D&D puzzles that make your players think

Thanks so much for the feature, and glad people are enjoying our puzzles book! :D Also, by popular demand, there is now a discounted bundle available that includes all three volumes!

Step one: Have players that actually pay attention TT

My players have found a book in a mansion and I'm going to give the player who actually needs the book a strong of seemingly random words, put them in the right order to get a message. Long story short, she needs to recreate Persephone eating pomegranate seeds in order to find her mother's secret garden.
This was planned already six months ago, and now two days ago I came up with how they will get their hands on the seeds.

I was once invited to an existing campaign. I made a wizard because party didn't have one.
This is how the DM introduced me to the game. "you were guided by another wizard to help some adventurers" and I start by entering some kind of dungeon without any idea what it is, then he goes back to the party and keeps playing for 30 min. I ask "what about my character?" He's like "ohh, yeah what would you like to do?" "Join the rest of the players so we can play together on this puzzle?" "Ok so what do you do in this room." "I don't know what I can do." "You see a door." "Ok I open the door." Trap killed me... Anyway, back to the party.

one of the funniest puzzles i made was just a giant slot machine that you could use a dex check to quick stop it on what you wanted. the slot was how a door opened and the hidden item was revealed but if u missed u took damage basically

I have just started DMing, and puzzles have been so hard to get right. Thank you so much!

All of my puzzles use at least one character's abilities, skills, feats, personality, or languages. This keeps some players from dominating the campaign and allows some players the opportunity to take the lead or at least feel included.

your pretty

As a player that is fairly new to DnD. I have yet to see any puzzles that make any sort of sense but then again both of my DMs were ADHD and trying to figure out their brain would solve a lot of problems for them hahah

Nah, just put a door in front of your group. They will re-discover fire with puzzle as devious as this

Actual game session, we've been trying to figure out a puzzle for a while. Goliath Barbarian: "Lions usually mean strength, I try to move the stone relief in different directions." DM: "You try to force it in different directions. You think you feel a slight give when you try upwards." GB: rolls a Strength check "28" DM: "It comes out of it's mortar in your hands. You are now holding a building stone with a lion relief on the front. Let's hope that wasn't load-bearing."

Like Sleeve of Wizard

Thanks for the great Video, i'll try to implement a few puzzles in my campaign soon and i feel way more confident about it thanks to you! :)

also for 4.99 you can buy a childrens riddle book, and stump adults

Runes are great for this. Also a letter signed by 2 kings or rulers. It might contain hidden agreements or whereabouts of a dead drop or where the military is headed.

One thing I kind of want to try in terms of a puzzle is to have a puzzle that's intentionally impossible. You let the players flail about for a while, then when a character does something in the room that amuses you that's where the actual latchkey was. The wizard/lich/BBEG du jour designed the puzzle as an attention trap.

I was banned from a group (due to panic attacks) last session had a puzzle that required a DC 30 check 7 times and we had to take like 2 turns doing it I had a panic attack due to the puzzle almost killing me (it was a magic electric fence) and how the dm said "too bad no one got a nat 20 cuz you'd get a +2 to inteligence" which was just kinda a dick move to even bring that up tbh. So nice to see a how to do puzzles

Puzzles are stupid and I hate them

I hate lazy players. I setup a mental problem and they just give up immediately. It's sad. If everyone's intel or wis was under 5 then okay... but 3 of them are 16 or higher. Play your characters!

Ah, another rare female dm, i tip my hat to you 😊

I built an awesome puzzle to unlock a door in a room of enemies. I thought the party would kill the low level guards and have to find the clues to open the door. They impersonated the BBEG's Captain with prisoners and walked right by it.

I recently ran a Christmas one shot called "the night before wintermas" and there was a cookie puzzle where the group had to eat a specific cookie to get into Santa's workshop.. the cookies were all laid out in a row on platters in a cookie factory and the players could get the whole riddle by talking to the gnome in the holding cells next door... well my players split up and the rogue and barbarian made it to the cookie factory while the rest of the group went to the holding cells and got the riddle... thing is without even looking at the cookies first the barbarian immediately dumped all 7 platters of cookies into her back pack and left the room so when they met up with the group again they al realized what happened and since the riddle was based around the placement of the cookies thay threw that out and immediately began just shoving cookies down the barbarians throat.. it was glorious 😂 they managed to narrow it down to three safe cookies and everyone just ate the three cookies but not before the poor barbarian took a few hits from bad cookies

The door, in avatar, is actually only opened by five fire benders, or one avatar that can fire bend. Ang didn't know fire bending at the time, so they just used explosive charges to simulate fire bending. The situation was a better example than you thought.

I’m a DM, and some of my favorite puzzles are the ones that are solved by saying please to whatever’s in your way. Is that dragon blocking the door? He’s just sleepy, but he can move over for polite people. What about that golem who stole a key? He just likes the shiny, but life’s full of shinies. The players can fight if they want, but all they had to do was ask 😁

im so gonna use the zelda tone of "you did something right" when making puzzles. like play it as a cue the players did something good before describing it

Sounds like you are a great DM. Just subscribed!

Coupon has expired =(

I am a dungeon master in my spare time, but my official job role at work is also "Game Master".

This is because I work in Escape Rooms, guiding people through the story & puzzles of the room. I've actually found that being a GM has helped my DM skills a lot, & vice versa.

One thing that I preach is that the sweet spot when it comes to puzzles is the line between relaxed & stressed. You want your players to feel like they've accomplished something. If you give away the answer too easily, they won't feel like they've achieved anything. If you make it impossible to figure out, they won't feasibly be able to achieve anything.

Lay down enough hints & nudges to keep the rythm of the interaction going, allowing the players to think they're figuring everything out on their own despite the fact that you're puppet-mastering everything they're doing.

I like puzzles. But not when it takes a month's worth of 1 1/2 hour weekly D&D sessions. Our DM threw a cypher at us with little to no context when we were supposed to have more messages to help us solve it. And I was the only one doing anything almost all of the time. We finally finished it! ...Unfortunately he said he's planning on throwing another one at us sometime! Hopefully he's learned something.

Is that a custom Wyrmwood GM screen?

wanna know what the real puzzle, predicament and perplexity actually is? viewing the bundled series of material purchased from DMG on their supposedly compatible apps/programs. Been at it for hours and im pulling my damn hair out. Buyers remorse doesnt even begin to describe which plane of existence im in right now

A thought to combine the "key in the possession of a hostile entity" & "having them find the door ahead of time" but still give a clue: foreshadowing via wall art or bas reliefs. Show the Triangle Gate shut & sealed in on one wall stopping a guy, next wall the guy is in front of the giant spider thing with key around it's neck, the next one key around a collar of dog led by a mysterious entity in a cloak & final wall shows him both keys & the triangle door opening on the wall art thus telling them what they need to do. Then the players when they find the gate know they have to find where else in the dungeon the Spider & Cloaked Guy are.

My favourite puzzle was.. an unlocked door. After knocking on it didnt work, we spoke about trying to climp the house and get in through a window, lock pick the door etc. before someone suggested we just try the handle and it ended up working :>

I GM shadowrun and don't personaly play d&d, but I come to d&d videos for inspiration. I can just imagine the following interaction regarding the triangle lock puzzle in shadowrun:
Player: "I plant explosives around the door."
GM: "ok, but you're going to piss off the American Archeological Association, and there's nothing worse than an army of Harrison Ford clones and William Cunnington A.I. chasing after you."

Ready for a weird point? DDO (the online vidya game thats like ten + years old) is excellent at puzzles. Its honestly imo nit a bad idea to steal some of their stuff

I'm generally opposed to puzzles because they almost always seem very Meta-Gamey with no rational reason why someone in that world would have put such a puzzle in place.

I personally like the skyrim style puzzles...where the answers are within the area but not obvious

One of my favourite puzzles is the Goblins guarding some sort of passage way and they just make up a nonsense riddle on the spot because "isn't that what we are supposed to do?" except they never came up with an answer, so they accept any answer as correct. Since the players don't know this and the riddle makes no sense, they often spend a hilarious amount of roleplay trying to figure out wtf is going on.

Hardest puzzle ever: how to get Ginny Di to dial back the quirky adorableness. Hint: same solution for Zoey Deschanel.

The fundamental problem with puzzles in RPGs is that they need to be solved by the players, not the characters.
A INT-focused Wizard might be completely stumped by a riddle, just because the players can't figure it out. Likewise, a dump-stat-INT Barbarian could just breeze on by if the player is clever enough.

In what was definitely the worst campaign I ever encountered, every single meaningful piece of story progress was achieved by solving a riddle.
Basically, this meant that the characters' stats and abilities became completely irrelevant. The only way to win that campaign was for the players to be smart.

wizzard sleeve studios. someone has a good sense of humor

For puzzles, I let my players do Int checks. If they score high, they get a lot of hints to help them solve it

I personaly don't like puzzles in D&D. After 4 sessions we finally solve Tomb of horrors.

We once had riddles

We were all wizards in that campaign
high intelligence

Now I don't know why, but I cannot do word riddles
like give me a physical puzzle with moving parts and I can solve it. Escape room type shit sure.
but word puzzles noppe

So we sat there at the table for hours while the DM drummed up riddle after riddle for hours and my character or more aptly me (and another player) couldn't make out any of the answers

which made a 20 mins segment into several hours
Where none of us seemed to have much fun in the end

Remember : If you're not googling "puzzles for toddlers" - it's going to be too difficult

How do you distinguish between the 120 different keyholes? "Yes DM I insert my key into the keyhole that is 24th to the left of the top of the triangle"

I really enjoy combat encounters with puzzle elements or puzzles with combat background elements to increase the tension

I once made a fully working puzzle with a ridle, golum style

The general principles for puzzles outlined here are fantastic, but I have to say, regrettably, that I don't know that the sponsor's book follows them all that well. They mostly turn on the sort of hyper-gamey riddles and logic puzzles that undermine immersion because... nobody would ever secure a door this way, unless your antagonists are all Riddler-style obsessives. That said, I think a lot of them can be revamped into something more plausible by following Ginny's suggestions, such as, e.g., having clues or keys found earlier elsewhere, so it's not just a lock with a riddle telling you how to open it sitting right in the same room.