to use one of the statues, which had fallen from its plinth, as a battering ram. We manage to put a crack in one of the doors, but it's still lodged shut.

Yeah, this sounds like the thing. You were supposed to just put the statue back on its pedestal to unlock something (either the door itself or some compartment with a key for the keyhole or something). You may have thought of it too much like a real life thing and too little like a videogame, a lot of the things you'll encounter in a dungeon crawl follow videogame logic.

RPGs are supposed to flow more smoothly than that, but it seems like both you and the DM are inexperienced and are fumbling around looking for the proper mode of thought, proper brain-state where everything clicks together. It'll get better once you get experience (IRL, not in game).

Also it's normal that you only get one try at anything because if you had unlimited tries, it would be trivial to brute-force every single skill check.

Yeah. Don't let them see the man behind the curtain, it ruins the illusion. If you're deceiving the players, don't tell them you're doing so.

Or, alternatively, stop being a back of dicks and accept the story hook the DM is pushing in your fucking direction you childish piece of shit.

Compare these two scenarios for example:

>We want to break into the abandoned fortress!
Ok. You get to the fortress. You can't get in.
>Ok... Are there any cracks or the like in the door that we can use to force it open or break it down?
No.
>Kay... We scout the areas for clues?
You find [stuff].
>Can we use [stuff] to open the door?
No.
Etc etc

And

>We want to break into the abandoned fortress!
Ok. You get to the fortress. You can't get in through the gate. You spend a couple of hours scouting the area and find three noteworthy locations. The first, a small metal grate, rusted shut, hidden within a a small cavern a few hundred feet away from the main entrance. The second, a few small openings higher up along the mountain wall that could possibly have been used to keep watch against invaders in the past. The third, a series of runes along on a broken statue that might offer some insight into how to open the main gate. How do you wish to proceed?
>Let's try to decipher the runes. Someone in town is bound to know something about how to read ancient dwarvish. Worst case scenario we're gonna need to get some tools for scaling that wall or breaking down the grate anyway.

Sounds like you're a really shitty player, and your DM doesn't have experience dealing with shitty players. The way you do those things is you outright say "No, this is a cutscene, you don't get to make decisions or act now. Your all get off the boat and it immediately gets stolen".

>This is a cutscene
I pack my shit and leave.

Puzzles in TTRPGs are shit and defeat the purpose of the game.

If you're building a puzzle to challenge the player, you're not playing the spirit of the game. It's a challenge to the actual smartest player in the room, excluding the other players.

If you're building a puzzle to challenge the characters, then the puzzle will simply be resolved with a skill check.

Good fucking riddance, dipshit.

>hooded figures
God dammit, not the Cult Of Shipthieves again. I hate those guys.

This is OP.

This is going to sound like I'm making it up as I go along, but we did actually try to put the broken statue back in its place. The DM told us the foot stumps were too weathered support the statue anymore.

Who the fuck cares about the opinion of the kind of shitty DM that actually refers to descriptions as a 'cut scene'?

>Puzzles in TTRPGs are shit and defeat the purpose of the game.

You are shit and defeat the purpose of the game. Puzzles are awesome and you should stick them everywhere you can.

I spit in the DM's face, kick his dog/cat/significant other, and leave.

You're a fucking retarded mongoloid and should kill yourself before you have the spread your idiocy even further. Puzzles challenge the player, not the character, ergo, they're not part of TTRPGs.

That's stupid. Every decision the characters make is in fact made by the players no matter what. There is no escaping that. You are always, no matter what, challenging the actual players and they merely use their characters as a tool to solve those challenges. This is how RPGs have always worked.

Only way to avoid that would be to have some kind of an algorithm or AI make all the decisions for your character, and that wouldn't be a game at all after that, it would be a weird toy that you watch.

The kind of player who gets mad about that is not worth anybody's company. It is a game. Deal with it.

So the player reacts within his character (vet guarding a ship) to a prompt the dm gave (shady docks) and then the dm pulls several things out of his arse to fuck over the player.

I understand wanting to implement a plot hook but you're just undermining your players and railroading them at this point. No one wants to watch a cutscene and be actively punished for playing.

>Puzzles challenge the player, not the character, ergo, they're not part of TTRPGs

Literally everything in an RPG by definition challenges the player. The character is nothing more than a tool for the human player. You know nothing about anything.

Now try making a salient point.

There's a difference between challenging the player to think about what their character would do, and challenging the player to solve elven sudoku

Look, as a player you're not supposed to fucking fight the quest hooks the DM gives you. That's not clever, that's not helpful to the game, that's literally the opposite of good roleplaying. If you see that coming, you should wink and nod and walk into it anyway because otherwise the game won't progress. DMs don't prepare a Skyrim sized world for you that you can do whatever the fuck you please in, they like to pretend they do but that's just an illusion and it's not polite to actively try to poke holes into that illusion. In reality any DM is only going to prepare a specific quest and a specific area, and your job as players is to accept the hook that leads to that quest and that area because otherwise there won't be a fucking game tonight, there's nothing else prepared.

Wrong dipshits. Or maybe for a metagamer like you, that is true. But for a normal, GOOD player, their decisions are based on the filter of their characters.

How about you try? All you've done is express how mad the word "cutscene" makes you for no real reason. That word's perfectly fine for describing what's going on: a brief segment of play that sets up the next quest where player decision-making is limited or disabled (because any possible deviation would just break the quest).

Your character is not a person. Literally everything he does was in fact done by you. There is no way around this.

By that logic, all combat should happen entirely on autopilot since any strategic or tactical decision is just challenging the player. No, I'm sorry, this whole idea is horseshit, it's a game and inherently in a game you must always challenge the player. There is no one else to challenge.

Sudokus are clear. You know what your options are, you know what your goal is, and they're supposed to present you with enough numbers to make them solvable.

'Puzzles' in RPGs can and often do devolve into the tabletop version of pixelhunting in point-and-click adventure games. Your character is free to do anything, but if the puzzle is particularly difficult, only one single course of action will be able to solve it. That means 99% of a player's options are mental dead weight. Garbage options that won't advance the game in any way.

That's when the DM is supposed to drop some hints that exclude most of the trap options. Give them a fair chance.

If your quest hook relies on the characters doing something that doesn't make sense, it's not a good quest hook.

Why would they leave their boat completely unattended?

>In reality any DM is only going to prepare a specific quest and a specific area, and your job as players is to accept the hook that leads to that quest and that area because otherwise there won't be a fucking game tonight, there's nothing else prepared.

>sandbox doesn't exist
>railroad is the olny way to play

can you please kill yourself?
right now if you can

So, what you're saying, your inbred Jew nigger, is that an Intelligence 7 barbarian and an Intelligence 18 wizard will approach a puzzle-lock in the same way?

If you say yes, you need to get up from your computer chair, do a running start, and jump headfirst out of the nearest window.

No? Are you fucking stupid? Do you pay attention to what you're saying? Challenging the player using combat would be you literally pulling out a sword and telling the player to defend himself. You're challenging the characters to combat, you fucking realist mongoloid.

I really need to know what kind of trauma and abuse you suffered to give you these kinds of adamant derangements and complexes.

>So, what you're saying, your inbred Jew nigger, is that an Intelligence 7 barbarian and an Intelligence 18 wizard will approach a puzzle-lock in the same way?

they are just stats man
you are literally retarded

>You may have thought of it too much like a real life thing and too little like a videogame, a lot of the things you'll encounter in a dungeon crawl follow videogame logic.
Are these truly the people who play tabletop games nowadays? Fuck, 3.PF truly has ruined a generation of RP'ers.

Do you have like 0 idea what roleplaying is?
Do you even try to reflect or represent your character when you play?

Stats that describe the intelligence of the character, yes, including his puzzle-solving ability. If you can't see that, you need to make a noose and hang yourself.

Absolute nonsense user - sure go along with the first plot hook you're shown, but that assumes you're playing a railroad/premade module etc. which is simply not the only way to play.
Also, if the GM's carefully laid out plans are thwarted by simply having one PC in the "wrong" place the the GM really needs to put more effort in the hooks they are presenting the players.

Guys, guys, how about the third option: you don't act like a passive aggressive piece of shit, and you don't silently agree to play a game you don't enjoy. Instead you talk to your DM like an adult and tell him you'd like for your actions to matter. Speaking as a GM: if plot is North and the players go South, I warn my players. "Hey guys, the adventure is *that* way. We can have a game about what's South but then I'll have to pause the session so I can get some shit prepared." (That's assuming I don't just make shit up on the fly or move the plot South.) Your DM can do that too. And if he won't, just leave. No game > bad game.

Combat and solving puzzles are two different things.

Combat rules are usually pretty clear-cut. You know what your options are for attack and defense, there's a turn order, and so on.

If your DM doesn't give you any context for a puzzle, you have no starting point. Nothing to go by. That's when players say 'Fuck it' and break doors down with old statues.

It's nothing to do with 3.PF
It has everything to do with /v/ casuals coming to play Veeky Forumss from Neverwinter or Divinity, who still thinks that Nintendo Collectathon "Puzzles" are clever and the only thing that classifies as a puzzle.
Take a look at any 3.PF adventure path and you'd know that shit is discouraged.

do you think roleplaying means roleplaying your stats?

if yes you are retarded

>they are just stats man
That's dumb. Why call it Intelligence if it doesn't represent your character's intelligence?

You might as well call the stats Red, Yellow, Blue, Purple and Green.

If you think it doesn't, you're munchkin garbage.

Acting in a means outside the knowledge and capabilities of the character is meta-gaming.
At least try to have a point when you mock someone next time.

>It's nothing to do with 3.PF
Yes it does, it introduced the idea that you had to know how to build a character before you actually went through the trouble of making that character.
>Take a look at any 3.PF adventure path and you'd know that shit is discouraged.
How so?

>So, what you're saying, your inbred Jew nigger
/pol/ you're trying too hard to fit in again.

What exactly do players get to have input on, if not putting a gaurd on their own boat?

>get a boat
>dm immediately slaps your hand and tells you "NO YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO HAVE THAT BOAT"
>players stuck on bumfuck nowhere and spend hours trying to leave
>story

>Stats that describe the intelligence of the character, yes, including his puzzle-solving ability.
Actually, it determines how well he can recall information from knowledge checks and their ability to cast spells as a Wizard. Anything that goes beyond that is head canon and homebrew.

>not caring about stats is munchkin

oh am i laffin

stats exist for dice rolls not for roleplaying your character

how do you even roleplay a charachter with 18 int?

normal human intelligence is supposed to be between 9 and 11

18 is einstein level intelligence or even beyond
how do roleplay that you retard?

Not him, and I don't even agree with him, but I do think that having a stat called Intelligence is pretty fucking stupid. It's extremely difficult to play a character that's dumber than you, and it's impossible to play a character that's smarter. I get the feeling that the original intent was for Int to represent booksmarts while Wis was more like streetsmarts, but Int is also used for a whole bunch of cognitive things that aren't related to education. I want to get rid of the stat entirely and replace it with something like Education which in turn is used for knowledge rolls and the like but is not at all related to how good of a tactician or puzzle solver the character is.

L o l

Do you play pathfinder, by chance?

No, no, no. You're doing it all wrong. Cutscenes are a terrible idea. Instead you need a level 20 DMPC who will threaten the party members or mind control them. It's the only way the players will learn.

>That's dumb. Why call it Intelligence if it doesn't represent your character's intelligence?
For the same reason the designers call Wisdom "Wisdom" when most of its abilities center on your ability to detect minor inconsistencies in your environment using your five senses.

The designers from back in the day didn't put much thought into how stats were represented beyond their mechanical niches and nobody called them on it because D&D was one of the first of its kind.

No, ”puzzles” are fine if they have real-world or in-game-world logic applicable to them, and have several potential correct answers. Such as: how do you get a gem that’s set into the ceiling.

Not fucking riddles.

Did you know this is an 18+ website? I think you should leave before you get b&.

>better accuse him of being /pol/ because I am losing the argument
t. you

Fucking brainlets, when will they learn?

>Not him, and I don't even agree with him, but I do think that having a stat called Intelligence is pretty fucking stupid.
Not necessarily more stupid than tying every single character you play down to your personal level of intelligence.

>better accuse him of being /pol/ because I am losing the argument
More like
>Calling people racial slurs does not make your argument stronger, nor does it make it less obvious where you came from.
I mean come on /pol/, do you really need to shove your racism into every facet of your life?

In GURPS you can avoid this. There are skill called Tactics, and when you succeed at it your GM may give you some hints of how to wield your character probably; or this might be a hardcap for some decisions characters make (oh no, Bob, this feint-then-deceptive-strike-into-neck-while-all-out-attacking is not what your character might think of)

So how are you planning on solving the fact that your character is a much better tactician than you?

It's called a world view for a reason.

It colors every interaction with the world.

>Not necessarily more stupid than tying every single character you play down to your personal level of intelligence.

what's the correct thing to do instead?

augment my intelligence with cybernetic implants so i can roleplay my 18 int wizard?

By giving him abilities and skills that cover that particular discipline.

I'm not the one arguing that it doesn't make sense to have an ability called Intelligence.

Your newfag is showing.

”OH BOY BETTER DRINK THIS OBVIOUSLY POISONED CHALICE BECAUSE IT’S CLEARLY A _PLOT HOOK_”