This was posted as a comment on Rodrigo Lopez's article here: http://www.majorspoilers.com/gamer%E2%80%99s-corner-puzzles
My theory on why puzzles don’t work in role-playing games is that the two are just related and unrelated enough to be weird together.
Let’s try and think of some analogies. Here’s one: CG faces. There’s a certain sweet spot, or hump, between totally unrealistic and totally realistic, where CG faces become really weird. Unrealistic faces, like on toy cowboys and anthropomorphic cars, work fine. But people react badly when they think you’re trying to fool them into thinking a face is, or could be, real.
Here’s another analogy. Puzzles in RPGs are like taco sandwiches. You don’t butter a taco and put two slices of bread around your taco.
And a third analogy. Many of us get really pissed off at writers who pull the “it was all a dream” trope in a comic, novel, video game, television series, or movie. It’s kind of like the inverse of breaking the fourth wall. Instead of having four walls, there are now eight walls, as well as the possibility of an infinite regression of inner narratives.
Basically my point is that a D&D game is already a kind of puzzle. You can think of any RPG encounter as an elaborate versions of Chess puzzles, where the PCs themselves are the pieces. A good Chess puzzle makes creative use of the space of the board, and the conceptual space of what is allowed by the various theories of piece movement.
In Chess puzzles, it is virtually inconceivable that you would have the pieces stand in the centre of the board and hand the players a substitution cipher, and state that the Chess puzzle will be won when they complete the cipher. In that situation you might as well just get rid of the Chess board and play a different kind of puzzle.
I haven’t actually implemented this, but I have a theory about a sort of Denny’s placemat-and-crayons type of D&D adventure. In which combat and role-playing are just two of the half-dozen or so activities that make up the entire evening. Basically instead of personifying your characters, you are asked to look at them from six or seven different angles, sometimes from far above, sometimes close up, sometimes over longer periods of time, and sometimes over shorter periods. Your characters might not even resemble themselves when you change the lens you’re looking at them through.
What this also means though is that a character sheet might be insufficient to really represent all the facets of a single character. On the other hand, we already know that character sheets are notoriously complex and contingency-based, so it should be possible to use some of those numbers in interesting ways that aren’t always necessarily moving the players around on a 1-inch grid.
I don’t mean to denigrate the 1-inch grid though. I think the game can be perfectly rewarding if it is cast as a series of puzzles that all play out on a 1-inch grid. I still think there’s infinite possibility there.
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Interesting thoughts. I'm offering advice to a DM who's including in his next few sessions a few "puzzles", so this is a nice bit of synchronicity.
I think there should be a distinction between "puzzles" and (for lack of a better term) "brain-teasers". Pushing buttons in a particular sequence, or arranging chess pieces on a board feel like 'puzzles'.
To illustrate the other concept, an example:
The entrance to the Temple of Grumbar, lord of the Earth, has a section in front of the doors that is bare earth; not stone or masonry, but dirt. In front of that section are a few worn stone cubes, roughly two feet tall. If the characters try to enter the temple, a hostile Huge Earth Elemental rises from the dirt and calls them disrespectful in Terran, language of earth elementals. If they try to move past it to enter, it attacks. But, if the characters sit down on the stone blocks, (or on the ground; the blocks are there for the same reason you'd have a bench or a chair inside your entrance: courtesy) remove their footwear, and walk barefoot over the sacred ground, they may enter the temple without a fight.
Puzzle? Not like the chess game is. "Brain-teaser": what are the worn stone blocks for? Why bare earth? How does it all fit together?
The best sort of 'brain-teasers' are those that allow for multiple possible solutions with varying outcomes. Characters could fly or levitate over the dirt, or make a running jump (maybe!) or they could try to run past, open the doors, and hope that the elemental won't leave the dirt.
What this also means though is that a character sheet might be insufficient to really represent all the facets of a single character.
As a narrativist player, I'd say the character sheet was never meant to represent all the facets of a single character. The purpose of a character sheet is to record only the game-mechanics and game elements that require definition. Anything else can be jotted down on note paper, or written on the back of the sheet, if it's written down at all. Bob the Barbarian hates spiders; not a phobia, just doesn't like 'em, especially if they're hairy. That can go anywhere on the character sheet, or it can be left off. Bob the Barbarian can enter berserker rage 3/day: that needs to be on the sheet because it's a game mechanic.
I don't really agree.
Much of roleplaying games is puzzle solving, at least for a lot of groups. "How should we find where the villain is hiding?" is a puzzle. "How do I move so as to strike at the bad guy's unprotected back and get a to hit bonus?" is a puzzle. It doesn't matter what level of abstraction you impose; at some point players need to make intelligent choices to move the plot forward - or to deliberately fail the plot, if that's their bag - and at that point they are puzzle solving.
Certainly one can argue that dumping a logic problem or riddle in front of the players is immersion breaking, bad, or whatever, but that's an example of a bad puzzle, not a reason to ditch the concept entirely. Heroes having to solve puzzles is as much entrenched in the fantasy genre as fire breathing dragons is, and it's not uncommon in other genres either.
Your analogy for the "it's all a dream" is flawed as well I think. The reason that's a hated device isn't, I submit, because it breaks the fourth wall. You can break the fourth wall and still be very entertaining; several shows do this fairly often (the BBC series Hustle is a fairly recent example). No, the reason "it's all a dream" is bad is because it invalidates all of the story telling, plot development, and character development that were, up until that point, thought to have actually happened (within the fictional narrative); it's hated because it is a Reset Button, in other words.
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