Stuff...

[malyss]

So there is a great thread about puzzles and non-combat encounters, and I didn't want to try and hijack it with combat stuff, but what sort of cool things can you do to weave a good combat encounter with a puzzle component to it? Like a curious trap or something. And what about the outcome? Interesting treasure and such.

Example
It was for an Eberron game and they were students of a famous adventurer who was teaching at the university in Sharn. He had a 'teaching-dungeon' where he would run students through a variety of encounters. In this particular one, the students had to go through and acquire a collection of items that would be worth something. He was teaching appraisal skills and acquisition skills.

They were set up with a few encounters where there were guardians of the treasure, or the guardians were what appeared to be the treasure. There was art all over the place etc. They were being taught that some treasure is harder to handle than others. Some guardians triggered when they moved treasure away from them and essentially tried to take it back from the players (think statues animating etc. that went after the PC holding the item).

They got to one point where they had the treasure, and they had set up to attack what they thought was the guardian. So when the moved away, I had the paintings animate instead of the statue... it worked pretty well, despite being cheap...


And sometimes the treasure is the monster. How do you capture a rust monster? A typical cage sure isn't going to work, and if you don't have sufficient magic to create some sort of force contraption, what do you do? Just think about how all of those mad wizards get the monster guardians in their dungeons in the first place.


I have also given my PC's their treasure in silver pieces. 50 coins equals 1 lb. I'm sure you can come up with some interesting math for that... (and you would be surprised how little a bag of holding can hold when filled with coins...)

And don't forget to factor in the weight of the container when carrying treasure!

And over-sized treasure. A dazzling tapestry that is 40 feet wide and 30 feet tall, made for a castle and worth a fortune (over 10k gp) - you can't just fold that sucker up and stuff it in a sack, and it is worth enough that the players won't want to leave it behind.

[Tadanori Oyama]

I like the concept of combat puzzles alot. Combining detailed thought with swords and spells is alot of fun. However, I have some problems given the make up of my current group: the assholes hate anything mentally puzzling.

The times I've put a puzzle into combat I've been able to smell the clutch burning as the players try to change gears between "kill it all" and "blue key goes into blue lock". Same thing with riddles.

[Mckma]

Two from the other thread:

1.  A frozen battlefield where characters slide until they hit an object or wall (like in many video games).  The characters would get to slide a number of times related to their move speed and have to more strategically think about movement.  It might be very frustrating though...

2.  Another inspiration from videogame "boss" battles.  Needing to do more of a process (drop the chandelier, hit the legs then the head, any number of things), to take it down faster than just beating on the guy.

[robotkarateman]

I've got a puzzle room that I like to use when I'm running a new group through a dungeon crawl. Basically, it's a round room, column in the middle, exit door way up the top. On further inspection, I give the players the following information -

• The column in the middle is covered in carved slots, they're about eight inches tall, an inch wide, and three inches deep. In fact, just about the right size to be hand-holds if you were climbing around the column sideways (I say this because then they start thinking about why they would be climbing around sideways instead of thinking about the puzzle realistically. I love stating non-facts as misdirection).
• There's a gap between the floor and the column, about half an inch. By holding a light they can see that the floor is about two feet thick and there's a sub-floor below it.
• The wall of the room is covered in silver banding, as if the entire room were the inside of a giant compressed spring (again, another phrase meant to seed misdirection). Anyone spending a lot of time studying the bands, or rolling really well on their examination, or just being dogged in their questioning the purpose of the bands, will figure out that, like a spring, it's just one band that spirals down from the top to the bottom, or back up depending on your perspective.

The punchline is that the floor is magically/mechanically/space alien technologied to be ultra light and is threaded to match the metal band, like a screw. By grabbing the handholds on the column, the characters can pull the floor around and slowly screw it up to the door at the top, where it clicks into place. There's also a big ass switch to release it just inside the exit.


The best use of this room I ever had was when I threw it inside of generic ancient ruins that led underneath an evil temple the characters were infiltrating. Inside the temple, the players ran into a group of evil priests, and fell back to regroup and plan. They retreated to the screw room, which they'd already solved, and one of the players decided to hit the switch to drop the floor.

Cue evil cultists leaping onto the rapidly spinning/dropping floor and fighting the players. Everyone had to make rolls to avoid being spun against the wall (the wall wasn't moving, so they'd hit it and fall back against the floor). For the next few rounds, the difficulty increased while the floor picked up speed until it roughly hit the subfloor, knocking everyone down. There was no real danger, since it was designed to drop back down, but it still gave the players a sense of "OH MY GOD!" and made that combat a hell of a lot of fun by throwing in that extra element.


Probably not what you were looking for since I didn't actually plan it.

[KallMeKip]

A fun one that is rewarding if done right is moving terrain. Fight on river rafts, or trying to fight fleeing villains on their carriage (i had just watched Ben Hur before i got to writing the next weeks encounter)

[FuzzyDan]

I once hosted a series of encounters where the PCs had to defend the Maguffin from waves and waves of encounters (11 or so, yeah it took a few weeks).  The plot device was encased a massive block of magical ice, so as the baddies would wail on it, more cold energy (oh 4th ed, how energy types can make sentences odd) would seep out and make more and more of the floor a hazard.  It was a little tedious to run, but the players still remember the battle against the Epic 88 with a kind fondness.