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Never do riddles


Student of Trinity

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Solving a riddle is a D&D trope, or at least it used to be. It seems that every DM runs a game at some point where the players have to solve some bizarre word puzzle.

 

The IC problem with riddles is explaining why the heck the riddle is there to be solved. In a world of magic it's easy enough to accept that reciting the right word can open a gate or whatever. As for why any evil wizard would deliberately provide a clue to the right magic word, in the form of a riddle, I guess it's easier today than it was in the 1980s to understand the need to leave yourself a password hint. Not even Sauron himself can remember all his magic words of opening, without leaving a mnemonic riddle beside each door. The more logical kind of hint would be a completely inscrutable phrase that couldn't possibly make sense to anyone but Sauron, no matter how clever they were, but whatever. You can work it in if you think about it a bit.

 

The OOC reason for the riddles is probably that they all stem from Tolkien's episode at the gate of Moria, "Speak friend and enter." Tolkien did that one really well, but he wasn't running a game. It took Gandalf hours to solve the puzzle, and if it had been a D&D game, Gandalf's player would probably have quit in frustration and gone home long before that, while everyone else would have eaten all the pizza, drunk up the beer, and started throwing lawn darts at the couch. The OOC reason to never do riddles is that they are horribly hard. Every riddle seems easy in hindsight, once you know the answer, and the gamemaster normally thinks up riddle and answer at the same time, or even gets the answer first and builds the riddle around it. So it never seems hard to the DM, but not even Albert Einstein could solve it in a reasonable time if he didn't know the answer to start out with.

 

The worse problem is that if the players can't answer the riddle, they usually don't just lose some hit points, burn a healing potion, and move on. If it were that simple the party wouldn't bother to spend any time on the riddle at all, and the DM wants them to sweat for ten minutes and figure it out and feel clever (but not as clever as the DM who set the clever riddle, of course). So the game grinds to a miserably boring halt, and the minutes tick by, while the players rack their brains and scour the pizza boxes for overlooked crumbs. After half an hour it seems like time for a hint, but then that would make the previous half hour a total waste and the players will surely guess the answer soon and feel great for having done it without a hint, so another half hour passes. Ugh.

 

Sometimes it works, though. Here are three rhyming riddles I used over the years. One was a disaster, and led to just the scenario I described. One was just about right: the players figured it out gradually, with several players contributing parts of the solution, and I might have given a few subtle hints that guided thinking without giving too much away. The other had everyone stumped for a few minutes, until the player who normally hardly said Boo because she was really only involved for her husband's sake came back from fussing with her children, listened to the riddle, and answered it immediately.

 

Falls under darkness, rises into light.

Words that are not proper, speech that is not right,

Shall fall under darkness, and arise in light.

 

(The last line was not really part of the riddle, but rather a somewhat obvious threat about what would happen if the riddle were not answered correctly — there was a bright floor and a dark ceiling that would rise and fall to crush the party. At least, the threat became obvious when the party blurted out something wrong, started getting crushed, and spent the next hour squished into a tiny pocket of space maintained by using an artifact staff as a tentpole.) Answer:

Dew, which falls in the night and evaporates in the morning, is a homonym for due = proper or right. This was the disaster riddle. Man.

 

 

If tears were rain, what moan would be;

If clot were ice, what gore would be;

If flesh were clay, what bone would be —

Would tell the tale, if four were three.

 

 

The first three lines refer to elements: wind, stone, water. The fourth line is supposed to imply that the solution is the missing fourth element, Fire. This one worked well. Three different players figured out the first three lines, as I recall, and then another one put them together, though I think that was where I needed to give some guidance. Leaping from "so we're listing three out of four elements, kind of" to "the answer must be the name of the fourth" is just the kind of arbitrary lurch that seems obvious when it's your own riddle, but doesn't really make a lick of sense, and is why you should never do riddles, unless you're willing to nudge the party a bit.

 

 

Walks on the water, sinks in the sea.

Doesn't have a fellow,

Doesn't have a shadow.

Shadows follow after him. Who is he?

 

 

The sun, whose reflection dances on water, but which sets in the western sea, is unique and alone, and has the appropriate shadow properties, at least if you squint right about the sense in which shadows 'follow' the sun. This is the one that the distracted mom in the party nailed immediately. This riddle was posed by a sphinx who would merely have attacked the party if the guessing had taken too long. At that point I had learned to have a fallback.

 

 

I guess the point is really that you can do riddles, but you have to be careful. Be prepared to be disappointed with how well the riddle goes over, and have some fallback plan to salvage the game and go on.

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The last two were pretty good! I figured out four elements theme of the second, and once I figured out the first three lines, realized the last line referencing four should point me toward the other. The worst part would dealing with people not familiar with the classical concept of the four elements. The last one was probably the easiest.

 

But that first one...yeah. Epic fail. :p

 

I think in addition to the password at the West Gate of Moria, Tolkein also promoted riddles through the riddle-game between Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit. Your sun riddle actually reminds me of one of the riddles in their game.

 

Good stuff!

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