Transcript
Speaker: Hello, my friends. Welcome to another episode, I guess. I had this whole mind of adventure of the Junction Problems podcast. Today, I'm joined by a voice that you might recognize, and if you don't listen like
Speaker: five, six episodes, seven episodes, I don't know. But today we are joined by the amazing, wonderful stupendous, all around torturous and wonderful person in the world, Ghibli Jam, who was part of the first Dungeons of Quandary. Ghibli Jam, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Where can people find you?
Speaker: You can find me on Twitch at twitch .tv slash Ghibli Jam. For those of you who didn't listen to the Dungeons of Quandary, Ghibli Jam is actually my DM. The only DM I have right now. And I've DM'd for her. So now it's full circle and we're going to talk about puzzles. So without further ado, let's see about these dungeon problems.
Speaker: Sure amounts and never grows And wins a toothless spider Darkness fills up empty pools And turns an endless spider What we're here for is mysteries But puzzles yet unsolved Such sad secrets lost to history As dungeon problems solved alone
Speaker: Dungeon zoom, problem zoom, puzzle zoom to solve them all. Dungeon zoom, problem zoom, puzzle zoom to solve them all.
Speaker: Boom, boom, boom. Cute theme song. If nothing ever happens of this podcast, I'm just gonna be so happy with that theme song. Dude, it's so good, yeah. It's so good. Done by the dungeon maestro on TikTok and Instagram. I throw that at the end of every episode too. But we'll do it at the beginning right now, right after that part. All right, Ghibli, here we go. Let's get started. Whoa, I just completely maxed out my own microphone.
Speaker: Oh, crap. Ah, aren't you really? I've already asked you this question and we'll see if it's changed or not. But do you like puzzles? Do you hate puzzles? Are you blasé about puzzles? I love puzzles. My answer has not changed, but I thought about maybe saying that I hated puzzles just to switch things up, which would be puzzling in and of itself. But I can't lie to not not to you.
Speaker: Thank you. Thank you. Yes, don't confuse me with changing all the puzzles. Then I'll have to like listen to all the episodes and figure out what exactly you meant and double entendres. So you like puzzles. Wonderful. Do you have a lot of experience with puzzles?
Speaker: Yeah, I do. So as a player, my favorite puzzle was actually in Vampire the Masquerade, not even in D &D. But as a DM, I love puzzles. I don't know if you've noticed, you guys have had several puzzles so far in your campaign.
Speaker: I like it because I think there are different, you know, you have your different styles of players. Obviously, there are people who love combat, people who love roleplay, and then you have the people who just want to critically think their way out of every single situation. And some of my favorite, like just watching the party be its own thing as their DM, and they're just so creative at the way that they respond to their puzzle.
Speaker: It's, you know, most of the time, not even the way that I want them. Like, it's not the solution I had figured out in my brain, but they're just so creative and it works. And I'm like, OK, I'll allow that. So like, I like the cohesion that it brings together. Oh, I'm so happy you said that last part, because the puzzles we have for you today are going to be very much like that. But that's not yet. That's not yet spoilers. Oh, there's so much I can just touch upon right now that just that that
Speaker: two minutes, one minute, whatever long that was. We'll start off with the D &D though. I do want to talk to you about Vampire Masquerade. So you DM for me, you've run several puzzles. What do you think your favorite, I'm going to pick your brain about the puzzle you've liked that you've run for us and then I'm going to give you my thoughts on that puzzle.
Speaker: What's your favorite one? So my favorite one that you guys have seen so far in your campaign, because I am running this campaign between two different groups. And so I have one, one group is superior to the other. Cinnamon for life.
Speaker: okay had to say that one yeah fair i would i i legally i have to agree with you right now um but uh so the one that i gave you guys that i liked the most was um i gave all of the players that spoke elvish
Speaker: the elvish like alphabet and like it's corresponding like letters in the translation and then never really touched back on that for months and then you guys came to a rune stone where it was like those uh little square tiles that you have to like shift and you know rearrange to spell out something and it wasn't very difficult it was song in elvish s -o -n -g and the creatures the grung that were worshiping at this like giant obelisk were you know singing and it was
Speaker: pretty obvious but it was just the concept of like the party has actually go look at a handout that I had made and they had to make the conscious choice to share that alphabet with the you know the rest of the party that didn't speak elvish and you know you guys figured it out I was really really pleased and then I was pumped because I gave you guys movable tiles on the map didn't work out that well at the beginning but we did figure it out so that's really all that matters
Speaker: I really liked the moveable tiles. That was cool. Definitely. The the Elvish part of it, my character did not speak Elvish. I don't remember. They didn't share with us. I don't think they shared. No, I saw the hand. I saw the handout. Yeah, I believe D 'astre was like, oh, I'll quickly write it out for the rest of the party, like a translation Rosetta Stone. D 'astre can write.
Speaker: That's played diasteries played by mr. Baca who was also part of the dungeons of quandary Yeah, I think it is very interesting to have a puzzle that in theory some people are not able to solve Because they're limited either because their character doesn't make Their character doesn't speak the language or has no chance of solving it like it's an arcane based puzzle
Speaker: I don't know how I feel about that because it just automatically takes potentially some of the party out of the puzzle. What did you think about when you were kind of doing it that way? Were you just in your mind saying, yeah, they're going to share, they're going to include everyone or was a little part of you like these motherfuckers who speak English aren't going to help at all?
Speaker: So I think I may have prompted the sharing as a DM when they were like, hey, we have the handout of the alphabet. And I said something like, you know, would you I said right now, the only characters that, you know, can see this handout are the ones that speak Elvish. Would you like to share that with the party? And that's when the Austria was like, yeah, yeah, I write it out. So I think I gave a prompt. I think if the you know, what would I would have like, what would I do if the party was like, no, we don't want to share.
Speaker: At that point, you know, maybe tried to honestly I probably would have just introduced a bunch of like really weak mobs to keep half the party like hey we'll fight while you like nerds figure it out. That would have been interesting. I like that actually I like that a lot because that would have added a level of peril and danger to it.
Speaker: I always think of it like, like the hacker, you know, and like someone's got to like guard the door while the hackers hacking in and you know, so your job as the puzzle doer is the hacker and you know, but I'm a huge fan of just throwing mobs that you guys randomly just to spice things up, always low level, you know, goblins or something like that, but just
Speaker: we did completely mark those grongs. You just brought up a hacker and I'm dating myself right now with an old reference right now that I hope no one, actually no, I hope everyone ever watches this movie. And if you don't watch this movie after I mention it, by the way, this is rated R right now, this next statement. Have you ever seen the movie Swordfish? No. Okay, it's Hugh Jackman.
Speaker: Lally Berry and John Travolta. Wait, have I seen this movie? It is beautiful. Without spoiling the movie because you should watch it, it's a very good movie. Essentially Hugh Jackman plays a hacker who was caught and part of his freedom was he can't touch a computer. That's pretty traditional.
Speaker: they bring him to do something. They were like, okay, we want you to do a job for us. And he was like, I can't, I can't touch computers. So they held a gun up to his head and was like, okay, touch this computer. And he's like, well, you know, if you shoot me, then I'm useless, blah, blah, blah. And like, okay, no, you got to do it. We got to see that you, and then they were like, we'll shoot your kid or something. I don't remember exactly. But so he starts.
Speaker: And John Travolta's a criminal, Halle Berry works for him.
Speaker: Yeah, he starts hacking and they're like, okay, well, let's up this game So Halle Berry's character starts giving him a blowjob Well, he's hacking into like the CIA and so like you're seeing her head bobbing He's getting all furious and shit and then it's like he like they're like times up bang Don't actually shoot him he finishes so she comes up and she's all like oh yeah wipe off the lips and then he just turns the computer around and he's like boom did it and
Speaker: Boom, we're in baby. So I don't recommend that for your puzzles. But that level of peril. I mean, I did throw you guys into an orgy. That's true. And I won that orgy. I absolutely won it. But I think that that is a good insight on what to do if you deliberately design a puzzle that other people might not be able to participate in.
Speaker: What about something else to do? Exactly. What's been your most frustrating instance in the campaign that I play in? Oh, oh, boy. Oh, boy. Is it all in me apologizing? No, no, no, no. When the party got really meta about
Speaker: things that are
Speaker: Nighthides don't come. They're not fiends. They're they're part of that corruption of the Feywild. So like when I forget, this wasn't a puzzle per se, but someone was like, did divine sense and they never came up with the fact that she was a fiend. And I was like, yeah, there's no fiends like you're good. That was the most frustrating in terms of like just a rules lawyer basis. But then it does come back to a puzzle.
Speaker: so we recently had a thing where the shadow road there's a shadow fae ambassador i believe that's the mob that can send you there it's just an ability no save no anything just if they're on a shadow road they could just teleport people to this like alternate
Speaker: I'm not sure if it's an alternate plane per se, but it's just like a visual, you're trapped on this forever shadow road. You can go this way and it just infinitely loops around and you start, you know, you get back to where you started and stuff. And so that puzzle to me was a puzzle that had absolutely zero answer. There was no specified way that you could do it, that you could complete it. But what I like to do is I'll say, okay, you're in this like weird, freaky, scary situation, what would your character do?
Speaker: And so going back to the rules lawyering, this is where it all comes. This is where the two, you know, waves collide. But so everyone starts googling shadow roads. Oh, well, we weren't on a shadow road. Meanwhile, leading up to it, I was hinting, hey, guys, the earth here seems to be darker, like in this like path and this trail. And, you know, so the.
Speaker: It was on me for not hinting at it and foreshadowing it better. But I think having a party that immediately goes, I don't want to do a puzzle. This is not fair. I'm pulling out. This is illegal. Pulling out the DMG because the way that I was running this puzzle was what would your character do? And it was literally up to the dice rolls and how creative you were. So, you know, you could have
Speaker: any number of ways like if you were a lazy character like if you were a monk and you were like I choose to just meditate it out okay guess what buddy that's how you solve that puzzle you know like there was no answer it was just up to the dice rolls and what the players wanted to do so for me I think having players that are too quick to rule their way before they even attempt to think about a puzzle that to me is the most frustrating so if you do that don't do that
Speaker: That's not to you, by the way. Did you ever receive the cease and desist letter that we sent to you for Shadow Roats?
Speaker: My legal team will be right on it. See you in the shadow. Yeah, it is such a tough. I don't think I've designed too many quote unquote puzzles or problems that are based on world lore, which now I am after experiencing that puzzle for myself, you know, on an outside observer, you know, seeing it.
Speaker: I really liked what you tried to set up. I think it is a very tough balance because you and I talked about this during that whole section and I hope I made a point
Speaker: that I really firmly believe in as a DM is if you're going, your players, while they care very much about your world and are great players, they will never truly understand your world the way you understand it, you know, or really think about it the way that you think about it. So if you're designing these puzzles that are world lore -centric a little bit,
Speaker: It's such a beautiful thing, but it's also a very tough balance. Let's see how we might, like you mentioned, you dropped little nuggets about the road. Actually, you know what? I don't think we should really dissect that puzzle at all, because I think the biggest thing about you dropping the nuggets is now that we've experienced it,
Speaker: We'll think about that more. We'll notice that more. Because that's one of the ways players learn about your world is by experiencing it. So I think the only thing I would do is if you're going to design puzzles that are such world -centric, start off really small with a puzzle. Like maybe it would have been start off with like, oh, you know, like you found a journal that's encoded that talks about shadow roads.
Speaker: then you, you know, you're passing by and you see a weave of tangled magic and it's a, you untangle it and you realize, oh, that's a shadow road. And then you experienced the chalaportation onto the shadow road, really slowly build it up. So us dumb players can really catch up. Like dumping people into it is very scary. And I would say in terms of - We were terrified.
Speaker: Yeah, we were absolutely terrified. Time and the way that time works in the campaign as well. You guys have a reason to be because when you guys were teleported to the Shadowfell and you almost missed a full moon coming back for a werebear that you had to rescue by the full moon. So I understand the necessity. So we already experienced the Shadow Road when the werebear was?
Speaker: no that you were in the shadow fell that was that was different but you guys had heard about the shadow roads or you had heard about in the corrupted forest there being like
Speaker: Infinite time loops that people would get stuck in and stuff, but it wasn't enough foreshadowing So I'll own that and I'll just you know, I think Dropping lore nuggets. You're right. If the party isn't as you know, knowledgeable because everything's all in my head But for me, I think the frustrating part was the just the opening up the book and the rules lawyering because at some point I think players have to trust their DM and
Speaker: and just understands like on the one hand they could be making a mistake like with the fiend with the night hag that was something valid to be like hey by the way you know are you aware of this yeah buffers you know something like this to be like well and that's not legal because you know and like point out like all these things so that was a puzzle that went wrong I would say yeah
Speaker: I really like this because this is not a type of puzzle that I've ever touched upon in this podcast of a world lore puzzle, which I think is a different type of puzzle. You know, like we've talked about, I've talked about problems or like traditional puzzles, stuff like that. Combat puzzles. I talked to a friend a little bit about combat puzzles.
Speaker: Uh, but this world lore puzzle is an interesting one that I would love to, I think is incredibly powerful. Especially if you build a game that I like, I think all of our players are very serious about the game and love it a lot. Uh, I mean, I'm, we've been playing for how many years now? Uh, so I would, ooh, I'm gonna, I like this idea of world lore puzzles. I'm gonna.
Speaker: I really should take notes during this thing. Oh, no, I'm taking I'm taking audio. I was just going to say recording it. We can all listen and take notes later. Yeah, this will be on the test. Viewers, listeners. Well, one of the things I want to do is write like who knows if this will ever happen in the brain of Ben, who has a billion projects. But, you know, eventually maybe the end of this podcast or I'll have a Kickstarter book that's like Ben's puzzles.
Speaker: And I'll have it all broken down into different types of puzzles. And now Ghibli Jam's contribution, World Lore Puzzles, will have to make an appearance. Oh, I'm going to back it. I think the hardest thing is coming up with puzzles. What's your process on coming up with puzzles?
Speaker: Okay, so the way that I create my campaigns is I start with a very top -down approach. I create two or three major
Speaker: spot arcs, and then I go in and I create each town, and to the level that I create each town, this campaign currently has over 1 ,000 NPCs named, given, I forget which map it is, it's either Matt Mercer or Colville, but it's the, you give your NPCs three personality traits, a fear, and a desire, and then from there you can just improv any situation that they would be in, right?
Speaker: Like, I think it's like 11, almost 1200 NPCs with all of those traits, names, familial ties. A lot of them are just like generic NPCs, like Bandit or Thug. Some of them are actually like leveled characters. So once I start making the people, then I start thinking about their motivations.
Speaker: and then I think okay would this person want to put the party in combat or would this person want to kind of slow down the party maybe they're not violent maybe they just sort of want to halt the party they're trying to protect something and then once I figure out the motive then I kind of design a puzzle around that if it's not going to be combat. I will admit
Speaker: you know, 90 % of the time it's always combat because I just love, I love combat. But I will throw in puzzles, especially when I start designing quest lines in towns. If it feels like it's really hostile and it's really combat heavy, that's when I'll come in with like puzzles. Interesting. Interesting. I like that. You know, your, your, your,
Speaker: You just said you love combat, and I think that's great because, you know, as a DM, you also have to have fun. But I also like that you are consciously when you're like, okay, this whole quest line has just been pure combat.
Speaker: let's throw in a puzzle somewhere I think that's the right way of thinking about it because I think there should be little everything sprinkled in should be like your campaign your adventures your your sessions should be like just a nice thing of curry I love curry curry is one of the superior foods in this world where the thing I love about curry is it's
Speaker: It's such a balanced dish for the most part. You have your protein, your rice, you have the sauce. They are hot curries, but I've never had a curry that I'm just like, this is pure heat. I have had a curry where I'm like, this is creamy. This has some heat to it. The chicken falls apart, but the rice is nice and firm. God, now I'm getting hungry.
Speaker: And that's what I think a session a puzzle a campaign should be So yeah, I like that that you you I think as a DM you should always look at your Kind of your style stay with that sound not saying change your style at all But also analyze a little bit and be like what should I throw in? What should I include to make sure all the players are happy? It's the same way with puzzles Yeah
Speaker: I um just recently you guys did a little mini puzzle in the medusa cave where there was like you had to crawl prone through like a very small hole and uh and then like the tunnel kind of gives out for like 40 feet and everyone has to try to get across this gap and
Speaker: What was interesting was I actually ran that for both campaigns, your campaign and then the other campaign, my ladies campaign that I run it with. And the less superior campaign, not as good as the cinnamon. I'm sure they're very lovely people.
Speaker: Um, and, but you guys, both of the parties had just wildly different ways of figuring it out for relatively similar party composition. So you guys went with the mold earth route, even though they had druids and sorcerers and everything on their party.
Speaker: They did not do that at all. They tensors floating discs, like, you know, the rope over. And, you know, there was just like but it was just interesting to see because the thought process behind all of these people in this tight, you know, in marching order. And if ever if you wanted to get out of there, everyone would have to back up in a line and how you guys are just going to deal with like I called it the traffic jam. But I love that. Yes. Name your puzzles. Name your puzzles something witty.
Speaker: Yeah, I love and I hate D &D sometimes for the fact that there's so much you can do. And then sometimes it feels like you're just stuck at certain points. For example, I'm playing Baldur's Gate. I've restarted Baldur's Gate for like the eighth time. And this time I had Gail burn and large reduce.
Speaker: Primarily because I wanted to sneak in spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3 if you haven't played the intro yet. I wanted to sneak into the little thieves guild that's in the druid's lair and I've never done that. So I was like, fuck it. Gail's learning and Large would do so, I can do that. And now I'm just like, now he's saddled with having that spell that has no other purpose really in Baldur's.
Speaker: I disagree. I enlarge everyone. I enlarge Laezel. I haven't played around too much with it, but like in D &D terms, part of me is like this spell is kind of. Dude, enlarge reduce is so good. I, we just, I recently used it in a one shot that we played together. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's I love that is out so spoiled go check out the chaos den podcast as well She's I'm just sharing everyone out. Yeah name dropping Matthew Mercer, I'll show you how to just name Yeah, you did
Speaker: I, uh, I enlarged the monk or monk. Yeah. Maybe, maybe I'm just getting biased my old age. Yeah. Yeah. You're one of those, you're, you're getting, you're like one of those cranky, like back in my day, we couldn't do size alteration magic and we were better for it.
Speaker: When you crashed in large reduce, nothing happened. This is just major ego bigger. Wish they would quit casting that spell on our economy.
Speaker: So you mentioned at the beginning, one of your favorite puzzles has been from the vampires masquerade. And this is exciting for me, because I like this. This is called dungeon problems. It is primarily Dungeons and Dragons, because that's my love. Ironically, I do have vampire the masquerade up on my bookshelf. I've only cracked a little bit.
Speaker: Oh, God, I have so much. I'm in three. I'm in four campaigns. I play in yours. I run one on Mondays and then I run two on Fridays back to back now, not back to back. Alternating. Yeah, I'm in four as well. It is so much play pretend. I love it. And I hate it at the same time. So tell me about vampires, masquerade and puzzles in it. What is what is it similar to D &D or is it different?
Speaker: Similar, I would say Vampire the Masquerade is generally way more theater of the mind, so a lot of the times you're not going to have a puzzle on a battle map that would require you to actually move pieces to figure out. Generally, in my experience, they were puns. I love puns, as you can tell by probably all of my horrible NPC names.
Speaker: So a lot of the times it'll be just wordplay or like a translation of a word we had where we had like a Russian mob boss guy and we were trying to figure out where we had to go to intercept the shipment and the whole time
Speaker: He just kept saying this like word over and over and I finally just recorded it on my phone and then Google translated it to Russian or like Russian to English and was like, oh, it's just that like the fish warehouse doc thing. Like, oh, OK. But what I liked about Vampire the Masquerade is because it's so modern, you can get away with doing things like that. Like, wait a second. I'm actually going to sit here and record on on my phone another time because it's modern. I was in the game store that I used to work at and
Speaker: I was kind of being a little facetious because we were in this smart home tech millionaire and I was like, Alexa, where's the nearest place to kill prostitutes? And Alexa in the game store popped up and was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I was like, no, Alexa, please, this is a business. This was in the game.
Speaker: I just feel like I need to put a disclaimer out there. People were hunting the prostitutes and I was trying to stop it before it happened because I was actually in charge of the brothel so it was hurting into my business. So it was so personal. I was trying to like catch Jack the Ripper before Jack the Ripper happened.
Speaker: So but my favorite one of all time. OK, so this is going to require a little bit of backstory, but hear me out. So in vampires, the masquerade, you have like your sire, you know, the the vampire above you that turns you. And so prior to being turned, my character was a Satanist. And so after I got turned, I believed that my sire was actually Satan. Right. And he wasn't. He was like literally this like
Speaker: Cockney dude from like the 1300s just real old school old world vampire But in my brain I had like, you know been doing these like, you know demonic rituals and stuff I just would like to point out for those who are freaked out about You know the satanic panic in tabletop board games. This is a completely different experience than what most people would I decided to go this route because edgelord I guess anyways, so
Speaker: my uh like you know my GM for that made a whole like breaking into kind of the equivalent of like stealing the declaration of independence you know but into a satanic temple and we had to steal these like you know original copies of the
Speaker: This is getting like way crazy because I probably shouldn't be talking about this on your podcast, but it was like the unedited version of the original Old Testament.
Speaker: So like, so and it was like to basically see that there was like all this like issues with translation and over time and things have been added and taken away and all of this stuff. So, you know, that's that's where our group decided to go with it. But yeah, there was this entire thing where we basically had to know, like,
Speaker: Like demons and angels and devils and all the stuff that were talked about in the Bible itself so like we took out this like little like pamphlet that we had been given it was a handout and we all the answers were on this pamphlet so it's not like we had to like actually open up the Bible or anything like that but it was really cool because we would get to something and you know there would be like a
Speaker: the, you know, Baphomet, like, and then like an item slot. And then we'd have to like read through the thing and be like, OK, well, you know, if Baphomet is this, you know, we're going to put this in here. And it carried on for like, you know, six or seven different rooms with all different sorts of things that all relied on this handout. So it just felt like a worksheet. Honestly, it was really fun. All the information was right there. But I liked it because it was made specifically for me, my character and my background. This had nothing to do with our campaign, but it was tailored to me.
Speaker: And I think that as a player, if your DM is going to do something, you know, for your personal story arc or your quest line, you know, that's the puzzle you want to show up for, you know? Yep. Yep. Oh, this just made me think of how I can't wait to have my own like real space. And I'm just going to have things all around like my D and my D &D room. I'm just going to say to the players, hey,
Speaker: When I give you a puzzle, when I give you something, you're welcome to use anything in this room and have like a black light hidden somewhere, have like a French dictionary, or like a series of like old historical books and be like, whenever I present a puzzle that you might not know the answer somewhere in this room. Yeah, and it turns into an actual library search. That's so cool.
Speaker: That would be all I'm doing this. So vampires masquerade, you've had puzzles in it and that's really cool. Do you, one of the things I love about D &D, which I think D &D has fallen away from is D &D was originally a miniature war game, you know, then a fantastical war game, then an adventure where puzzles seem to be ingrained into D &D and D &D has seemed to forgotten that in my opinion, a little bit.
Speaker: uh do you feel do you know vampire the masquerade has stuff specifically for puzzles for like when people are designing their own stuff is there like a section in the blood keepers or something that's like when crafting a puzzle for your vampires make sure you blah blah blah blah blah blah
Speaker: So they touch on it about the same depth that I would say that the DMG touches on it for Dungeons and Dragons. So it basically gives you like a couple ideas, but then it's just like, come up with it yourself. They'll give you like stats for traps, things like that. And again, because it's more modern, it'll be like, you know, machine gun turret and things like that, you know? But it's, again, I don't think that there's a lot of oversight to the puzzles. I'm not sure.
Speaker: why these published works don't have a little bit more help. But I think that part of coming up with a puzzle, especially with today's internet and everyone has access to it, you can't keep reusing the same puzzles over and over. At least they have to be re -skinned. So maybe they don't wanna publish anything. And then everyone's like, I know this puzzle. I've done this puzzle in eight campaigns.
Speaker: So actually the DMG, I've mentioned this before, doesn't have a single thing about puzzles in it. It has traps, that's what I'm thinking. Just has traps. Puzzles were not mentioned until Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. And that infuriates me. I wonder, you know what? We're gonna solve this right now live on podcast. I have here all my old,
Speaker: D &D books. Old is relative. And we have the DMG from 3 .5. Let's see. I don't know if I'm going to be able to... Yes and no. Yes and no.
Speaker: All right, there's nothing about puzzles in the... Oh, wow. You know you've loved and had this book for a long time when the bungee is going to be falling apart. Let's see if I can find something in... If I can't find this quickly, then I'm not gonna really treasure dungeon terrain, the dungeon 57 traps designing a trap. Okay, maybe... Maybe it doesn't have anything about puzzles in this one either, and then I will retract my hatred towards...
Speaker: Fifth edition. Fifth edition a little bit. I know that there are in published modules, like there are puzzles in those modules, but you're right. There's no like guide. There should be a guide to making a puzzle. Ah.
Speaker: Obviously, everyone's style is different. I don't know if my mic's picking that up. Probably is. It probably is. I don't know. I feel like there should be. Like, you know, obviously, you can't just be like, this is how you make a puzzle because then everyone knows. But we've touched upon in other interviews of like, what are your stuff? What do you think every puzzle should include? A trigger, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But it's good that Vampire Masquerade has a little bit about it. It is built into the game. I wonder if that's just TTRPGs in general or if some games are like Monster of the Week, the Monster of the Week. That entire game is a puzzle. You have to puzzle out who the fuck the monster is. So maybe it's just so kind of inherent in TTRPGs that it's not even really spoken about.
Speaker: Maybe I've just cracked it. Did this, did we just solve it? We could have, but now here's an interesting philosophical debate. Do you consider traps to be puzzles? Because I believe that a trap can be part of a puzzle, but a trap in itself does not make a puzzle. I think so as well, just because
Speaker: my view on traps in 5e is not super high because a lot of times it's just like make an investigation check I checked for traps it's not longer like the big ornate like siding blades it I yeah I think I think traps are definitely
Speaker: I think the big difference is traps surprise you in theory. Puzzles don't always surprise you. You sometimes walk and you're like, and I've heard many players say this, ah shit, it's a puzzle. Like there's such a different inflection there of, oh shit, it's a trap. It's that time of night when we try and stump you with puzzles. Are you ready? Yes.
Speaker: I have an interesting idea that we're going to try out for this one. In the past, all my other ones have just been nameless characters with their parties. I think since we have two puzzles and you and I have played recently and you've had two characters, we're going to let each character try and solve a puzzle. Oh, no. Okay. So Glenda Goodwitch and then Time Rosemary. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: We have two puzzles, the puzzle I created myself and the puzzle that I found in an official module. Which one would you like to solve first? I would like to solve your puzzle first. All right.
Speaker: And who would you like to solve my puzzle first? Oh, okay. Well, I technically played as Glenda Goodwitch in that campaign. So I feel like I have to continue with her. All right, Glenda Goodwitch. Remind the fair listeners who Glenda Goodwitch is. Glenda Goodwitch is a bard
Speaker: And her whole shtick is that she's basically Tehani from The Good Place, and she wants to basically be like the first influencer. So she wants a whole, you know, troop, like, you know, traveling bards telling her tales, that kind of thing. So she's very big into like fame. And she got it. She got her fame. She sure did. Do you happen to have Glenda's character sheet?
Speaker: So Glenda has come to a small clearing in the middle of the woods. And what draws Glenda's attention is an ancient decrepit well that sits in the middle of this clearing. By this well is a small wooden pail that is not attached to a rope or anything, it's just a pail.
Speaker: I will open it right now.
Speaker: And then a little bit off in the clearing, it's completely surrounded by trees. You can see a small pond just a little ways off. As Glenda approaches this well, she looks in and she sees that it's bone dry. It's about 15 feet deep. There's a little bit of water at the bottom, but at the bottom, just on top of this water is a floating chest of gold and silver.
Speaker: Hmm. Okay. Now, how is the chest open and is that how I can see that it is filled with gold and silver? The chest itself is made out of gold and silver. It is not open. It is just floating on this little, it's probably about half a foot of water. Okay.
Speaker: Is there, is this one of those like wells with the little posts with the little roof over it to stop stuff from getting into it? Okay. Yes, it is. Well, first thing that I think Glenda would do is she would toss a gold coin in there and make a wish. And I think her wish would be, I'd really like to get that chest. I wish I could have that chest.
Speaker: You hear the gold coin drop off against the chest, but nothing happens. Um. Looking at the water. Does it look like regular water? Does it look contaminated? Does it look really murky? Give me a nature check. Okay. I'm going to roll real dice for this. Look at that.
Speaker: Okay, well, 13 plus two, 15.
Speaker: You're looking down at this water, you notice that it's very similar quality as the pond water nearby. It's pretty clear, it's not, it's probably a little murky from dirt and stuff like that, but it looks pretty safe. It floats for just about half a foot at the bottom of this well. So it looks like pretty normal water.
Speaker: And then so the chest itself is floating, even though it's made out of metal, which I would know should not occur. Ghibli knows maybe something, but I don't know if Glenda would know this. I think it's an ooze. I'm a believer in player knowledge as part of a puzzle, for the most part.
Speaker: So, Linda is going to, you tell me what check to make, but she wants to see, is this some type of ooze that is actually holding up the chest? Okay. I would say...
Speaker: We'll just use that 15 nature. It looks like water. You can see through it pretty well. It doesn't look gelatinous at all. It doesn't look syrupy. It looks like water.
Speaker: I will send my mage hand down. I'm assuming the chest itself will be too heavy for the mage hand to be picked up, right? But I will send the mage hand down with, I will untie the bucket, the rope, and I will give the rope to the mage hand, and if it can kind of tie and secure the chest. Okay, give me a sleight of hand check. Oh boy, sleight of hand.
Speaker: Well, jack of all trades, so that's good. Plus half my proficiency, so just another one. So 14, 15, 16. All right. Your mage hand wraps around the chest a couple times. It's much easier because it's actually in the water and not like on the solid ground so it can get underneath it and does some loops and it's pretty secure.
Speaker: My Mage Hand went to Boy Scouts when it was growing up, so it's a really good knot tying Mage Hand. I made sure of it. Okay, what happens if I attempt to pull the, you know, crank the well and kind of pull it up using that mechanism? So you begin to pull it up and it lifts out of the water and begins to pull up, up, up. The well is only about 15 feet deep, and when it gets up to about 14 feet,
Speaker: It seems to hit this invisible barrier and falls back down. Oh, easy to spell magic. Okay. On the, on the, uh, well, I guess first, before I dispel anything, I should probably detect magic. That would be the responsible thing to do. Okay. Uh, there appears to be a, um,
Speaker: a wow, what's the abjuration? Abjuration spell on the mouth of the well, which you can assume is kind of creating this barrier that the chest isn't able to pass. And the chest has that same type of magic on it. And the water has very similar magic to it.
Speaker: And then around the mouth of the well, you see a faint trace of transmutation magic. Transmutation, oh no, abjuration I can live with. Okay, how high up is the well standing from like the ground? Like not the full depth of it, but the little stone wall. Only a couple feet.
Speaker: And are those cemented together? Those stones? Yep.
Speaker: Well, Glenda Goodwich sure wishes that she had her very strong friends with her because I could dispel the magic, but I actually want to just break the well and then take the chest up and out of the side, like, through those rocks, but I don't think that she's strong enough to do that. As a matter of fact, she has a minus two strength, so she would probably barely be able to crank that lever to get it up, honestly.
Speaker: Alrighty, I will cast a spell magic. You would be with a party, so if you want, I will give you a 50 % chance that you have a strong enough party member to do that. Well, if that's what we're doing, then I would like to cast Enlarge Reduce on the strong party member to make them stronger. Said it was a useless spell, my ass.
Speaker: Comes back to kick me in the ass. All right, 50 % chance. Do you want a high 50 or a low 50? High 50, always high, baby. 92, so you do have, you have, did we even have a strong party member? No, we had, yeah. No, that Traegar wasn't - Oh, no, sorry, sorry. I'm mixing up my one shots. Fuck, he was such a cool character, too. Chris is a minotaur.
Speaker: Gosh, I can't remember his name, but I loved him.
Speaker: He wasn't even supposed to be a minotaur, he was supposed to be a gnome. He was, well he was a gnome, but. Yeah. Alright, well, let's see if he has enough strength to break down. Within large, he counts. In large, so advantage, and that advantage helped him out. I'll say he starts breaking, he has a hammer with him. He starts breaking the well apart and makes a hole.
Speaker: I would like to just... whoa whoa whoa chaotic Chris let's not be too chaotic whose character's name I have forgotten but you are a minotaur slash gnome person instead of breaking the whole well down here's what I want to do if there are like
Speaker: bricks or stones that I could take out, but still leave the structure intact. I leave a chest size hole so that I don't break the actual top circular, you know, ingress into the well, but I just sort of leave like a little, little hole in the side of the well. That's what I want to do. And then put the rope through that way.
Speaker: and feed it down that way with my mage hand. And then when I pull it up before it hits the top, like that 14 foot, you know, ceiling, slip it out through the side.
Speaker: Okay. Give me an intelligence check. Oh, I'm good at this. If you have like stone cutting, or something like that, or don't have stone geometry tools. You can use your proficiency. No, I'm more of a PR person. So I'm just like, that
Speaker: looks really well done as he's breaking the hole uh so with intelligence that's going to be a 13 total i love percentile dice they're my favorite dice in the world i'm not going to tell you the number i'm picking up because that's just
Speaker: Okay. You, as he starts to bash, you realize, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, let's do this carefully, carefully. And you start analyzing and you remember this very challenging game you played as a child. Oh, Jenga. I was literally about to say Jenga. Yeah. So you start, you start knocking out specific bricks and you think you have a hole big enough. You start cranking up this chest.
Speaker: And you pull it through this hole and you open it up to find this golden silver chest as hundreds of platinum pieces in it. And you have solved my hole of never filling by completely breaking it by completely breaking it.
Speaker: I love that. The the official way. So there's a magical. I was going to let you use to spell magic on that, but it would have been a very hard DC because there's no spell that creates a barrier like this, really. Well, there might be. But, you know, puzzles, you never want to be too easy. So that was making it so the chest goes and go up, except for if you took that pale and filled it with water and filled up.
Speaker: the well, it would rise the chest up and the flower passed. But there was a second puzzle involved with this. Around the rim of or like around kind of the base of the well was dust of dryness. So when you raise the water up just enough to almost get it, the dust of dryness would activate and send it right back down and cause the water to disappear.
Speaker: I love that dust of dryness and dust of like, um, choking and sneezing are some of my favorite things to use in D &D. I, I, I designed this today. I'm very, well, I designed half of this today. I came up with a name like weeks ago and then designed it today. And it was beaten and beaten in the best way possible and not the way I saw it. Hey, you know, like.
Speaker: It uses everyone's skill set. Did you ever read the, I, there was an excerpt from some like famous burglar and he basically said like, once you realize that you don't need to go through doors and windows and that everything can be an egress or an ingress into where you need to go, like,
Speaker: that's where your crime life begins. I'm coming off horrible during this episode. I would just like to point out, I am a very staunch rule follower, but what this guy said was really interesting. He was like, so these people, these criminals, like these robbers, people, you know, doing bank robberies and stuff like that, they don't, uh,
Speaker: follow the law. So why would they follow the law of architecture and not just buy like a $10 drywall saw to get into like the walls and stuff like that. And then I don't know, I kind of meant that said a lot to me about like, huh, what a creative like way to solve problems. I mean, wasn't that the entire like plot of like,
Speaker: Oceans 13, 10, 11, uh, the Italian job. Uh, yes, I should say, uh, Ghibli GM is a law abiding citizen listeners. Uh, they do not condone breaking the law, except for certain aspects. Yeah. Don't steal anything except for other people's hearts.
Speaker: Metaphorically in a cute way not in a who are single and not in a committed relationship. Yes, not in a vivisection way Not an necromantic satanic panic, yeah So the second puzzle is brought to us by and this is gonna be an interesting one castle and ember and
Speaker: Castle Ember is a 5th edition conversion and classic homage to the X2 Castle Ember adventure that was written in 1981 by game designer Tom Mulvey. This is exciting, I've actually never heard of this.
Speaker: So I have two of these. These are essentially the whole series of like old adventures and they look like the old books used to look like black and white. Black and white, beautiful black and white pictures. It doesn't look like crazy formatting and it's just a regular book. I don't need to look at little boxes all over the place. Yeah. The monsters aren't even
Speaker: So I was interested in doing this because one of my last interviews was with Teenagers Basement who's been DMing for 26 years from AD &D and I asked him about puzzles and stuff like that back then and you know we talked a little bit about it and it made me want to look and see if I could find puzzles. I've posed puzzles from Tomb of
Speaker: Where is slash annihilation? Tomb of four, because they have that revamped as well in five teams of annihilation. No, Dreams of Annihilation is actually different than Tomb of Four. Tomb of Annihilation is the same idea as Sarak is.
Speaker: doing batshit. They remade. The classic. Yeah. I'm a big Dungeon the Mad Mage fan. I know a lot of people don't really like it because it's just a dungeon crawl, but I absolutely love it because it's just a dungeon crawl. There's like three quests and Tales of the Yawning Portal was like our what do we do to break up the monotonous grind of that. Let's do the Tales of the Yawning Portal dungeon crawls.
Speaker: Those are classic dungeon crawls, and I do love a good dungeon crawl. All right, so this one. This one's going to be interesting because it gives me nothing to work with. I'll read the scene to you in the center. Oh, wait, and introduce your character. Oh, I am Time Rosemary. I am a wizard, a chronergy wizard. I am a far traveler and I have memory loss.
Speaker: I think out of both characters that you could have picked this is the right one for this puzzle. Good, good. In the center of this otherwise bare room is a 12 foot wide, 10 foot deep sunken pit filled with clear liquid. A sphere the size of a melon and made of thin glass floats on the middle of the pit.
Speaker: Oh my God. Am I pondering my orb? Inside the sphere can be seen a large silver key. And that's it. That's it. That's all it gives us. So it's glass or, or, you know, clear translucent sphere inside of that is a silver key. Yep.
Speaker: And this entire room is bare, except for this pit filled with clear liquid that probably water, we're thinking. And then that's it. Do I see what the key would go to? Are there any locked doors, locked chests, locks? Do I know why I need this key?
Speaker: yeah we'll say in your previous machinations of this dungeon you saw this key it's a silver key has a skull on it and you came across a door with a giant skull on it okay well i think the first thing that unfortunately time would probably do would be to
Speaker: Try to, does she have levitate? Does she have levitate, my girl? I don't have levitate, but you know what I do have? Okay, two things. First question.
Speaker: This is going to get actually insane. Going back to enlarge reduce again. All of Ghibli's wizardry characters. I always say I think it's such a great spell. I have. I use it all the time. That's why when you were hating on it, I was like, no, it's you just have to be creative. It's not even about like the bigger bonus for damage or anything. It's just all the silly stuff that you can do.
Speaker: Okay, well, actually, no, I would like to take my, I'm barefoot, so I'm gonna dip my toe in the liquid. Just my toe. Wonderful. You take eight points of acid damage. That's what I freaking thought, okay. Ow. Wow, I rolled max damage. Here's what we're going to do then.
Speaker: Now question, I just want to verify, the pit, I'm in a dungeon, right? I'm not in someone's house. This wouldn't be the equivalent of me attempting to break their in -ground pool and then it floods their basement. No, it's like a pit in the hole in the dungeon. Can I tell if the acid itself is eating away at either the, is it corroding the pit?
Speaker: Give me a perception check. Well, unfortunately, I don't think I'm good at perception. Ah, I am. I'm proficient. So many characters. Okay, so that is a 15 on the die plus 419. It is eating neither the glass nor the pit. Seems pretty well contained in there. And that is 10 to 15 feet
Speaker: full of this acid it's not like partially full or half full it is completely full 12 feet wide 10 feet deep and the key is like six feet in there it's right at the center uh okay and the sphere itself if i toss like a pebble or something does it
Speaker: seem to be solid or it's just a magical aura protecting the key from being corroded? Like does the pebble plop through the feeder? With your perception check, you can tell it is a solid thing. Like you can see it like floating in the acid. It's like moving around a little bit. It's not like a magical barrier or anything like that.
Speaker: Uh, then very carefully using my herbalism kit, can I tell, just scoop up a little sample of the acid, can I tell if it would either be blammable or freezeable? Like, uh, checking, I guess the
Speaker: fumes of it to see if it would actually light on fire. And if not, is it like salinated or something that I would not be able to freeze it? Give me a nature check, but you have if you don't already have proficiency, you can have proficiency. Thanks. I do not have proficiency that is.
Speaker: That's a two on the dice. So that's a total of six plus proficiency would be nine. So I don't think I can do that. Well, you know, acid, the liquid doesn't makes you know, like.
Speaker: gas can be exploded a lot, uh, like methane, stuff like that. And acid maybe could be made out of that. Uh, but it's a liquid and liquids, liquids freeze for the most part, except for alcohol. Does alcohol freeze now? Well, I don't think so. No, no, no, for the most part, a lot of liquids freeze. Okay.
Speaker: Now this sphere and this key would not be considered creatures, right? Not really creatures. Inanimate objects. Okay. Okay. Okay. And I am only level six, so I don't have my temporal shunt yet. Okay. I do have pulse wave. So here's what I would like to do.
Speaker: The pressure pulls or pushes creatures and objects. Okay.
Speaker: Each creature in the cone must make a con save. A creature takes 66 force damage on a failed save, half as much on a successful one, every creature that blah blah blah, these are just creatures. In addition, unsecured objects that are completely within the cone are likewise pulled or pushed 15 feet. So what I would like to do is I would like to angle myself in such a way that when I pull the sphere out, the 15 feet, um,
Speaker: it will come out of the water and towards me. So this ability allows you to pull anything in this comb or one specific thing.
Speaker: It says you create intense pressure, unleash it in a 30 -foot cone, and decide whether it pulls or pushes towards creatures and objects. Done. It has rules for what happens if it's a creature, and then it has rules, in addition, unsecured objects that are completely within the cone are likewise pulled or pushed 15 feet. OK. How much damage does it do? A creature would take 66 force damage on a failed safe. All right.
Speaker: Give me a Arcana check. Oh, I'm good at this. I'm a wizard. I'm really good at this. Arcana, Arcana plus seven, 30, 20. Okay. 20 is really good.
Speaker: That's really good. Uh, so I will give you an 80 % chance that you, you know what? Nope. 20 is really good. I'll give you a 90 % chance that you don't pull any acid with you because this is sitting in the acid. So do you want high 90 or low 90? High 90 always high. All right.
Speaker: So you cast this, what's it called? It is called pulse wave. Pulse wave. You hold up your hands to pulse wave this thing. Yeah, pulse wave it. And the acid begins to pull. The glass ore begins to pull. The key begins to pull. The pressure from this shatters the glass. And you realize that you're going a little too, you're going a little too hard on this.
Speaker: And you lessen up a little bit, focusing primarily on the key. And the key begins to drop into the acid. But you pull it right to your hand. Accio. Please don't sue me JK Rowling. As it comes right into your hand. And you have the key. There we go. You've solved the bobbing for a key puzzle.
Speaker: That's why we always need casters, a caster supremacy. Sorry, Marshalls. You just can't do it. So that the, uh, the glass orb had eight HC, eight AC and two hit points. And the puzzle literally says the puzzle has practically nothing in it here. I'll show you the paragraph of the puzzle. Like.
Speaker: This is the, that's the puzzle. It just says the glass, thin glass sphere is extremely delicate, weighs three pounds. It will likely shatter unless it is delicately handled. If the key falls into the acid, the key will be ruined. So I, I was ready for, I was really, please tell me that when you asked about a large reduce, you were thinking about enlarging the key.
Speaker: Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of doing. I wanted to enlarge the keys so that I would just break the thing and then get big and then I could just pull it out, like, you know, Kingdom Hearts style keyblade, like. Melted it. Oh, I kind of wish. But no, you beat it. You beat it. What do you think of those two puzzles?
Speaker: I liked him. Honestly, I liked how simple the key one was. I think that that was great. Obviously, you would work that into your own campaign and there would be more reasons and things around it just for bare bones. But I like that concept of, especially now that I know that it would have melted the key. As for the first quest, or the first puzzle, I should say, that was really awesome. Knowing
Speaker: See, again, if I hadn't been a caster, if I didn't have Detect Magic, I probably would have just gone the...
Speaker: smash the well anyway because I, you know, that's what I would do if I was like a barbarian just like, I wanted to come up here. But what I liked about it was like, I was so nervous that I was going to be put into harm's way. I thought either the water wasn't news. I thought maybe, you know, there was something menacing down there. I honestly thought that the chest might be a mimic. And so when we pulled it up and there was like no danger and I was like, oh,
Speaker: It's just a literal glass ceiling, you know? And so here we go, how do we get around this? And I was nervous when you said transmutation magic to do dispel magic because I was afraid that like, whatever was trans - Yeah, yeah, I was like, I don't really wanna know what this thing is, I just want the booty. Yeah, I did come up with that today, so I probably would throw
Speaker: something like I think you did some pretty good rolls to break the well. If that had gone poorly, I probably would have made the well collapse and then you have very little chance of getting the chest or something like that. The dust of dryness dried up the chest. I don't know. I don't know. I like the filling up the water.
Speaker: And then it hits the certain thing and then the dust of dryness activates. I don't know if I would have figured that out to be honest with you. Was a passive investigation or perception would have allowed you to see like next time you did it, there are little marbles in the water this time. And then an arcana check would be like, Hey, that's the effects of dust of dryness. Gotcha. And so it was a beautiful puzzle.
Speaker: But like any good puzzle, any good DM, you should be prepared for your players to break it and allow them to have fun doing it. That's so true.
Speaker: All right, final question time, Ghibli. Okay. You've already partially answered this a little bit with some of your favorite puzzles. That was kind of the conversation today, one of your favorite puzzles been, but in any form of media, in any thought that you have ever seen or experienced, what has been your favorite puzzle ever?
Speaker: Okay, I can't say the teacher's name. I don't want to dox that, but when I was in sixth grade, we had science class and we had this really cool assignment where we came in. And do you know how you were saying with your library just being open to everyone? That's what she did. All the cabinets were open, all the beakers, the buns and burners, everything was open. And she handed us this beaker and inside of it was salt, sand, and iron shavings.
Speaker: And she was like, the first person who can separate all three of these different items into three separate containers gets extra credit. So I immediately was just like, boom, easy, iron, take a magnet, get that out of there. Boom, easy, salt is soluble by water. Put a bunch of water in there, you know, strain out the sand. And now I'm just left with salt water. Boom.
Speaker: And then she wouldn't take the salt water either. And I was like, oh, you're a stickler. So then I had to actually boil the salt water back down until I had just salt left. But I did get the extra credit. What? This was in sixth grade? Yeah. You know, this teacher's mad. I love it. Yeah, she was awesome. And it was like such a fun day because we weren't actually like sitting down and like plus it had like the extra credit attached to it and stuff. But it was just like a
Speaker: You're a scientist now. Separate these three things. How do you do it? And I just immediately was like, let's go. So to me, that was like just super, super fun IRL puzzle that has been thrown at me.
Speaker: go I love that. That's a great answer right there. That's, that's some real world shit right there. I assume that throughout the the time like in classes previous you were learning about magnetism stuff like that or we were learning about like
Speaker: states of matter. So we weren't really learning about magnets, but we were learning about like, soluble, you know, like creating like solutions. And so that was where I thought to dissolve the salt into water. So yeah, I think it did tie into that. But I also just think she was just sort of like, hey, guys, like, here's something fun you can do with science after sitting at a desk, you know, for weeks on end, like, this is the actual fun part. So that was pretty cool.
Speaker: That's crazy. I love that. Teachers are so great. And that's one reason I love being a DM. Because part of our job as DMs is to teach people how to play D &D. I should have finished that thought. Just teach people. Just teach people. I am your DM. Cool. Awesome. Well, Ghibli, thank you so much for coming on today. Where can the people find you?
Speaker: Uh, you can find me on Twitch at twitch .tv slash Ghibli Jam. Awesome. If you guys are ever on Twitch, she streams late at night for me, which is a real bummer because I'm always like about to fall asleep when you go live. Uh, she plays the game that I've named the cursed game EU four. I don't understand ever. Uh, I've seen a lot of it and I just, it just hurts. It's a puzzle.
Speaker: Yeah. But go check her out, guys. She's a wonderful creator. Go check out her YouTube and leave comments on the YouTube about how you want more Dungeons and Dragons live play coming. I'm really far behind. I'm sorry. You can check me out over there and I make her life hell.
Speaker: But guys, thank you all so much for listening today. The theme song was done by the Dungeon Maestro on TikTok and Instagram. And yeah, that is it for today. I hope you guys check out some puzzles and think about how you can solve puzzles in real life, just like that science teacher. Have fun, do your best, and remember, I believe in you. I believe in you too.
