Advice on riddles

[Red Baron]

Does anyone have tips on making up good riddles? My thoughts follow, but if anyone can offer good advice I would appreciate it.

Wordplay Riddles

My current method is to google a list of homophones and stare at them until something clever pops out at me.

For example, I made these up in the last three minutes while writing this thread.

R. “How is an actor like a will”
A. "Both affect an heir"

R. "How is an enchanted princess like an insomniac?"
A. "They wake up at knights"

R."What do horses have in common with pumpernickel?”
A."They’re both bred"

I think the advantages of writing riddles this way is

1. They are quick and easy to come up with (so you can generate riddles on the fly in-game)
2. They are humorous
3. They have a good level of difficulty for how quick they are to write, but are still solvable

The disadvantage of this type of riddles is that if you are playing with a frenchman, for instance, they might have trouble solving the riddle.

Descriptive Riddles

I prefer world-play riddles to "descriptive" riddles. An example of a riddle that I don't like would be 

Q. "I am made of wax,
I'm shaped like a tower,
My spine is of flax,
I live for an hour,
what am I?"
A. A candle

I just made that up on the spot, and I'm sure there are DMs who can do a good job with these riddles, but I think these are rather boring, and obvious. They are not fun to solve, and the difficulty is hard to balance, so they tend to be trivial or impossible. I also find them somewhat staid and cliche.

Cryptic Riddles

I enjoy cryptic riddles, but they have a different purpose in play than word-play riddles or descriptive riddles. Whereas the former two types of riddles can be used for situations like "answer this riddle to reveal the treasure" or "answer this riddle to open the secret door", cryptic riddles are vague ominous wording that can give hints to players about what they can expect in the dungeon. Like random rumors about a dungeon, they don't even have to mean anything, and can just be dropped into a game to mess with players. The more mysterious these lines are, the greater effect they will have for intriguing and freaking out players. Make sure at least on or two of them are very strong clues to revealing the big mysteries of your dungeon, in order to imbue the meaningless hints with false credibility.

Whereas I think rhyming is tacky in descriptive riddles, it can be a strong point of cryptic riddles.

Mellon Riddles

These riddles are of the form "speak friend and enter". I find it very hard to come up with these form of riddles, or at least to come up with good ones. I'm at a loss for exactly how to describe these riddles. I see them as very different from logical puzzles (ie. puzzles involving manipulating numbers, determinng which order people are standing in, whois wearing what hat, brainteasers, cyphers/codes, etc.), yet they are puzzles requiring a creative leap to solve. These are very very good riddles, but are few and far between in literature and gaming, so its hard to cite examples or even clarify what I mean here. 

[Red Baron]

As a follow up, I think the Brazen head in Zenopus tower is my favorite riddle in d&d!

[Zenopus]

Great idea for a thread, Red Baron, and great ideas for generating wordplay riddles, which I enjoy. Gygax was a big fan of puns so I would think he would enjoy these as well.

As a player, I enjoy when riddles come up as it represents a break from the ordinary mode of play. Generally our whole group brainstorms the puzzle, and someone can figure it out. We had a session a few months ago with a set of five or so riddles in one room in Stonehell; though I'm not sure if they are in the original or were added by our DM.

* * * * * 

Classic riddles include those of the Hobbit, which would all fall under your "Descriptive Riddles" category:

tolkien.cro.net/talesong/riddles.html

* * * * * 

One riddle that stayed with me from childhood was from an episode of the Superfriends ("Battle of the Gods", 1978), where a Sphinx poses a descriptive riddle that Batman solves:

"What is it that builds up castles and tears down mountains, makes some men blind and helps others to see?"

After you try to solve this, see the answer here: superfriends.fandom.com/wiki/Sphinx

* * * * *

Gary included another type, a Parsing Riddle in his "Dungeon Delving" level for the Hall of Many Panes:

He asked for the simple meaning of the following:
In pinetaris; in oaknoneis.
In mudeelsare; in claynoneis.

Apparently these known phrases are difficult to parse if you just hear them said out loud. See here and here.

* * * * *

The Solo Adventure in the Mentzer Basic Set had a simple riddle of another type, not sure what to call it though:

Surprise! You are here for double-or-nothing! Ready or not, here we go. O-T-T-F-F-S-S. What's next in line? If you solve this riddle, your treasure will double. If you fail, it will all disappear. What is your answer?

* * * * *

The module UK5 has a relatively easy descriptive riddle:

Young as spring, old as time,
Often falls, cannot climb,
Always rushing, never still,
In a bed, never ill.

* * * * *

Here's a riddle linked to an item from Gygax's 1976 version of Greyhawk Level 1, as run by Stormberg at Gary Con. Not sure if the riddle originates with Gygax or is something Paul added:

Trophy Room hidden by secret door, containing an ogre and a chest with runes, decipherable with Read Magic, that say "Closed tight, until the bright". The chest will open easily if taken into daylight, and contains silver and a "nice shield (hopefully magic)".

[doublejig2]

Post Harry Potter, perhaps the most famous Riddle is Tom...

[grodog]

My father game me a copy of The Oxford Guide to Word Games when I was a teenager, and I've found it to be full of useful guidance over the years: www.amazon.com/Oxford-guide-word-games/dp/B0010Q7XG2/ref=tmm_hrd_title_3?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

[Red Baron]

Aug 23, 2019 20:10:20 GMT -6 grodog said:

My father game me a copy of The Oxford Guide to Word Games when I was a teenager, and I've found it to be full of useful guidance over the years: www.amazon.com/Oxford-guide-word-games/dp/B0010Q7XG2/ref=tmm_hrd_title_3?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Thats very inexpensive, I might order one. Could you further explain why you have found it useful?

[Red Baron]

Three pedestals hold broad, shallow stone bowls. Plaques on each respective pedestal read:
I. “GEMS ULTIMA, AFRITS GUISE, THEOGONYS PLUNDER, CRONES DEMISE.”
II. “WINES END, WIFES TONGUE, SAGES FRIEND, ‘EL’ WAS ONE.”
III. “DREAMS CATALYST, VIZIERS WORD, STONERS LOCKS, WOMANS SWORD.”

Can you solve this puzzle? How would a character proceed (to open a secret door, for example)?



Hint: I got the idea from thinking about dragons.

[kaiqueo]

I usually avoid puzzles/riddles. From a player perspective, I usually love them. But from a DM perspective, I find them really hard to tune. They end up being too easy, in a way that it's not even fun (usually a player already knows the answer), or to hard, dragging the game down and sometimes forcing me to give a clue.

That way, whenever I put a riddle/puzzle in the adventure, I try to make the reward (treasure, info, access to a place, etc):
(1) Not essential for the campaign.
Or
(2) Achievable by other means.

[samvandenberg]

That's a neat project to formulate your own riddles. Personally, I have always just found and adapted riddles when I've needed them. I have used them like this: When the PC's encounter the riddle (written or spoken) it is described only as a "strange and complicated writ" (or "incantation"). Then the DM makes an intelligence determination for each character attempting to understand and solve the riddle. If no character succeeds, the DM says, "the writ (or incantation) is incomprehensible and you don't understand it." Or if some characters succeed, the DM says, ________ figured it out. Can you?" Then, the DM just tells the players the riddle and gives them a few minutes to solve it for fun. Generally, the DM shouldn’t tell the riddle to the players if their characters didn’t solve it. Since, it might them angry if it was really easy. And, like others have already said, I never require the solving of a riddle to progress in the adventure. Twice, I have played in games where this was required, and it brought the game to a literal screeching halt while the players struggled to solve it. P.S., they never did, and needed it explained to them!

[tetramorph]

Oct 25, 2020 16:15:51 GMT -6 kaiqueo said:

I usually avoid puzzles/riddles. From a player perspective, I usually love them. But from a DM perspective, I find them really hard to tune. They end up being too easy, in a way that it's not even fun (usually a player already knows the answer), or to hard, dragging the game down and sometimes forcing me to give a clue.

That way, whenever I put a riddle/puzzle in the adventure, I try to make the reward (treasure, info, access to a place, etc):
(1) Not essential for the campaign.
Or
(2) Achievable by other means.

Wow. I believe I am entirely opposite on this.

I find combat a kind of boring distraction.

I run my game as an exploration and puzzle solving game where combat means you’ve had an unhelpful random encounter or you have failed in some way.

[ThrorII]

I put riddles in some dungeons. Most I think are clever, and my players bowl right through them. My suggestion is treat riddles like clues. You should have 3 different clues in three different areas/forms that lead to the right answer. That way the clue is not a gate-lock on the adventure. In the same way, if you put riddles in, there should be other ways to get past it.

For example: A magic door has a riddle on it to open it. There should also either be the answer to the riddle elsewhere in the dungeon, or a 'key' of sorts to bypass it. The keys and answers can and should be harder to get - making answering the riddle a short cut.

[tetramorph]

My experience as a ref has taught me that when it comes time to solve a trick, puzzle, or any other kind of problem, even the brightest adults have limited CPU while keeping track of all the other complexities they must imagine in order to engage the game at all.

And they cannot get inside my head.

I have found that if I present such features about one notch higher than what a 12 year old could handle, they still struggle and when they reach a solution they have a sense of achievement that serves as its own reward greater than any experience point count.

A session full of these usually results in gratitude for a session well spent expressed to me by my players. It is also what I find most rewarding in play.