Noncombat challenges can be difficult to set up in a DnDish game, so there is no shame in using others' noncombat challenges for your own purposes. These are most commonly found as deliberate puzzles, but can also include finding and opening hidden doors or finding and getting around traps for a more natural means of in-game puzzle use.
While there are many books and pdfs and blog posts and videos that provide such content, some official sources come from the pages of Dungeon Magazine: the Challenge of Champions I-V. Each of these is billed as being for four PCs of any level.
The Challenge of Champions adventures can be found in Dungeon Magazine issues 58, 69, 80, 91, and 108. The first three are for AD&D rulesets, with the last two being for 3.x, not that ruleset really matters.
It doesn't matter because the puzzles included are aimed more at the players than at their PCs. The conceit being that there is an Adventuring Guild sponsoring each Challenge, enforcing rules about items and magic available to participants. Looking at them, this guild exists in an incredibly high-magic world.
Anyhow, each Challenge comes with handouts and illustrations - and approved solutions given the parameters of each challenge. Those handouts can make it a challenge to use many of these online, but ideal around the kitchen table. Each challenge also provides some NPCs to round out the team, as well as a list of other competing teams and those teams' final scores.
Using these as-is works, but moving some of them into your homebrew adventure may require a bit more effort, unless you're running a funhouse, where most of these challenges are right at home. The preferred solutions of the challenges go out the window when PCs/players have full access to all their spells and items, and honestly, this is perfectly fine. I say this because a good puzzle encounter is one that engages most or all players and can be solved multiple ways or merely ignored until later.
This last is important, because PCs/players should always be able to move forward or backwards without solving the puzzle (or finding the secret door or making correct die roll). Puzzles (and secret doors and die rolls) are ideal for hiding cool loot, shortcuts, and side quests, but using them to block forward passage can result in frustration and an overall dissatisfying game session.
Especially if some players in the group don't do puzzles.
Luckily, you talked about puzzles during Session Zero, so you as DM already know how puzzles are going to work out with your players.
-----
There's a fine line between traps and puzzles, and resources for one often include resources for another. So here are some additional puzzle resources for your games - I address trap resources in another post (and should probably update that one).
Puzzles, Predicaments, and Perplexities series
the Riddle Room series from Cloud Kingdom Games (some volumes seem to be ebay only).
and lots of videos on the YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment