Critical Miss: Issue 1 [GMing With Nothing]

GMing With Nothing - A Five Step Guide

Step 3: The Enigmatic Puzzle

The next step is to improvise what appears to be an enigmatic puzzle. It is of course simply a disguised dead end. For example:

GM: “The crimson whirlwind engulfs you and you feel yourselves being transported away before losing consciousness. When you awake you are inside a square room, around 20 feet on a side. The floor, ceiling and walls are featureless grey stone. There is nothing in the room.”

Player 1: “Okay, maybe there's a secret door. I'll start examining the walls.”

Player 2: “Maybe this is some kind of illusion. I'll cast a spell...”

It is of course a totally sealed box, designed to securely imprison the characters while you think of something else. All you have to do is listen to each idea a character comes up with for escape, then report that it has failed.

The players will of course assume that it is some kind of “ puzzle” and that they just have to figure out the “ answer”.

If the players start getting bored and complaining, give them the “challenge gives the reward speech”. The basic gist of this is that if the GM simply helps the characters perform the task, so that whatever they do turns out to be the correct option, and they always succeed regardless, the game will quickly lose all meaning. Therefore, for reasons of ethics alone, it would be wrong for you to tell the players how to get their characters out of the box. They will simply have to stay there until they figure it out.

Eventually, one of the players will come up with a particularly cunning and clever way of escaping the box. When he outlines it, smile and nod, as if you are happy that they have figured out the “elaborate puzzle you prepared for them” and report that it has succeeded.

“Yes Zarvod. As you thought, you have been transported to a four-dimensional universe, and are now imprisoned in a four-dimension hypercube, which has an open face in the fourth dimension. You can't see that of course, because you are three dimensional, but as you point out, the definition in the rule book of your move spell says that it can transport you in all dimensions. You cast your move spell, move kind of sideways, and suddenly you're outside the cube...”

On to STEP FOUR...

Back to STEP TWO