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I’m sure many of you have trouble coming up with good puzzles for whatever dungeons and whatnot you put your players through. Or perhaps sometimes you come up with a really good puzzle idea, but it’s just far too hard for your players to figure out.

So, if you need inspiration, why not check out some very cool web puzzles? I’ve recently discovered Dracula’s Riddle, thanks to a friend of mine. So far, I’ve been having quite a bit of fun with it, despite wracking my mind to figure out the answers to some of them.

Aside from Dracula’s Riddle, I’ve also come across a couple lists for even more web puzzles:

• Online Riddles Round-Up at Digital World
• A thread on web riddles at GameServers.net forum

Now of course the way those puzzles are created aren’t fitting for a fantasy roleplaying game. And I don’t think it’s all too fitting for even modern and sci-fi RPGs as well. However, you can still make use of the material in some way in your campaign.

One of the common things I’ve found in Dracula’s Riddle is the need to do a bit of research to figure out some of the answers. You’ll even be directed to Google during those instances. So, in a puzzle that your players’ characters need to solve to continue their quest, have the characters make an appropriate knowledge check. You can have a chart with DCs that can give appropriate clues depending on how high a roll a particular character made.

However, sometimes there isn’t anything that needs to be researched. You just simply need to think about it. So, for characters in D&D, you can have them roll general knowledge checks. Bards will be particularly adept in this case, since I would rules that they can use their Bardic Knowledge to figure out the puzzle. And just as with the research, you can create a chart of DCs with appropriate clues depending on how high a roll a player made for their character.

So rather than just forcing the players themselves to solve a puzzle, let their characters at least have a chance to figure it out. Besides, perhaps you have one player who’s horrible at this kind of stuff, but their character is rather adept in them. By using the character’s skills, you can give the player the appropriate clues that will make it much easier to solve the puzzle.

Despite the roll play involved in using the knowledge skill checks, I think this can really help better promote roleplay.

How have you gone about dealing with puzzles in your campaign? And what have you used for inspiration, if you needed it?