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 some bloke wrote:

DM Spiel:

After making your way through the cave, you find a side chamber which appears to be a washroom. there is a small stone basin into which a trickle of water flows, and on one wall is a circular carved stone door which features an upside down, hollow goblet held by an upside down dwarf on its surface. To either side of the door are lit torches in sconces. The floor is flat, rough stone slabs and the ceiling arches up with brick arches at either end, with the curved plaster ceiling being 10ft high. Above the door is carved the words:

"One change of mates would be reversed

the last of teams should come in first

to fill my cup and quench my thirst."

I'd start trying to mess with the sconces to see if they move/rotate, and try to see if one turns upside down.

 Captain Joystick wrote:

That mouth, those twitching eyes... that's animated by the Brackenwood guy!

Apparently. I took a look at the website shown in the credits of the D&D short and the first post is about whatever Brackenwood is. I'm not familiar with it personally.

Someone posted this over in the chat for my new D&D 5e group... I think it captures the spirit of the typical fantasy adventure game. And is probably the reason some here were raving about a grittier post-apocalyptic game last page as well.

 RegularGuy wrote:

I'd start trying to mess with the sconces to see if they move/rotate, and try to see if one turns upside down.

Nope, neither of the torch sconces move when you investigate them, but the torches can be removed.

 some bloke wrote:

 RegularGuy wrote:

I'd start trying to mess with the sconces to see if they move/rotate, and try to see if one turns upside down.

Nope, neither of the torch sconces move when you investigate them, but the torches can be removed.

Well i suppose I would try taking one of the torches and raise it up into the inverted cup

 some bloke wrote:
Hello everyone! I have made a riddle for my campaign, and I'd like to get a feel for whether it's too cryptic or too easy. The riddle opens a door which is bonus to the plot, so it can be abandoned and the story will still progress. Can you guys have a go at cracking it and let me know how you found it?

DM Spiel:

After making your way through the cave, you find a side chamber which appears to be a washroom. there is a small stone basin into which a trickle of water flows, and on one wall is a circular carved stone door which features an upside down, hollow goblet held by an upside down dwarf on its surface. To either side of the door are lit torches in sconces. The floor is flat, rough stone slabs and the ceiling arches up with brick arches at either end, with the curved plaster ceiling being 10ft high. Above the door is carved the words:

"One change of mates would be reversed

the last of teams should come in first

to fill my cup and quench my thirst."

The door doesn't move if forced.

Please put your responses to this riddle in a spoiler so that others can have a go! And if you saw my thread on makign the riddle on dndbeyond, no cheating!

 RegularGuy wrote:

 some bloke wrote:

 RegularGuy wrote:

I'd start trying to mess with the sconces to see if they move/rotate, and try to see if one turns upside down.

Nope, neither of the torch sconces move when you investigate them, but the torches can be removed.

Well i suppose I would try taking one of the torches and raise it up into the inverted cup

That it possible, but the door remains stoically closed.

 bantha_beast wrote:

Spoiler:

Can the torches and water in the basin be used to generate steam underneath the goblet? I think if anyone in the party is used to crosswords or puzzles they'll get 'steam' from the first couple of lines. How they fill the goblet is another matter!

That's the way!

Unless your group has gotten used to how you do riddles, i don't think they are going to get that.

1. Circular door with inverted details infers it can be rotated
2. i don't think i'm hot gak, but i'm not getting a hint from either of the first lines, let alone come close to how you specified it to open.

A bard or a wizard could use 'identify' and force you to tell them how to use it at level 1 though so no biggie - and like you said, it won't halt the plot so no worries.


A little anecdote for your consideration:


Really hoping this helps because i feel i'm being a little blunt here..

@SirDonald

That reminds me of a time when my adventurers came across a stream, and took 2-3 hours figuring out how to cross it.

I just let it play out, as everyone was laughing and having a good time. That days session was focused on one encounter, a normal, run o-of-the-mill, stream.

Yeah, puzzle experiences too-often degenerate into players taking ranks in the 'Mindreading the DM' skill (or not). Age, experience and education matter a lot (unless its a puzzle that rehashes something in pop culture, in which case, if someone hasn't it seen/heard it, their contribution effectively goes to zero)

I can remember one frustrating session, where I found a player's notes afterwards. He'd confused 'Runes' for 'Ruins,' and I have no idea if it was an accent issue or a literacy issue. But suddenly the previous three hours made a lot more sense.
---

My biggest pet peeve will always be the 'one lies/one tells the truth' puzzle. It does not work if the duo (be it doors/skulls/faeries/whatever) recite the lines:

If each take a part, they're BOTH telling the truth at that point, which renders the 'always lies' false.

If only one says both parts, if its true, that one has to be the truth-teller, because if the liar gives the set-up, the whole puzzle is abrogated since you can't trust any aspect of it (he could be lying about any part- which leads to safety, that the doors work, that they're obligated to tell you anything, etc.)

There has to be a third party present (or a sign). And I've seen people screw this up way too many times.

 Easy E wrote:
@SirDonald

That reminds me of a time when my adventurers came across a stream, and took 2-3 hours figuring out how to cross it.

I just let it play out, as everyone was laughing and having a good time. That days session was focused on one encounter, a normal, run o-of-the-mill, stream.

Sounds nearly as dangerous as the dreaded gazebo
It's great you just rolled with it since they were still having a good time.

Puzzles and even traps are often a really bad thing to use in a TTRPG. The problem is they don't challenge the characters, they challenge the players. The PLAYERS start trying to solve a riddle. The PLAYERS start searching every nook and crannie for traps. Because it's the PLAYERS intellect that is used to solve those things, not the characters. And there are very few ways that you can shift that to the characters and not have it feel super gamey.

I would be incredibly wary of every puzzle you place in front of the players and I would foreshadow potential solutions earlier in the dungeon if you do decide to use them. It's not fun for anyone to have the game grind to a halt because they interpret your clues differently then you intended. And if they do that they will feel cheated when the solution they were sure would work doesn't.

Of course, the answer is to make a puzzles that has no set answer! Therefore, any solution they come up with is right!

 Lance845 wrote:
Puzzles and even traps are often a really bad thing to use in a TTRPG. The problem is they don't challenge the characters, they challenge the players. The PLAYERS start trying to solve a riddle. The PLAYERS start searching every nook and crannie for traps. Because it's the PLAYERS intellect that is used to solve those things, not the characters. And there are very few ways that you can shift that to the characters and not have it feel super gamey.

I would be incredibly wary of every puzzle you place in front of the players and I would foreshadow potential solutions earlier in the dungeon if you do decide to use them. It's not fun for anyone to have the game grind to a halt because they interpret your clues differently then you intended. And if they do that they will feel cheated when the solution they were sure would work doesn't.

...Which is why I often create puzzles for my games without a set-in-stone solution that will not allow the players to pass unless they do or say a certain thing. If I put a puzzle in a game, it's because I think it'd be fun to have the players roleplay how their character would approach a puzzle, and then I tailor the resolution of that puzzle scene to be based on the way that the character chooses to approach it.

That definitely depends on your group though. With the people I play with there's essentially no motivation on the players' part to try and "win" every proposed scenario, and it's usually fairly obvious to me when a player is taking the piss and would be perfectly happy to have their character fail to solve the puzzle or disarm the trap in a funny way.

And that can also result in some of the funniest situations. We once came up to a puzzle that involved a character the players were trying to rescue at the top of a stone tower with a spiral staircase rigged with a trap that caused gelatinous cubes to spawn when you touched the stairs.

one character turned into a bug to get up the stairs, fly through the keyhole and then turn into human form, thinking (for some reason) the prisoner had the password to disarm the trap and would just tell him...unfortunately they didn't even have the key to the room. The monk started trying to run up the stairs as fast as possible, with the idea of just dodging all the cubes as they appeared, and he passed seven consecutive acrobatics checks in a row to triumphantly arrive at the top of the stairs with a huge number of cubes slowly climbing up behind him. The warforged paladin had initially tested the trap with a finger and had a growing cube on his arm that he tried to conceal from his comrades so they would'nt get mad at him for triggering it, so he wound up just trying to make stealth and deception checks to hide an expanding cube, and it turned into an extremely fun Shrek "you didn't kill the dragon?" situation that culminated in the party using the following cubes to make the nobles' mercenaries unable to follow them out.

Happy Thread New Year!

For those who have played 5e outside of the relatively new Rime of the Frostmaiden adventure, is this nugget of info from the DMG accurate to 5e encounter design?

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

In the same way you figure out the difficulty of an encounter, you can use the XP values of monsters and other opponents in an adventure as a guideline for how far the party is likely to progress.

For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party’s adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

That seems pretty ambitious to have an average of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day and I don't think I've ever come close to that average in any edition I've played (mainly 3.x but also a smattering of 2nd and 4e). A frequent comment/complaint about Rime of the Frostmaiden is the punishing difficulty (and at least at early levels I'd definitely agree) so I definitely don't have enough personal experience to gauge whether this is a case of game designers deluding themselves or if in typical Adventure League settings people actually play that many encounters without a long rest.

Realistically, I find most groups don't abide that guidance. A typical session in my experience has 2-3 light combats and 1 big combat, but mileage will vary by group and DM style and campaign. Some more RP heavy campaigns (Strahd comes to mind) can have entire sessions with no encounters. Generally, easy combats are far too easy. Most DMs I've played with pump combats to be more deadly and they compensate by having fewer combats overall.

Rime of the Frostmaiden might be a bit harder in response to some of the modules that came before it. I know some of the players in my local league complained Descent into Avernus and Ghosts of Saltmarsh were too easy.

Pretty much entirely no. And unlike 3e or before, it actually gets worse as you go up in level, because PCs get fewer resources and enemies get a lot more bloat in terms of HP and damage (so the PCs have to pull out more crap)

6-8 encounters per day is pretty crazy in 5e, especially if they're leaning medium to hard. I'd honestly cut that in half without hesitation. Especially if the party leans hard on casters (or doesn't have a lot of healing).

There's some leeway if the party knows how to optimize, but some classes have a hard time with defensive optimization and some monsters just have broken math for their level (hobgoblins for example, can butcher a party if played like they're supposed to, just by teamwork bonuses).

5e constrained the range of numbers for attack and AC that really works against the party in a way that wasn't true for earlier editions. Encounters per day is basically an attrition war, and each successive one is more pressure to lose.

Thanks. Yeah, I saw that for casters that cantrips are a viable backup somewhat scalable damage source in combat once you run out of leveled spells but not as something you should depend on entirely for multiple encounters which you would have to if you're doing 6-8 multiround combat encounters per day on average. Obviously not everything considered an encounter should result in combat (like social interaction, puzzles, and traps) and not every combat encounter needs to be resolved as such but six to eight felt like way too much when I read it based on my experience with prior editions.

Per day! What in the 9 hells!

That is the worst neighborhood ever. How can a village survive anywhere if it could be attacked 6-8 times PER DAY by some wandering monsters! Villagers and outlining farmers wouldn't stand a chance of ever getting in a crop, they would be too busy fighting off giant rats, Green slimes, and goblin bands.

There must be some terrible property values in these worlds. Are people fighting against their local NIMBY's all the time too?

It isn't saying you should throw 6-8 encounters per day, it is saying that on average 6-8 encounters can be beaten by an adventuring party before they have to take a long rest.

This can be useful in planning out extended scenarios which will feature combat, such as defending a settlement during a siege. You know that by the end of that 6-8th encounter, the party is going to be pretty ragged. They've used up a lot of their spell slots, their healing is depleted, their abilities are used up. They haven't slept properly in days as the drums, horns and chanting of the great host keep them awake and they keep having to rush to defend key points from attack, or fight fires caused by flaming ammunition, or launch daring night raids to destroy the siege weapons etc. And then the warlord uses his wizards to detonate the wall with a massive blast of wild, uncontrollable magic and charges in with his elite guard, looking for a final decisive blow against the defenders.

Not every day of adventuring should be taxing the characters that much, but having a rough guide as to how much they can take to push them right to the edge in an extreme situation is quite helpful, especially for newer GMs.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:
It isn't saying you should throw 6-8 encounters per day, it is saying that on average 6-8 encounters can be beaten by an adventuring party before they have to take a long rest.

For all intents and purposes, that's the same thing. A long rest is... 8 hours of sleep with a little light activity for no more than 2 hours, that can't be done more than once every 24 hours.
Denying the party long rests is basically saying 'don't you dare play spellcasters at my table.'

This can be useful in planning out extended scenarios which will feature combat, such as defending a settlement during a siege. You know that by the end of that 6-8th encounter, the party is going to be pretty ragged. They've used up a lot of their spell slots, their healing is depleted, their abilities are used up. They haven't slept properly in days as the drums, horns and chanting of the great host keep them awake and they keep having to rush to defend key points from attack, or fight fires caused by flaming ammunition, or launch daring night raids to destroy the siege weapons etc. And then the warlord uses his wizards to detonate the wall with a massive blast of wild, uncontrollable magic and charges in with his elite guard, looking for a final decisive blow against the defenders.

Once you've gotten to this point in 5e, the players have pretty much lost. If all their abilities and resources are gone, used up in earlier encounters (no matter if its been 1 hour or 3 days), the warlord and his elite guard are just going to roll over the party like a steamroller.
That's utterly _awful_ advice for a new DM. Attrition wars like this don't work in 5e. The players have a finite pool of resources, and each monster group shows up fresh and can expend everything they have. So effectively, the attrition is only on the player end.

Not every day of adventuring should be taxing the characters that much, but having a rough guide as to how much they can take to push them right to the edge in an extreme situation is quite helpful, especially for newer GMs.

But as a rough guide, its wrong. Its several encounters _past_ the edge in an extreme situation.

 Easy E wrote:
Per day! What in the 9 hells!

That is the worst neighborhood ever. How can a village survive anywhere if it could be attacked 6-8 times PER DAY by some wandering monsters! Villagers and outlining farmers wouldn't stand a chance of ever getting in a crop, they would be too busy fighting off giant rats, Green slimes, and goblin bands.

There must be some terrible property values in these worlds. Are people fighting against their local NIMBY's all the time too?

Yeah, in a dungeon complex it is alright, but out in the wilderness it is crazy. I like to use the rules for rests as they are for dungeons and then use 1 Week for Long Rest, 8 Hours for Short Rest in the wilderness to keep the encounter scaling sane. I justify it by saying the dungeons exist in the Weird, where there is higher background magic or whatever and that speeds up healing/allows access to healing cantrips/allows mages to recharge their powers more quickly.
It is also why there are so many monsters in dungeons but the rest of the world is like dark ages europe with the odd chimera.

Voss wrote:
The players have a finite pool of resources, and each monster group shows up fresh and can expend everything they have. So effectively, the attrition is only on the player end.

Very true. It's rare for an enemy to show up wounded or at half resources/abilities unless it's a part of downgrading an existing enemy for CR or plot reasons.

 warboss wrote:

That seems pretty ambitious to have an average of 6-8 encounters per adventuring day and I don't think I've ever come close to that average in any edition I've played (mainly 3.x but also a smattering of 2nd and 4e). A frequent comment/complaint about Rime of the Frostmaiden is the punishing difficulty (and at least at early levels I'd definitely agree) so I definitely don't have enough personal experience to gauge whether this is a case of game designers deluding themselves or if in typical Adventure League settings people actually play that many encounters without a long rest.

The key word there is "MEDIUM or HARD ENCOUNTERS". It says in the very next sentence that parties can typically handle fewer tougher ones or more easier ones.

But for some reason, a lot of people mentally skip over that bit and assume it reads "six encounters minimum or you're DOING IT WRONG!". And then at some point, it seems to have become an article of faith that that's what the DMG says when in the very next sentence it says how you can adjust that. It's becoming a serious pet peeve of mine.

Things to bear in mind--

--Anything that consumes resources (hitpoints, spells) is an "encounter" for this purpose--traps, environmental navigation, etc.

--Two encounters can be merged together and disguised as one--yes, you defeat the demon cultists, but as you're mopping up, that big evil circle flickers and a Nalfeshnee turns up to see if there's a party here.

--"Deadly" encounters aren't very deadly at all, barring terrible luck or the deck really being stacked in favour of the monsters.

In actual play, I've found the only real no-no is to have one big encounter per day, because that just encourages "alpha strike then rest" behaviour. Something else I houserule is to say that short rests only need 5-10 minutes, but you can only benefit from two of them between long rests.

Wow, I have gone whole sessions (2-6 hours depending) with only 0-1 encounter.

I guess I maybe doing it wrong......

My approach to combat these days tends to run on the principle that a fight with no real chance of failure (NOT just PC death, but failure to achieve the objective for which you're fighting) is usually utterly pointless. There are no stakes, it just slows down the game and in the end, if you're just trying to draw out resources to the players go into the next fight down some spells, features and HP, a narrative combat/skill challenge scenario works just as well. When you're fighting the undead horde to get to the lich or death knight, a skill challenge for the first part flows better, gives the players more freedom and feels more exciting than six hours flailing at zombies and skeletons turn by turn.

In my experience CR is utter whack as well, maybe the easy-deadly scale works if you are hitting that high encounters per day rate, but the way I run things, there are genera''y just one or two big combats between rests, and CR just doesn't apply there. The flipside is that the players have the freedom to go all-out and use their resources rather than having to eke them out over a full day, or half a dozen fights. As DM, you get to use the powerful, interesting monsters and enemies, throw around high level spells or drop in things with crazy high AC and HP for the 'normal' way of playing. Make sure these fights are tied in with the narrative stakes, and every initiative roll becomes an epic action sequence, rather than an hour of pointless goblin-bashing where you're in no danger and you've got to make a handful of spells or features last.

It takes some courage to make the leap and start doing things this way, but I've found it so liberating compared to the more conservative, linear and ultimately boring traditional approach I used to take. I honestly used to dread prepping combat as I would fret over balancing and resources and constantly veering between top easy and too hard. Now, I work on the basis that the most fun to be hand by everyone is putting the PCs in a battle the maths/rules say they should not win, and watching and enabling them as they find a way to. I trust my players to find the win, rather than relying on the game to set one up.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Easy E wrote:
Wow, I have gone whole sessions (2-6 hours depending) with only 0-1 encounter.

I guess I maybe doing it wrong......

Seems right to me! I've only had 2 battles in my past three games, and that's in a campaign reaching its conclusion and set in the middle of a 3-way war...

Though last time despite the lack of combat, someone did get hit with Feeblemind and Dominate Person and made to throw themselves out a fourth-storey window... You don't need combat to make a mess of PCs...

 Easy E wrote:
Wow, I have gone whole sessions (2-6 hours depending) with only 0-1 encounter.

I guess I maybe doing it wrong......

If you're having fun, you're not doing it wrong. Even if your campaign is a fantasy cyberpunk brony furry crossover...

I just find the stated baseline expectations as written in the DMG to be unrealistic even under the most generous circumstances in actual practice.

Well, we had an interesting random encounter in Rime last night. During a blizzard that affected our visibility, we were ambushed by a CR 20 ancient white dragon hidden under snow laying in wait for us. No negotiating prior or chance to avoid it other than running away just because we see a corpse in a snow bank during a blizzard. I rolled a 19 on my con save (14 con for a total of 21)... and still failed vs the breath weapon. This is a random encounter for 1st - 4th level characters as written (we were 3rd).

Don't remind me, we're about to fight an icy dragon in our campaign! I don't like to know creature stats as a player, but we're all anticipating a tough fight...
I forget what level I am, but it's either 3 or 4 too :-)

Hopefully your dragon will appropriately leveled/aged instead of the top version! Random encounter balance is nonexistent in Rime. Unless you metagame with forehand knowledge of encounters by sneaking peaks into the module as a player, you can really be screwed by random encounters through no fault of your own. Our GM when setting up the campaign specifically said he wanted to play it as written and warned us of the insane difficulty spikes and we all agreed to it so I don't blame him. But, eriously, screw you WOTC. If the goal is to make bands of adventuring heroes play like classless level zero npc townsfolk who instinctively run from relatively innocuous things they encounter then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Lol.