I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of overly complicated and poorly explained puzzles that can crop up in games since finally watching the D&D movie the other day, and I’d love to hear some horror stories from all of you. I put bad in quotes since I know every table has their preferences and what’s too complicated for one table is perfect for another, so really anything qualifies so long as it really didn’t work for your group.
I’ve been trying to think of my own examples, and while I know I ran some bad ones in my first campaign, I seem to have scrubbed the details of the worst ones from my mind.
The one I do remember was a cypher where I made a physical code wheel with card stock. The players loved it, but seemed to be taking an overly long time with it. When I finally checked on them, it turned out I’d misspelled some words in the code and left them with some gibberish in the middle of the sentences, so I had to just tell them the answer 