Jay Barnson on Designing Puzzles in RPGs

Perhaps it’s just my impression, but Frayed Knights developed Jay Barnson has been fairly active on his blog lately, with the latest post being a reflection on puzzle design in role-playing titles. I’m going to quote a snippet on “adventure-style” and “true” puzzles:

Then there’s the adventure-game style puzzles. which generally fall into the category of (inventory puzzles), although ‘˜inventory’ may mean much more than physical items in your TARDIS-sized pockets. Basically, you acquire something knowledge, physical items, attributes, whatever in one location that you can use or combine somehow with something else to gain access to something new often new locations and new inventory items (which can then be used to solve more puzzles).

Now, these adventure-game puzzles are the kind of puzzles I can really sink my teeth into. I love them right up to the point where I hate them. In the past, the problem might simply be because I was stumped. My least favorite puzzle of all time which Tim Schaffer FINALLY admitted to being unfair was the Monkey Island 2 puzzle where you are supposed to use JoJo the Monkey as a wrench get it? Monkey Wrench? to fix a pump. I quit the game for a year because of that one. There was always the supposition that somewhere I’d missed some item, its pixels hidden away in some scene that I’d failed to recognize.

Even with a solution a quick Internet search away, these kinds of things in excess, or when poorly designed and not providing enough clues to the player take me out of the game and can ruin my enjoyment. Still, sometimes I still enjoy a good adventure game (or even a bad one), and I like the occasional adventure-game style puzzle in my RPGs. For many years, they were a staple of the genre. Then perhaps with the advent of Diablo they became relatively scarce, replaced with more straight-up combat, other puzzle types, and of course (quests) that explicitly stated the items you needed to acquire to move forward. Recently, possibly because of the indie movement, they’ve been making a little bit of a comeback in RPGs.

Then there’s the (true puzzle.) These are obstacles that literally block progress until you solve some kind of puzzle or brain-teaser. You cannot take the battle to the evil overlord until you’ve solved this crossword puzzle! Or solved the Towers of Hanoi yet again! Unlike the action-game (platform puzzle) elements, these depend on more on logic (and sometimes outside knowledge) than trial-and-error, memorization and timing / execution.

Yes, these get irritating. And yes, I had a couple of those in Frayed Knights. Used sparingly, I don’t have a problem with them, and I think they can help add pleasing variation to the gameplay of an RPG. But they can also get very frustrating, particularly when the end-user doesn’t (get it.) It’s very difficult to gauge the difficulty of the puzzle. While a (medium) difficulty Soduku puzzle (not that I’d ever recommend one in an RPG!) would be a piece of cake for an experienced Sodoku player in the middle of a game, a player who has never played anything like that before might find it completely impenetrable and unplayable. It will effectively shut down the game for him, probably forever. That’s not (adding variety) to the gameplay it’s ruining the game.