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Interview... with myself??????
36 Plays1 month ago
Today's interview was... with myself
I deconstruct one of my favorite puzzles that I've seen... a puzzle from the 2000 D&D movie. There are three parts to this puzzle and I think I came up with some creative solutions to replicate it. Check it out and try some of it for yourself!
Please, if you enjoyed this leave a review or send me a message on social media because I would love to hear your thoughts!
The theme song was done by the Dungeonmaestro on tiktok and Instagram!
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Transcript
Introduction to Solo Episode Format
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello my friends, I'm EarthosCreations and you are listening to Dungeon Problems.
00:01:15
Speaker
Today's episode is going to be a little different because I want to try something a little new. I don't have a guest today. It's just me.
Integrating Favorite Puzzles into TTRPGs
00:01:25
Speaker
At the end of each of my interviews, I always ask my guests, what is your favorite puzzle that you've ever encountered in life?
00:01:33
Speaker
And I've talked about my favorite puzzles every so often, but I really wanted to examine them and figure out how I can bring the puzzles that I really enjoy into TTRPGs, specifically my D and&D games. So I thought it would be a fun opportunity to deconstruct some of my favorite puzzles and figure out how you can use them for your games. Today's puzzle, you're going to hate me for where I got it from.
Eye of the Dragon Puzzle Introduction
00:02:14
Speaker
We understand you have something called the Eye of the Dragon. We desperately need it. Yes, but I'm always happy to help a fellow thief. Have you ever heard of the Antious Guild Maze? Of course. Every thief has heard of it.
00:02:32
Speaker
Wonderful. Well, then you'll know that the Eye of the Dragon is the prize at the center of my guild maze, won't you? You finish the maze, you win the prize. Has anyone ever finished it before? Uh, no. They all died trying. But look on the bright side. At least the prize is still there.
00:03:08
Speaker
This clip was from the 2000s Dungeons and Dragons movie,
Solo vs Party Play in Maze Challenge
00:03:13
Speaker
probably one of the most hated movies among nerds. it It was pretty atrocious in terms of D&D, but I still love it.
00:03:23
Speaker
The main character of the story, Ridley, is tasked with finding the Eye of the Dragon, a massive ruby. So he goes to the city of Antaeus, where the Eye of the Dragon is said to be held by the Thieves Guild Guildmaster. He gets down there and meets with the Guildmaster, who tells him, yeah, the Eye of the Dragon is here.
00:03:45
Speaker
But it's the prize for solving the Antious Thieves Guild maze. A maze of puzzles that so far no one has completed. Ridley hopes to be the first. Now one of the first challenges I had to think about was in the movie it's just one thief trying to beat this guild maze. Yet when you're playing D and&D you probably have a party.
00:04:08
Speaker
You could have it so only one person in the party gets the chance to try and beat this, and the others have to watch from above like what's happening in the movie. You could also have it where the players who are watching from above might be able to give advice. For today's kind of experiment, I've decided just to utilize one person. Making it so multiple people would have to go through it might be more of a challenge, but along the way, I might offer some advice for that.
Bladed Sword Trap Solution
00:04:49
Speaker
Let's look at the very first trap that Ridley has to encounter. It's pretty simple. He walks into the maze and a bladed sword shoots up from the ground and almost hits him.
00:05:00
Speaker
This is a pretty simple trap. I don't think we have to dive too deep into this. It would just take a dexterity saving throw to avoid this. You could work in an investigation check to see if they spot this like the or the floor plate that he steps on in order to make this trap go off. But it's pretty easy, I would say, a very short trap to avoid.
Recreating the Pendulum Light Puzzle
00:05:37
Speaker
onto the next challenge. And this one was fun to watch and really fun for me to try and deconstruct, figure out how you could do it. Ridley comes to a hallway and he sees that there are these three kind of motes of lights, rays of lights. He takes his hand and he puts it through the first one, which causes a swinging bladed pendulum to go through the corridor.
00:06:04
Speaker
He's pretty smart so he throws a piece of bone that he found on the ground from a previous challenger through the remaining modes of light and that causes the entire hallway to be filled with these swinging pendulums. There are two on one side and three on the other and they all kind of meet in the middle, which really insinuates that one cannot just run through this corridor, they would die.
00:06:28
Speaker
There was a simple way that Ridley kind of beat this. He climbed on top of one of the first pendulums, moved over to the next, and then as it got to the center, he jumped onto the top of the other pendulum, moved over and swung to the end of the corridor, and did an impressive backflip to get there.
00:06:47
Speaker
Now that's pretty much acrobatics. I don't really like that. I think that would be a little too simple for the party or for the lone challenger of your party to try and beat. And it really doesn't give too much descriptive. So I've come up with a few different ways that you could try and do this to make it a little bit more cool.
00:07:09
Speaker
Now the light is kind of the first thing that they'll have to see. He used his hand to go through it. I would allow like an investigation check to see if they could see trip sensors or arcane glyphs that would get over it. um They cannot avoid the light. It takes up the entire part of the corridor. So if they throw something through it, they know about it. But if they just walk through it themselves, they're going to get hit with the very first pendulum.
00:07:35
Speaker
I would say they have to make a dexterity saving for this. And if they fail, they would get hit. Now, the very important part of this is I would ask my player, which way do you jump back when they avoid it? If they jump back the way they were, they're fine. But if they jump forward, they're going to go through another mode of light and get hit again. Then if they do the same and go through the third, they could do it again.
00:08:02
Speaker
The kind of problem with this is you have to make sure they know that this damage could be lethal and would kill them. Now they could just throw something through like Ridley did and make it so that all the pendulums are going. And this is kind of the thing I would recommend trying to get them to do because it makes it a little bit more fun. I've come up with two ideas that I think are pretty creative to present this puzzle to your player.
Innovative Puzzle Ideas for Players
00:08:32
Speaker
Now, one utilizes a technology and one doesn't. So the first one I'm going to talk about utilizes technology. If you have computers at your table, you don't do pen and paper, um and they're both kind of less for theater of the mind and more interactive. Now, the first idea utilizes Google Slides. Bear with me a little bit. This is going to be a little funky.
00:08:59
Speaker
you essentially are going to make 10 slides. Six of these slides are going to have a picture of a bladed pendulum on them and four of them are going to be completely blank. Now in the Google slide settings, you can make it so the slideshow automatically moves on to the next picture.
00:09:21
Speaker
You can set it for a certain amount of time, one second, two seconds, 10 seconds. You're going to want this to be a little quick. The idea of this puzzle is that the player will watch a slideshow and they have to pause the slideshow on one of the blank slides, one of those four blank sides.
00:09:41
Speaker
If they do it on one of the sides that has the pendulum on it, they're going to get hit by a pendulum and not be able to progress on. They might take some damage and they have to start over from the beginning.
00:09:55
Speaker
They're going to have to hit four empty spaces. One for kind of each section of the corridor. The first one will be when they're first moving into the pendulums. The second and the third are when they're right in the heart of the pendulums. And then the fourth will be when they get to the other side. I would do it kind of quickly. I think it would be a little bit more fun if there are seconds in between each slide.
00:10:21
Speaker
You can also play test it yourself, see if it's quick enough or if it's too quick for your players. They would have access to the mouse and they would just pause the slideshow.
00:10:33
Speaker
This setting is a little different for everyone depending on kind of if they use Google Slides or if they use a different slideshow presentation app like Microsoft Slides. I don't know what the other ones are. I use Google. You pretty much just have to find the three dots that open up the menu and change the slides.
00:10:53
Speaker
So you have them set up with this, you start the slideshow and then they have to pause it four times in a row in order to progress correctly on those white slides.
00:11:04
Speaker
Now if you don't like utilizing computers at your game tables, which I quickly am becoming like that because as I play more games, computers can be a real distraction. I have another type of puzzle that you can do with this. You're going to need a deck of cards. You're going to need the cards labeled one through 10. Just one set, so you'll have 10 cards. You'll shuffle those up and put them in between the dungeon master and the player, the challenger.
00:11:34
Speaker
A third player is going to flip the cards over. You can kind of arrange the speed how you want that player to do it. And each the challenger and the DM are going to try and slap the correct cards. The cards they're looking for are 2, 4, 6, and 8.
00:11:53
Speaker
Now if the wrong card is slapped by the player, they're going to take damage. If they slap on the odd numbered cards or the 10, they're going to take damage. If they accidentally slap a 4 instead of the 2, if they haven't gone the 2 already, they're going to take damage. If the DM slaps the correct card first, if he slaps the 2 before the player can, the game starts over and they have to start again. Shuffle up the deck and put it in.
00:12:24
Speaker
I think this is a kind of creative way. My inspiration was the old card game war where you flip over cards and whoever has the highest card takes the pile or something. I honestly don't remember that game. ah Please tweet at me the rules of those that game if you ever played it. ah I'm curious.
00:12:41
Speaker
This one I think takes a little bit of good communication between the player who's flipping the cards and Just making sure they're doing it at the right speed and people are not hurting themselves doing this Note to self don't wear rings when I try this mini game
00:13:11
Speaker
The next puzzle that Ridley encounters in the movie is kind of a doozy.
Eyeball Motif Corridor Trap
00:13:17
Speaker
You can definitely explain it theater of the mind, but then I would recommend using a gridded map to really allow the player something to interact with. Ridley comes to this corridor. The walls, floors, and ceiling of this corridor are titled with eyeball kind of motifs on them. Each eyeball has different colors, designs slightly. There are red, green, blue eyeballs. There are eyeballs that have eyelashes on them. When he first steps into the room, jets of flame shoot out from the walls. There are little holes in the center of the eyeballs, and it becomes quite clear that he is
00:14:05
Speaker
not gonna be able to make it through this to the other end where there's a circular exit for him because these fire this fire is blazing hot and it's surrounding the entire corridor. So he stops moving. He takes his sword out and he takes his sword and he jabs it into the tiles because he accurately detects that the tiles are the trapped things. He stabs into a blue eye and jets a fire go off.
00:14:34
Speaker
He then stabs it into a red eye and jets a fire again. And then he stabs it into a eye with eyelashes on it. That's the best description I have for it. Go watch that scene. I really do enjoy this puzzle. But when he stabs it into this eyelash one, nothing happens. He's like, great, these are safe. I see them all throughout this corridor. I can step on those and move. So he steps on the very first one.
00:15:03
Speaker
and the wall behind him begins to move and head towards him and also the I don't know if I'll have to rewatch this the exit from this chamber begins to close I don't know if that happens right now or in a little bit because as he begins to move this walls getting closer so he has to speed up He begins getting halfway through the corridor when suddenly all the tiles flip over and he doesn't know which ones to step on anymore. So he does what any logical insane person would do and he just makes a run for it. He dives through the closing exit and makes it to the other end.
00:15:50
Speaker
It's a movie. Obviously he's not gonna die. maintain Main character syndrome. But I want to make sure that there was a threat in this. Because the corridor itself in the movie is not very long. You can make it however long you want it to be.
00:16:10
Speaker
You're going to have to make a gridded map for this. You can hand draw, computer generate these eyes on it and make it however long you want. But I would definitely make sure that the tiles that are safe to step on are not too far apart. You don't want your players having to make acrobatics or athletics to jump from each one. You want it to be a little bit more, I guess, simplistic in a way for that.
00:16:38
Speaker
I consider, do I make this a real life timed event where I set a timer for a minute? You have a minute to get down the corridor and every 10 seconds the wall gets closer and closer. Or do I make it based on rounds? Where essentially every round the wall gets closer and you get to move a certain amount based on your speed. ah Maybe make an athletics check to see how quickly you can move.
00:17:09
Speaker
So you don't have to worry too much about the wall. Which one am I gonna choose? Weirdly enough, both. I would say you start off in rounds where you have, you start off, you roll initiative, the wall moves or you or the challenger moves. And they can move based on how many people they have. Once they get halfway, you're going to replace that grid with all the eyes on it.
00:17:38
Speaker
and replace it with a blank grid that's the same size as the corridor that has no eyes on it. This really plays into the memory of the player to see if they can tell which ones are correct. This is when I would introduce a timer.
00:17:55
Speaker
Not so much a timer for their, like the whole thing where you have only one minute to go, but a timer for their turns, give them like 10 seconds a round before the wall continues to move. So they really have to speed up their thinking. You could allow them to make history checks to try and remember which ones are safe and which ones aren't.
00:18:19
Speaker
I like this kind of two part puzzle because I think it will really build up the tension, help throw some like Jeopardy music on or something and make them really squirm and try and figure out which tiles are safe at the end.
00:18:35
Speaker
I highly would make it so they know not to just run down. They could definitely try that. They definitely could, but I would make it so the danger from the fire is enough where they're like, crap, we do not want to do this.
00:19:02
Speaker
You've made it to the final puzzle.
Final Chamber and Time-Based Challenges
00:19:04
Speaker
so Now, Ridley jumps into this new corridor and it's a circular chamber and he can see in front of him the jewel of the dragon, eye of the dragon. Yeah, eye of the dragon. It's right there for him.
00:19:22
Speaker
As he goes to reach for it, he notices on the wall, this weird hourglass thing turns over and sand begins to drip down into the bottom of the hourglass. And as this happens, the ceiling, which has these massive iron spikes on it, begins to descend, getting closer and closer to him. He goes to reach for the eye of the dragon and suddenly I don't know how like how they did this or why they did it this way, but like these spinning, rotating, like jaws of death appear. Fire scorches the air where he essentially cannot reach for the eye of the dragon. It's if he puts his hand to reach it, his hands going to get essentially blown the fuck off. Excuse my French.
00:20:18
Speaker
So he's looking around this corridor, this chamber, and he's like, well, well, fuck, I can't get the eye of the dragon. i I'll lose my hand. This thing's getting perilously close. He looks around and he doesn't really see anything in this chamber. And then he takes his sword and he breaks the hourglass, stopping the ceiling from descending and the mechanisms from ripping off his hand. And he gets the eye of the dragon.
00:20:49
Speaker
Very simple, doesn't give a lot to go on. This puzzle definitely is a time thing. You want to set a timer for the challenger to try and figure this out. Now, it's very difficult because it doesn't give you a whole lot and it doesn't give the player a whole lot.
00:21:06
Speaker
which on one hand would kind of suggest to the player, hey, there's really nothing else in this chamber besides that hourglass. Maybe that's all you have to interact with. I would love to say every player is going to get that. But as we quickly know, players will always ask questions. The floor of the circular chamber is covered in sand.
00:21:34
Speaker
An investigation check or something like that can reveal a stone pedestal on the bottom, a stone tablet on the bottom. This is not in the movie, but this would be my addition if your players are having a hard time. If they brush the sand away, they can see written on this stone tablet to avoid death. All you have to do is pause time.
00:22:02
Speaker
and then they can break the hourglass, they can turn it, something like that, and it will stop. I think that's a very simple way of making it where they have to investigate the chamber a little bit more, and it tells them what to do. That being said, I can't think of anything else really. I don't know how much time I would give them to try and figure this out, because a minute seems really short, but it is also a long time.
00:22:30
Speaker
This being the final puzzle, I think I like that it's rather simplistic. I don't think it needs to be too much because you want to get them to the eye of the dragon and you want them to have that feeling of they accomplished something.
00:22:48
Speaker
So I would I would leave it very simple have that stone tablet at on the floor of the chamber or if they don't think about the sand you could have it like be covered in grime on the wall right by the hourglass or right over where the eye of the dragon is.
Closing Thoughts and Listener Feedback
00:23:08
Speaker
Well, my friends, you have now heard how I would deconstruct one of my favorite puzzles. I'm so sorry I had to bring the memories of the 2000 Dungeons and Dragons movie into your mind, but I do love it. I actually love all the Dungeons and Dragons movies. I'm just gonna put that out there. The third one, the Book of Isle of Darkness, wasn't really that great. That's my least favorite. The second Dungeons and Dragons movie, I really think it was very good.
00:23:37
Speaker
Don't hate me at that. But thank you all so much for listening today. The theme song was done by the dungeon maestro ah on TikTok and Instagram. Go check him out if you need any musical needs. He does a fabulous job. Thank you to my special guest, me, for spending time to do this. I think I should thank myself. It's tough.
00:23:58
Speaker
I do have a big favor to ask of all you listeners. Please, if you're listening to this on Spotify or some program where you can give it a thumbs up, you can give it a rating or review, I would greatly appreciate it. If you would share it with your friends, if you would if you have friends who like TTRPGs, Dungeon Masters, tell them to listen to it. ah Because I've been doing this for about a year, I'm very thankful for everything that has come of it.
00:24:28
Speaker
but I would also like to see where else I can go with it. I would definitely also like if you liked this style of an episode, send me a message on Instagram, TikTok somewhere. ah Let me know what you thought of it. Let me know if you have any ideas, any changes you would do to it. I would love to hear from you all. Thank you all so much for listening again. Have fun, do your best, and remember, I believe in you.