I used a lot of puzzles during the Great Tower of Oldechi. The tower was divided into seven sections, each with a different manager. Each manager built a section of floors on a certain theme, like the classical elements or gothic horror. The fifth section, floors 19 through 22, was based on puzzles. Each floor was actually one giant puzzle, often with smaller puzzles of various types scattered throughout. When I later asked the players later which floor was their favorite, every one of them picked on of those floors (and among the five players, they picked all four floors). Remind me to talk about that someday.
But this story is about a different puzzle. The party was breaking into a tower in modern Tokyo, on the run from the military because a thousand-year-old police officer was chasing them (it was that kind of campaign). They had to disable computers in a server room, but they had to only mess with computers that were already running because doing anything else would trigger the alarm. So I gave them this:
The players solved it quickly, so I gave them a slightly harder one to represent the next server farm. When they solved that, they moved on.
Fast forward two years, to the Eight Arms and the Memento Mori. The party’s ship had gotten damaged by some sort of sharks with ankylosaurus tails or something. Without sails or a steering mechanism, they drifted to a ship graveyard populated by elementals from the plane of carpentry. In order to find shipwrecks of sufficient integrity to provide salvageable parts, they players had to determine where the ships were knowing only how many their divers could see from the side.
I gave them the same puzzle. Not just the same type of puzzle, but the exact same puzzle. The rules, clues, and solution were exactly the same. Two of the players were in both campaigns and neither recognized it from before. Heck, I didn’t even remember I had used the same puzzle until I was going through old notes to prepare for this article.
I suppose a pessimistic reader could see this as “your puzzles are so uninteresting that no player wants to remember them”, but since the puzzle was something like the third or fourth most exciting part of that session I’m not too bothered. More than that, this is an example of the power of reskinning. The exact same puzzle becomes unrecognizably different when presented in a different way, and that’s a good thing.
The key to reskinning a puzzle to fit your story is to have the two meet somewhere in the middle. Don’t come up with a brilliant story and try to shoehorn a puzzle into it, because it will feel out of place. But for the same reason don’t come up with a brilliant puzzle and try to staple it to your session. Puzzles work best when they work into the story better than “the bank vault for some reason requires Sudoku”. Even if it’s a somewhat flimsy argument (“The bank manager is a former Sudoku champion, and he designed this lock specifically to waste a would-be thief’s time”), players are a lot more forgiving when there’s an argument at all.
This means that it’s easiest and most satisfying to start coming up with a puzzle when you know roughly what the session and potential obstacles are but while they’re still in a sufficient state of flux. Given the above example, you can justify Sudoku as a bank vault combination. But instead, what if the combination was a nine-digit code that could only be determined from a Sudoku in the bank manager’s office? It’s basically the same justification, but now it feels more real because you haven’t already decided that the puzzle must be in front of the vault door, so you have some wiggle room.
I’ve also found that players are happiest when you don’t plunk a puzzle in front of the characters and say “solve this puzzle, orc barbarian!”. You can get away with doing that to the players, yes, but to the characters it would feel like a sudden cognitive break. This is why the example from my sessions framed the puzzle in the form of turning off servers or finding shipwrecks, because it made some sense for the puzzle to exist in the world. Solving a logic puzzle to get a bank combination is a little weird, but solving a wiring puzzle to short out the door lock feels a lot more realistic.
Given these tenets, the ideal puzzle is setting-agnostic (good job building that puzzle around dwarf culture, but you won’t be using it in your Star Wars game) and able to represent a number of things to make it easier to reskin. Following up from the last article, we also want a puzzle to be solvable by logic or reasoning rather than blind intuition and we want it to be challenging without being frustrating. And since we’re trying to marry it with a group of players, the ideal puzzle is also somewhat mutable, so that its difficulty can change a little if that’s what you need for your session.
Now for one of my dirty little DMing secrets: there are a few sites I’ve been using for years that fit all of these criteria. One hosts a wide variety of logic puzzles with unique solutions, different rules, and escalating challenge levels that I’ve been able to tweak to fit any number of sessions. If you’ve seen a puzzle by me, there’s even odds that it originally came from Erich’s Puzzle Palace. Case in point: the very first picture on that page is a link to and solution for the puzzle I posted above. So, you know, spoilers in case you’re playing at home.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t link to the page for Conceptis. A lot of their puzzles require pen and paper manipulation, making them more appropriate for handouts than for solving by simple observation, but they provide many difficulty options for each puzzle type so you can escalate at your leisure. If you’re not a fan of registering with strange websites, a lot of their puzzles are available on Kongregate (and if you are a fan of registering with strange websites, I’ll be happy to provide you my Kongregate referral link).
Both of these sites contain puzzles that can be slotted into any number of situations. Consider one of my favorites, Hashi. The general idea is that each number represents an island and each line represents a bridge, so it’s easy to give this to the players as a “connect all the islands” puzzle. But it could be anything where you need to connect objects without connections crossing each other. Each number could be a power terminal that needs to share energy with other terminals or be at risk of explosion. It could be an orc camp that needs a supply route with another camp, where the routes can’t touch because that might encourage banditry. It could be a glyph that needs to connect to other glyphs in a specific way to power a spell (here, feel free to replace the numbers with arcane symbols and give your players a key to correlate symbols with numbers—it’s no harder and it increases the immersion).
Once you strip a puzzles to its bare essentials, you can pile anything you want on top of it to make it specific to your session or campaign. This is sort of an extension of what I suggested in my post on designing a session in one hour. Training yourself to file the serial numbers off a plot or character is different from training yourself to figure out the root of a puzzle, but they serve similar purposes in that both allow you to take something designed by somebody else and change it into something all your own.
The easiest way to do this is to think of a description of the puzzle, then take all the nouns in that description and change them to “thing”. When you stop thinking of Hashi puzzles as “islands” and “bridges” and start thinking of them as “things that need connecting” and “connectors” you start to see the possibilities. Similarly, full house puzzles aren’t “touch all the floor tiles once” puzzles, even though that’s the most obvious application. They’re “touch all the things once” puzzles, which opens up power, supply route, exploration, and even communications reskinning opportunities.
This makes it easier to go the other way as well. If you know you need a puzzle where the players need to place magic symbols that interact badly in certain prohibited arrangements, you could look for a puzzle all day. If you think of it as “place things so they don’t affect other things”, you have many more options.
There are plenty of other options for puzzles, but these are the easiest I’ve found to reskin. If you’re willing to put in more work you can turn almost anything into almost anything else. A great example of this is the room escape genre of games, where the player is put into a situation (usually “trapped in a room”) and must perform tasks, solve puzzles, and combine and use items to work his or her way out. Given the sheer number and variety of such games they’re probably the king of non-sequitur puzzles. More than once I’ve had to rotate discs into a picture to open a desk drawer, the exact mechanics of which are neither explained nor necessary. A full room escape game is probably not appropriate for D&D given players’ predilections toward bursting through a door whether or not it’s locked by the triangle key, but bits of the games are right at home in a session. I’ve provided some links below.
Of course, if you want to create a massive, arc-spanning puzzle, you’re better off designing something brand-new. The simplest way is to have your MacGuffins be pieces of the puzzle, so the players must travel far and wide to collect segments of the puzzle’s solution. A more complex but more rewarding option is to present players with a prophecy or other tract open to interpretation that the party solves gradually. In any case, a puzzle that size becomes one of the points of the campaign, and that merits something group-specific and personal.
When I first started adapting puzzles from other sources, my biggest concern was that a player would recognize the puzzle and solve it immediately. With puzzles like this, that’s not a problem. A player who solves every puzzle I’ve linked above or player every room escape game is likely to have forgotten exactly how he or she did it and would be willing to do it again. If I’ve proven nothing else with puzzles in my games, it’s that the act of solving a puzzle is greater enjoyment than the knowledge that a puzzle has been solved, which is why players only ask for hints or leverage the “but my character is Reed Richards!” argument when they’re well and truly stuck. As such, I’m not nearly as bothered by linking to these sites as I would have been a few short years ago.
In fact, I hope one of my future DMs grabs some of these puzzles, repackages them, and gives them to me. I’ve been meaning to solve a bunch of them and haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Mild Escape by TESSHI-e: Especially pretty given the genre, and they rarely rely on searching for specific pixels to find items or combining clues in a haphazard, moon-logic way.
Crimson Room: The first room escape game I played, arguably one of the first at all. It and its sequels are fairly good, if a bit reliant on pixel-hunting and only occasionally solvable depending on whether a certain website opts to cooperate in a given day.
Jay Is Games: This is where I get most of the room escape puzzles I play these days. The quality varies wildly. As I write this, one of the first articles is “The 12 Best Escape Games You Might Not Have Played”, which is a decent introduction to the genre even if some of the games they list aren’t my cup of tea.