@boxobooks said to @ask-drferox: Hello! I saw your post about making a potion game for dnd– I’d love to do the same!! What advice do you have about setting them up? I’m worried about finding the balance between too easy and too hard
Gosh that was a long time ago. The original post is here.
The premise of this puzzle for D&D went thus:
Players found themselves in a dream world. To get back, they needed to drink the right potion.
Each potion would wake them up in a body. Hopefully they got their right body.
There were four players, one dream guide (a cat) and a couple of other entities in the dream world that would be very keen to wake up in a body.
The players got to choose which drink to drink, and allocate them to the other entities/npc. They got it right, but if a dream entity woke up in a player character body, I was going to expect that player character to now play the dream entity, as a sort of party mole.
When designing a puzzle the best advice I’d ever read was to make multiple layers of clues. You start with the most subtle and obscure hints and then slide more and more in as you go along until the players figure it out.
Each goblet had a different appearance and contents.
Each section of the dream world had a different scene/background, and the colors were warped differently.
So they had to match the character to the scene, the scene’s colors to the goblet to get the right person back into the right body.
The goblet at the front, the short black one filled with milk, belonged to their dream guide - a black and white cat. It’s scene was a garden where it lives, but all in monochrome colors. That was fairly obvious, and the cat wanted the milk. And yes, if a player had chosen to drink the milk, they would have woken up in the cat body.
The two ‘other’ entities in the dream belonged to scenes which the players hadn’t encountered yet, but were destined for the future.
If the players can’t solve the puzzle with the first layer of clues, let them do something to earn more clues. It’s D&D, the players exist to influence the world, one way or another. Let them do the hero thing and reward them with a clue.
The purpose of the puzzle isn’t to defeat them and wreck their day. It’s to lead them down an interesting path.
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