How do you bring your campaign world to life? It’s a question lots of DMs and GMs ask from a lot of different angles. We’re all looking for ways to make sure our players have fun, but also have new experiences in the game that make it feel more like characters living out a story and less like tabletop Diablo.
Some of our best questions come from our listeners. That is once again the case this week as Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into three messages asking about different ways to make your RPG world a bit less hack-n-slash and a bit more immersive with interesting puzzles, rituals, and weather mechanics.
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2:00 Listener question 1: Puzzles — the good, the bad, the ugly … and how we blew up Esmerelda’s wagon in Barovia
4:00 Puzzles and riddles: What we try to do, not to do, and how we involve the whole party
10:00 The puzzles the party ignored in Curse of Strahd’s Wizard Tower
12:00 The pros and cons of riddles
14:00 Should puzzles use character skills/talents or force players to rely on their personal knowledge?
20:00 How we design puzzles: If it’s difficult for you to explain, it’s probably too difficult for your players to solve
22:00 Puzzle ideas from Indiana Jones, The Fifth Element and The Lord of the Rings
26:00 The encounter mix: Where and when we use traps and puzzles
29:00 Listener question 2: Making rituals more immersive with tasks and skill challenges
39:00 If you made the players jump through a lot of hoops to do a ritual, don’t let bad rolls ruin it
42:00 It’s no fun to die (or have the story turn bad) due to bad luck
47:00 Listener question 3: How do you make weather a more impactful element in the game?
53:00 Ways we’ve used weather in different campaign settings, including Storm King’s Thunder, Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frost Maiden
56:00 How much game time do you want to spend (waste?) dealing with the weather?
61:00 Final thoughts
For the interaction between player and character for solving a riddle or puzzle, give the players a number of attempts that rely on the relevant ability score. That is, Player 1 has a wizard with 18 Int, so gets 4 attempts to guess the riddle’s answer, while low Int characters get few or no attempts. Or related, let the players submit pre-guesses to the DM with the same ability-weighted amount, and the DM crosses off all incorrect attempts. Then the players proceed with whatever they have; ‘smart’ characters then are more likely to give their player a head start or chance to look a bit more clever. But the players still need to resolve the puzzle amongst the group.