Travel in CRPGs can get a bit handwavey, as creating a large gameworld makes for a very boring time getting around it unless you have something like map travel, where you just click on the place you want to go and are instantly there, sometimes at the cost of some money, or acquire increasingly speedy mounts to get around on. None of this is necessary in Planescape: Torment due to setting it in Sigil.
Part of the fun of Sigil was finding and activating the various portals needed to advance the plot. There seem to be various criteria you can use:
- Temporal - requiring you to show up on a set date, or set time of day.
- Celestial - requiring specific events such as a full moon or an eclipse.
- Vocal - requiring saying the correct words. "Speak, friend, and enter."
- Physical - requiring you to carry a certain object.
- Somatic - requiring gestures or movements.
That's just what I can think of right now, and of course you can combine more than one of these. Fortunately this is all coming in handy now I'm playing Liminal, which sometimes requires the PCs to find their way into a fae realm. With all this in my head, I barely had to think about how the portal in my adventure was going to work - it was like I already knew.
Once you've come up with a fun portal key, there's the challenge of getting that information across to your players. Given how long the Lord of the Rings example took for them to figure out, I assume the GM thought he'd come up with a really simple puzzle, and was just waiting for one of them to say the right word, getting increasingly frustrated as they didn't, and ultimately asking for someone make a wisdom roll so he could just tell them the answer.
Still, he did try to make it easy, and made sure they got there in the end. It was a good clue, and I would have been facepalming afterwards for not having got it. My husband, on the other hand...
My advice for puzzle portals based on playing D&D with my husband:
- You don't need multiple layers of complexity in one puzzle. Multiple layers means multiple points of failure, which can lead to exponential levels of difficulty in solving it.
- Allow some kind of dice roll to gain insight into how to solve it. Have a back-up for if everyone fails the dice roll. Spending an hour floundering in frustration is no fun at all.
- Don't impose serious negative consequences for failed attempts. Players who are repeatedly punished for attempting to solve the puzzle are going to want to give up. Imagine how different The Lord of the Rings would have been if every time they'd said the wrong word to the door they'd had to fight the Watcher in the Water?
Here's an extract from the diary of Calia Nettleglade, my first D&D character, attempting to get through one of my husband's puzzle portals. Bear in mind that at this point we had already got through several traps, puzzles and doors that radiated necromancy so were already a little depleted on spells, hitpoints and ability to wrap our minds around my husband's logic...
We came into an octagonal room. In the centre was a column of light. Around it were four motionless figures reaching towards it, the oldest of which had clearly been there around 600 years. And in the middle - the staff!
Gendo and Titch headed in for a closer look, and then shadows came out of the walls. I shot one of them, entirely ineffectually as the arrows went straight through, but Bryson was clearly inspired by his previous success at turning, and after a few "Begone foul fiends!" the room was clear again.
That just left the matter of how we were going to get the staff out. There were four doors in the room, besides the one we'd come in through, and they all had the same picture on them. A five pointed star, with symbols in the points and in between the points, and another five pointed star in the middle. All the symbols and the central star could be pressed.
After much discussion, Sarflex and Bryson identified four of the larger in-between symbols as heaven, dark, spirit and light. They couldn't identify the other one, but Gendo thought it might be either undead or phlegm. I preferred my own interpretations: angel, communism, floaty things, the sun and evil clown, but the others weren't convinced. The smaller symbols were determined to be ice, water, fire, earth and phlegm, although the latter was later revised to air. The undead/phlegm was concluded to actually mean void.
This was all very well, of course, but didn't help us get the staff. What's more, there was a large stone block above the doorway with a certain 'get this wrong and be trapped' look about it, and the second necromancy-radiating door had closed again behind us.
Bryson decided to try pressing the heaven symbol on one door, and then the star. The stone block plummeted, and we were indeed trapped. Bryson tried a different combination of symbols...and shadows came out of the walls.
One walked straight through me. It was a very unpleasant sensation, and I felt much weaker afterwards. I did manage to stab it though, having more luck with my magic dagger, and between two of us we despatched it while Bryson did the shouty thing again. We ran over to attack another one, but in my now weakened state I couldn't do much damage to it, and before we could get rid of it it managed to touch me and drain even more of my strength. As the others destroyed it, I collapsed from the weight of my own equipment.
Of course the others found this hilarious. They were most unresponsive to my requests to 'get this bloody armour off me,' and found all kinds of entertaining uses for an helpless ranger, using me as a pillow, debating cutting my hair, arranging me in humorous positions and so on. (I should note that many of these suggestions came from the supposedly good members of the group.) Then someone happened to recall my 'you're all a bunch of bastards' vision. Funny, that.
I finally made it out of my armour, and was able to actually move a bit. We also made some progress regarding the doors. One item seemed not to fit in from each set of five - ice and spirit. Fortunately everyone agreed that it would be a good idea to get some sleep first (Rod had also been strength drained, but was significantly more mobile than me) and everyone who could prepared omen of peril spells.
The next morning I was feeling marginally better, and four lesser restoration spells later I was able to get dressed and pick up all my stuff. Needless to say, I will not be forgetting the events of the previous night....
By the time I'd fully recovered from the effects of the shadows (if not yet forgiven my companions for using me as a puppet) both Bryson and Sarflex were a bit short of spells, so we decided to rest for another day and I had a good think about both the problem of the doors and the vision from the lake. The latter was not in any way reassuring.
We took it in turns to take a guess at what to do with the doors. A couple of the others had a go, resulting in yet more rounds of shadows showing up. I avoided the first lot, letting the others deal with the problem, and once we had space I went over to the wall to poke at it. Just to check on things. Titch wanted to know why. I thought it was a good idea to keep quiet about it.
After all, if my companions had known I was worried that I was going to turn into a shadow and was checking that I wasn't turning incorporeal, they might have killed me.
I remained resolutely solid, however, and after the last round of shadows I asked if I could have a go. We needed to see the bigger picture, I thought. Maybe there was some significance to what we were being attacked by? They were shadows that chilled people - could they possibly be Dark Ice Spirits?
I cast Omen of Peril, and received word that there would indeed be peril. But I was feeling more confident in my ability to solve the puzzle than my success rate with peril omens, so I decided to ignore it. I pressed the appropriate buttons on one of the doors, and it slid down into the floor leaving a blank wall in its place, as did the one opposite it. And out of the walls came, not shadows, but shiny balls of light.
Not friendly balls of light though, and it took some time to get rid of them as we couldn't count on Bryson to zap them with the power of Zox'Atics this time. Gendo managed to grab one of them and tried to throw it into the column of light. Unfortunately the ball escaped, while Gendo was turned to stone in a sort of slam dunk position. Our sorcerers came in handy, managing to stun or daze several of them.
I could see which way the puzzle was going this time though. Our next combination was Light Heaven Fire, which was wrong (another twelve balls of light to dispatch) but we nailed it the second time with Light Heaven Spirit.
The final doors slid away, the column of light disappeared, and with a flying leap Titch grabbed the staff. Gendo turned back to his normal self, and we legged it.
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