@Shadelier, I've been thinking of a real interesting one all day. It takes place in a closed mall, and try as you will, you can't find a way to get out.
The puzzle lies in the security room, where the cameras are. Long story short, what you see in the cameras, is what appears in real life. And in these places you rewind/fast forward to, are the items needed to progress further into the puzzle. Some of the places hold DVDs, which are capable of changing the location completely. I haven't planned out a complete puzzle using this method, but what are your thoughts on it? I imagine this would be easier for video games than forum RPs, but would it be possible?
Apologies in advanced for a super long post!
One of my favorite things about running games is that things like this are done with as much effort as it takes to say them, where-as in a video game you'd have to do all the programming for it and the result is still completely inflexible. I love the idea that you could grab a Bob Ross DVD from nearby and put it on the TV playing the security feed, only to go to that location and find the same set and half-finished painting, slowly advancing towards completion by a phantom artist. I don't know if that's exactly what you meant, or were thinking of, but the idea both tickles me and seems really spooky!
As for the original thought: making your own puzzles is one of the roughest things I've found in running games. If you google some puzzles and riddles then you run the risk of the player already knowing how to solve it. In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic they had a puzzle based on the tower of hanoi, which I had to create a program that could solve it for me in my computer programming class, so I was already well versed in how to solve it. On the other hand, if you make your own then you have no idea how easy or impossibly hard they're going to be for the players, and if you try to add hints or false leads to help or confuse the players it can easily flip the difficulty the the complete opposite extreme.
In general you just have to do your damnedest and hope for the best! For puzzles like the sword one you describe you have to give a huge description of the room and be careful to not draw
too much attention to the swords, but clearly state enough information for the players to see that they're in the wrong place. Make sure you throw in irrelevant information to. For example, contrast the following two descriptions:
The room you see has a door that seems to be locked by some unseen mechanism. Other than that, there is an old, unplugged refrigerator with it's door cracked open.
The room you see has a door that seems to be locked by some unseen mechanism. It appears that this room used to serve as a kitchen, but is now in a state of aged disrepair. There is a burnt microwave, an old, unplugged refrigerator with it's door cracked open and no cold air flowing from it, and an oven with no door at all. A general smell of mold fills the air.
In the first it's obvious you have to do something with the refrigerator, whether that's close the door, plug it in, or find something inside to mess with. The second description allows it to blend in with the rest of the room description and just seem like flavor, but there are little things you can do to help the players along. "The description of the fridge was, like, three times as long as the other things in the room" the player might think, or else "ugh, I wonder if the smell is something inside of the fridge."
Like Shadelier was talking about, some puzzles only work as words, or only work visually, so sometimes you'll get a great idea only to realize that there's no way to explain it in words that won't be obvious. One solution for that is to NOT describe it in the
room description, but tell the players before you even start the game that they may be required to further examine things in a room for a more in-depth description. This is a trick used in many MUDs and MUSHs (text-based, multiplayer online games). Obviously in the previous room descriptions if there was some sort of puzzle inside of the fridge, a player would need to open it to find out, so the same can be true of anything else. If you say there are pictures in the room, you can always wait until a player examines the pictures in the room to give the description. Obviously some of these work better in forum games with "active times" where everyone is on alert for posts from X to Y o'clock instead of the usual post-at-will style where you could be waiting a week for someone to try looking at the photo.
Other than that, you can feel free to ping me for ideas, advice, or to test out your puzzles before you present them to your players, as I'm always willing to help out a fellow GM.
Hope this helps!
