An Aside on Riddles

Riddles are something of a love-it-or-hate-it element in adventure/dungeon design.  Probably the "hate" is somewhat more fervent here: people who dislike riddles really dislike them, and it's easy to understand their perspective.  Placing a riddle in the party's path can be like dropping a giant roadblock right out of the sky in front of them.  Especially if the rest of the adventure rides on their answer---whether the "riddle" is in the classic "Speak Friend and Enter" barred door, or figuring out the significance of a clue in a murder mystery; failing to solve it can mean the mission is abandoned, the dungeon exploration ends there, etc.

In point of fact, this has been my attitude for most of my DMing career; having been on the receiving end of some real bad "solve the riddle or the adventure ends" scenarios, which in fact pretty much ended the adventure.   Recently however as is obvious from my last post, I have come around to allowing that riddles can have a place in adventure/dungeon design.

So let's look at the example riddle I offered and why I think it shouldn't get me defenestrated from DM School.

"I'm hot and sweet, known to be hysterical
They never hear me coming, though my spots are inimical
I'm a master of stealth and silent off the branch I fall
Which is just as well, because I can't hear at all
What am I?

(The answers "Def Leppard" or "a deaf leopard" would be correct)

~
First of all, riddles obviously don't have to come in the form of a lame couplet, Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry or in any kind of poetic form at all.  At the broadest level, "in the room ahead is a chasm crossed by a gently swaying rope-bridge.  Directly under the bridge is a giant heap of dead bodies in armor and adventuring equipment, all in postures suggesting death by falling," is a riddle of sorts. But for our purpose,s let's assume we're just talking about the familiar guessing-game style riddle I wrote for my dungeon entrance.

The first thing to do, as I suggested last post, is know your audience.   I have two players who were teenagers in the 80s and another at least familiar enough with Butt-Rock to likely know the lyrics to "Pour Some Sugar on Me (In the Name of Love)."  Just pulling some brain-teaser off a website is likely to leave your players annoyed if not stumped; tailoring the answer to them will likely make the riddle 1) more amusing and; 2) more solveable.  And you want the riddle to be solveable.  This is the even more important second thing to do: design the riddle to be beaten.  Absolutely softball that shit.  If experience has taught me anything it's that four guys at a dinner table late in the evening have the collective problem-solving ability of one very drunk guy early in the morning. 

More often than not if you ask a riddle thinking "no way they can't solve this," what you'll get is someone figuring the answer out in the first minute and then the collective intelligence of your players defeating itself as someone else makes a counterproposal, and the "obviousness" quickly disappears in a roundtable of suggestion and rebuttal.   Hence, err on the side of caution.  Make the riddle as "obvious" as you can.  I mean, stop short of "which president had the given name George and the surname Washington?" but you want to make it easy hence A) aim for areas of knowledge where you know at least one player is strong; B) stack your clues. 

If you look at the example riddle I wrote you can even see how it might quickly become "not so obvious" after a round of collective thinking.  "Falling off the branch" may suggest leaf, stem, moss--if they get themselves into thinking about trees rather than butt-rock, "hot and sweet" might suggest sap.   Hell, they might come around to thinking about fantasy creatures and guess "Decapus" since that's a predator that lurks in trees or other heights in Pathfinder's bestiaries.   If the players think too literally, "hot and sweet" stops being a helpful clue and becomes a serious obfuscation. 

This comes back to: remember, you want your players to solve the riddle.  You don't want to "outsmart" them, especially not if the riddle is related to the adventure progressing. 

It's common advice to say: if you want to include riddles/puzzles in your dungeon or adventure, don't make solving them correctly necessary to any progress.  You might, say, have a side treasure room or ancilliary wing of the dungeon locked behind a riddle---relegating it to "bonus content," not the core of the adventure.  

That is good advice indeed.  If the game grinds to a halt because the party has been posed a question it can't answer, you have a problem.  However, there are more ways to deal with this than relegating "Speak Friend and Enter," conundrums to the strictly ancillary.  In my example, while (effective) character death is a possible outcome of guessing incorrectly, there is a possibility that even with no correct guesses some or even all of the party members emerge as Golden Ones---altered, but able to continue exploring the Stonehold.   With this dungeon in particular, altered states and mutations are going to be a strong theme; in other adventures the penalty for guessing wrong might simply be a loss of convenience, an increased risk, losing time or some other resource.

Puzzles and riddles have a longstanding place in not just adventure games but adventure stories in general---the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade both being iconic examples.  Very importantly, I've recently (while running Maze of the Blue Medusa) found that they create important shifts in the rhythm of an adventure/dungeoncrawl.  Without 'brain teasers' ranging from explicit riddles to simply interpreting clues, dungeons can easily become repetitive grinds of procedurally poking each  room and corridor with a 10ft pole and scouting for traps followed by yet another combat.