At some point or another, we will introduce a puzzle to our players. When the players succeed, all is well. When the players fail, things can get messy.
This post will contain some a very light Floating Fortress spoiler vis-a-vis the players dealing with a puzzle.
Combat challenges are such that the PCs can make incremental progress toward a goal - each successful blow lowers the enemies HP. When a PC fails to hit an enemy, that's ok. They can try again, and again, and again, until player or enemy is defeated.
Solving puzzles is often a pass/fail situation, especially for story or lore based puzzles. If you're trying to figure out why a plant is growing somewhere it's not supposed to be, you can poke in and around it, but until you try something successful you're going to be discovering things that don't work. This process, akin to invention or discovery, can be difficult to gamify well.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas Edison
Rather than try to give a primer on how to make a good puzzle, which I don't have a solid answer for, I'd like to talk about how we deal with PCs that are failing at a critical puzzle. This might be a puzzle they can solve now, or it might be a puzzle they can't solve until later.
Time
The first thing to keep in mind is that failing a puzzle is frustrating. The PCs want to succeed, and will often keep pushing to solve it until they have burned themselves out and lost interest, whereupon they will backlash against the puzzle and move on, never to return. If they do bring it up again, it will be with derision and frustration. To combat this, we must find a way to limit the amount of time players are spending on it.
A DM can watch their players poke around, knowing that they're not heading in the right direction, yet still feel like the PCs are only one connection away from getting somewhere. It's tempting to let them cook, and keep cooking, well beyond what was a fun amount of effort.
Unless they are working on a puzzle that must be solved now, it is in the interest of the whole table to end the puzzle attempts after ~15 minutes. Certainly by the end of 30 minutes.
Backburner
When you do try to get your players to move on, they're likely to be a little resistant to moving on. Try a line like this:
"This puzzle before you isn't something you have to solve right now, and we could spend all day here with no results, why don't we put this on the backburner and come back to it again later after someone has had a really good idea or enough time has passed that you can view it with fresh eyes. You may even come across a clue in your travels that will help."
This is a lovely approach for when players are working on a known puzzle. But sometimes our players are poking around at something that might be a puzzle, or a clue, or a hint and trying to understand it. If you tell them "don't waste your time, this isn't a clue", then it means every time you don't say something that they have actually found a clue. The absence of warning singling the PCs that they're on the right path, but DMs often don't like to reveal their hand like that.
In Floating Fortress for example, Riven found some plants growing somewhere they shouldn't be. Is this a clue? Our players tried to investigate it, but there was no way they were going to be able to solve at that time and I wanted to keep the story rolling. What I used to get the players to move on was a line like this:
"I've got a question for the party. How long should I let you work on a puzzle that doesn't have an answer before moving you on? I don't want to let you spin your wheels endlessly, but I also don't want to come right out and say, "This isn't a clue, stop looking". How long should I let you work something out?
The party took the hint and backburnered the project, moving on to do other things.
The lovely thing about having a puzzle on the backburner is that the PCs get to keep thinking about it while the campaign continues.
New clues
If it's an important puzzle, something core to the story or mechanics, you may want or need to seed the party with new clues.
We can be direct: "As you walk through that same area with the plants you were looking at before, you realize that they are indeed growing across a line!"
We can be indirect: "You pull your boat onshore, wading through the salt water, cursing the depth of the beach before you. The sands are hot, dry, and filled with slats - an inhospitable environment if there ever was one." could be an indirect clue to tell the players what to experiment with next.
The goal of new clues is to nudge the party forward, or provide important context, without solving the puzzle for them. Ideally, we want them to come across a clue all on their own without us saying, "this is a clue to that puzzle" and then let them connect the dots.
Reminders
Every now and then, if a puzzle is important, we should bring it up. Just mention it subtly. Bring the idea of the puzzle into their brains without talking about the puzzle at all. "As you all rest along the river's edge, you fall into a state of peace and tranquility. The flowing water, the bright red clover, the scent of blossoms. It's been a while since you've been able to enjoy the natural beauty often found along waterways, and it...". Here I'm trying to remind my PCs about those bright red flowers they were investigating along the waterway in Aknara.
We don't want our players to realize these things are hints; rather, we want the intersectionality of our description and the puzzle's clues to feel incidental, like the players are making the connections all on their own. We want to trigger their memories. Maybe your players are on a ship, far away from plants and the plant based puzzle at their home. You can say something like, "It's days like this, when the winds are calm and the waters stretch out before you, that you really miss the land. You've seen neither flowers nor birds in this salted desert for weeks and find yourself longing once again for simple beauties you can reach out and touch."
if our players don't pick up on our subtle reminders, which happens a lot so don't worry, we can start to introduce more direct reminders. "Has anything in the last few sessions provided a clue to that plant conundrum you were working on?"
Don't be afraid of direct prompting, even if no new evidence has been gathered. If the puzzle is important, we want to keep bringing it up so it doesn't get lost as a storyline.
The key with these reminders is to not let the party fall into a rabbit hole of failed puzzling again.
In Closing
Puzzles are hard. If they're important to solve, there should be other things to do while the players can work on them in their mind. Don't let them spend too much time on a fruitless effort, try to seed some clues, and keep reminding them of the puzzle's existence.
If the puzzles aren't important to solve, it's OK to let the wither on the vine. If they really care, they'll come back to it on their own.
gl hfNeal