Making D&D campaign. I want it to be really puzzle-heavy,

Take a look at the Tomb of Horrors and Temple of Elemental Evil.

Higher dimensional hypercubes are rife with potential. And they're not too hard to design (although the number of rooms you'll need will go up exponentially. There are 8 in a 4-dimensional hypercube, 40 in a 5-dimensional hypercube, and 120 in a 6-dimensional hypercube.

Alternatively, you can do a higher dimensional simplex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex
You might want to abstract it a little bit so they're not wandering through tetrahedron shaped rooms by ruling that each room is still a rectangle and each of the walls represents one face of a tetrahedron. But the number of rooms goes up in a far more reasonable curve. A 4 dimensional simplex has 4 rooms, a 5 dimensional simplex has 15 rooms. A 6 dimensional simplex has 21 rooms. The number of rooms in an n dimensional simplex is simply n(n+1)/2

File: DnDDungeonSetupTessaract.png (557KB, 1574x1794px) Image search: [Google]

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If you want your players to hate you...

>>52548775
I will, thanks!

>>52548783
Nice dude, cheers!

>>52548790
holy shit dude

might just use that for some optional endgame super-dungeon or something

>>52548783
The rule for an n dimensional hypercube is this:

1) Choose n variables. So for a 5 dimensional hypercube you might choose A, B, C, D, and E. In addition you will want the letters A', B', C', D', and E'. These prime variables are "parallel" to their corresponding non-prime variables.

2) Each room will be a three dimensional cube with a door on each wall. Each cube will have (n-3) variables assigned to it. So a room in a 5 dimensional hypercube will have two variables. These variables can be prime, non-prime, or some combination of both. The only restriction is that a room cannot have two parallel variables.

To continue with our 5 dimensional example, there is a room AE, AE', A'E', and A'E. But there is NOT a room with the variables AA' or EE'

3) Each of these rooms will have six doors, each door will be labeled with a variable that is a) not one of the variables of the room and b) not parallel to one of the variables of the room. So, room AE would have doors B, B', C, C', D, and D'.

Each door will be on the opposite side of the cube from its parallel door. So D would be opposite D'.

(continued with travel)

>>52548956
4) When you travel through a door you will enter a room with similar variables as the one you just left. Except that exactly one of the variables will have been replaced with the variable of the door you went through. The door that is now behind you will be labeled with the variable that got replaced.

For example, if you went through door C' from room AE you could find yourself in room AC' with door E behind you or in room C'E with door A behind you. You might notice that you can end up in two different rooms. This is the nature of higher dimensions. Each door will lead to (n-3) other rooms. It's up to you to decide which variable gets replaced, you can do random, but your players might get irritated. Theoretically in a five dimensional hypercube if you walk through a door, then step back through the door, and then walk through it a third time you could end up right back where you started and have passed through three rooms. Players tend to like that.

>>52548790
This is basically a mathematically less accurate version of the 5 dimensional hypercube

>>52548783
I think that simplexes will be far simpler. If you have an n dimensional simplex you will follow these steps

1) Choose (n+1) variables.

2) Each room will have four different variables (no matter how many dimensions you have). Any combination of four variables is a legitimate room.

3) Each room will have four doors. Each door will have one of the room's variables. For example, room ABEG will have doors A, B, E, and G.

4) Traveling through a door takes you to a room with a similar set of variables. The only change is that the variable of the door you passed through gets replaced with a new variable. Literally any new variable will work.

Again, this means that in n dimensions there are (n-3) rooms that a door can take you to.

You can choose the new variable randomly, but I'd recommend a system. Maybe replace the variable with the next highest (available) variable.

>>52549146
So, for example, Going through door E in room ABEG will take you to room ABFG with door F behind you. You can go back through door F and (if it is a 6 dimensional simplex) you will go to room ABCG with door C behind you. Go back through door C to end up in ABDG with door D behind you. Go through it one more time to get to room ABEG.

Ask yourself and your players if you really want to do this.

Puzzles almost invariably fall into three categories:

1. Puzzles you got online which are mostly a matter of have the players heard of them before.
2. Puzzles you made up yourself which may as well be "guess what number i'm thinking of"
3. Puzzles that rely on subverting players' understanding of the world (think the three chests in tomb of horrors, or the demon mouth) and are thus just "look how smart i am" dick moves to pull on the players.

>>52548956
ive written all of this down dude, thanks

>>52549229
i see your point, and i agree that more traditional logic-puzzles can be an annoyance if they are mandatory. just stop the game, kindof

but what i find is best is essentially forcing the players to be clever. any moment when they stop for 30 seconds and try to figure out what to do next, i see as a success. doesnt have to be a single solution either, just situations where they have to think intuitively

something more traditional i have, however (and that i totally stole from the internet) is a little dungeon owned by a witch thats obsessed with mirrors. so i have the following:

- A room with a big-ass mirror on one wall, but the mirror image doesnt match the room exactly. so they have to tweak the room so that it matches the mirror. maybe light a chandelier hanging in the ceiling or something

- a room with a smaller mirror in it. if they move the mirror, they can see the invisible door that leads on

- a room with another damn mirror, and they can see the door, but its locked. but they can see they key through the mirror, so someone has to climb inside the mirror and get it. but when a player climbs in, his evil twin climbs out (unless the player-character is evil. then the twin will be chill)

- one of those ocarina of time "adjust the mirrors to guide the sunlight thats hitting the mirror by the window" thingies

- one more that i havent thought of yet

>>52548716
Actual zelda puzzles are mostly just "shoot the thing that looks like an eye" and then there's like two really clever puzzles per game but you remember the clever ones and remember there being lots of puzzles so your brain compresses that to "lots of clever puzzles."

If you want clever "the door is locked by a puzzle!" things (like the chess thing in the first Harry Potter) I'd recommend playing Lufia II (SNES RPG, worth playing) which is happy to throw sudoku at you out of nowhere.

If you want dungeon-size puzzles, you can do a lot of decent ones by making the dungeon repeat itself and certain pathways are only accessible through loops. You can extend that by using any sort of tesselation instead of grid repeating.

>>52549465
yea zelda-puzzle mightve been a bad example, but however, giving them items to use intuitively can be clever

i will check out Lufia II (actually never heard of it, thought id played most sprite-based JRPGs), but im concerned about puzzles that are too reliant on a single answer, because if the players cant figure it out, the game basically just stops, and i have to send in an NPC to give them a hint or some shit

repeating pathways is interesting, but how would that work exactly?

>>52549388
No problem, my dude. I should warn you about using the hypertesseract. A hypertesseract (another name for a 5 dimensional hypercube) should have 10 tesseracts (4 dimensional hypercubes) in it and I have literally no idea where the 72 rooms come from. It should be 40.

An n dimensional hypercube will have n(n-1)(n-2)(2^n)/48 rooms in it

>>52549388
I love the "evil twin" being good. I'm imagining the party debating whether to just replace the asshole in the mirror world.

>>52549527
I should also warn you about my initial statements about the number of rooms in an n dimensional simplex. It should be (n+1)Choose(4)

So four dimensional simplexes should have 5
Five dimensional simplexes should have 15
Six dimensional simplexes should have 35
And anything past 7 will be (n+1)(n)(n-1)(n-2)/24

>>52549505
> i will check out Lufia II (actually never heard of it, thought id played most sprite-based JRPGs)

Holy shit you're in for a treat. Lufia II is the most JRPGy JRPG that ever JRPGed. (Don't bother playing Lufia I it's not as good.)

> repeating pathways is interesting, but how would that work exactly?

Imagine your dungeon is a 3x3 grid. The door from (1, 1) that should lead to (0, 1) (out of bounds) actually leads to (3, 1), and the same for most other doors. The bottom of cell (2, 3) is the entrance and does not loop to (2, 1), but above the entrance is a door to a catwalk that doesn't have a corresponding opening on the outside of the dungeon. If you take a staircase to the door at (2, 1) though, that leads to the catwalk.

>>52549527
>>52549635
shit this is a bit overwhelming, im writing down everything and it sounds like i have to take a minute to grasp this shit later

>>52549620
see, thats kind of what i want. forcing the players to argue and think intuitively

>>52549713
alright, i will definitely use that. thanks!

>>52549716
Other than calculating the number of rooms you won't have to do any math. And you can find that number on the Wikipedia page up to 10 dimensions, just remember that 3-face is just their way of saying "rooms in the simplex/hypercube"

File: tessarakt dungeon original.jpg (120KB, 1218x644px) Image search: [Google]

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>>52548790
What has always bothered me with this is that if you make it like the original screencap described, using the switch in the middle does not actually change the room they are in.

So it would actually be 8 rooms less, if I remember my calculations correctly, but MUCH more complicated to understand. Especially for the players since they have no idea what happened when they activate the switch.

>>52551321
>>52549778

alright, guys, as much as i appreciate this whole thing, and i probably will have this concept on some super-difficult bonus-dungeon somewhere that ill warn them about like crazy.. the absolutely most difficult singular puzzle ever isnt EXACTLY what i had in mind. i was thinking of something more simple, like "the trap-pit in the hallway is actually the way ahead, and they have to use a rope or something to climb down it".

the hypercube is like.. well its a whole dungeon and it sounds cool desu, and ill use it maybe for the absolutely last dungeon, cuz some of the players are pretty damn smart & might just figure it out actually, but holy shit

>>52548716
I learned the secret to good puzzles a few years ago.
Don't worry about the answer. Once you make the Puzzle, you're done. If your players figure out something that SOUNDS like a good/logical solution, then that's the solution.

>>52553797
yea, ive had situations where ive made some puzzle with some answer, and they just break it instantly, and im left trying to "sabotage" their answer... should just go with it next time. no need to come up with an answer to all of them

File: maze[1].jpg (76KB, 480x384px) Image search: [Google]

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Here you go, OP, end-game dungeon of Might & Magic 3. The numbers are the things the players are supposed to find, including a magic orb that gives 1 million XP and a keycard needed to access a spaceship in the endgame. Otherwise, the dungeon is littered with chests that each disintegrate a party member and you need a very costly and stat-draining ressurect to get them back. There's like 70 of them. The one that is not a disintegrating trap is the one with the crucial item to beat the game. The enemies are minotaurs who kill a party member in one hit. It's called "Maze from Hell".

One I've used recently:
A room containing polished hemispheres in the floor and ceiling, 4 statues holding mirrors, and unpolished shields laying on pedestals. The goal is to reflect sunlight from outside onto the far wall of the chamber. A wall in the middle blocks direct sunlight. Removing a mirror from a statue causes the statue to attack, but the statues can be turned with high strength, and the shields can be polished without breaking them with high dexterity.

One I'm soon to use:
The basic Indiana Jones style corridor with colored floor tiles, only there are dragon heads on the walls making breath weapon attacks if one steps on a wrong tile. The corridor also contains clues as to the right sequence of floor tiles to step on. There are two complications:
1) Some floor tiles are missing their color.
2) Halfway through the corridor, ghosts attack from behind the walls.

>>52548716
There was a Dungeon submitted for the one page dungeon contest back in 09 I think that was an actual cube, the map of the dungeon you had to literally fold up into a cube after the players enter the dungeon.

It was supposedly the lair of some cosmic being that is living in the center of this folded cube of space, and you only could attack it in the areas it stretched into from the center of the cube. You could even see yourself at the beginning of the dungeon if you were standing at the end of it because of how the dungeon was folded up.

I'm honestly thinking of doing something similar with my playgroup but using more than just a cube, but the shapes of various dice to do the same.

>>52548716
At the beginning of the dungeon, a mirrored simulacrum of each player is created and they are separated by a unbreakable glass wall showing what appears to be reflection of the dungeon. While it at first appears to simply be a large mirror, players should begin to notice small differences between the dungeon there in and the one in the mirror. Eventually include puzzles that rely on the simulacrum to interact with objects to allow the players to pass, and vice versa.

For added fun, make it so certain monsters on one side of the mirror are different on the other. Example: a wizard uses a fireball on a ice mephit, but its counterpart in the mirror is a fire mephit, thus the fireball has no effect on the one in the mirrior.

>>52560331
This is a pretty cool idea.

>>52548790
I actually ran this a few months ago with positive feedback. It was a simple proof-of-concept, but I enjoyed making it and they enjoyed playing it. I set up each tesseract to have a different environment/theme. There was a forest/jungle one, an Underdark one, etc. I can upload a pdf if you guys want.

>>52562572
>>>
yes please

what im not quite understanding is what the ultimate purpose of the design is? how is there a beginning and a clear-cut end? what would the players do? just go through room after room until they almost randomly end up in the desired one?

>>52562657
I had to give it a goal. The story I had in mind was that the dungeon itself was a puzzle designed by an artificier intended to test adventurers. Let me clean up the doc before I upload it. Hope you like music in your RPGs.

>>52562671
alright im curious to see what it is

>>52560331
i like this. ill probably include it in my "mirror dungeon", actually. nice!

>>52559978
interesting... im writing this down

>>52556524
nice ones, thanks!

File: Hypercube Dungeon One-Off.pdf (359KB, 1x1px) Image search: [Google]

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Alright, here's my version of the Hypercube. I DM in a very improvisational manner, so the descriptions are kind of broad. It's up to you to make this dungeon your own.

>>52551321
When I was putting together a version of this for a sci-fi game I replaced the lever with a spatial anomaly in the center of each room.

Each of them looked like a soap bubble showing the contents of the other linked room. The bubbles would appear the size of a pinprick to anyone at the edge of the room, growing in size as they approached and receding as they moved away. If anyone passed through the surface of the bubble it would (from their perspective) invert over them and they would then be in the other room.

The major downside to doing it this way is that if the bubbles grow relative to proximity and are the same size as the room you lose about half your real estate to put the actual dungeon bits in. For my game I solved the problem by having a bunch of them be broken - minefields of distorted space that would turn anyone who took a misstep into swiss cheese, rooms that would stretch off into the vanishing distance with duplicates of the PCs every normal room's length copying their every action, highly variable gravity (the rest of the place was in zero-g) which would ebb and flow necessitating them to figure out the pattern and time their movement and actions within the room to avoid being crushed.

One thing I end up ad-libbing that turned out really well was a brief predestination/time travel bit when the party split with some PCs meeting future versions of the missing characters before linking back up with their contemporaries, which sparked a spirited debate over whether they had to fulfill what had occurred (it was optional, the kicker was that failing to do so would split off a continuity within the maze - essentially an excuse for me to make a horde of time clones).

Everyones going crazy with the complicated shit, so here are some simpler one:

1. (stolen straight from Dark Souls 3) a pad that when you step on it, it goes downwards. But beneath is a dead end. The trick is when you get on the pad and it goes downwards, it also lowers another pad to the middle area, that is coming from above. So get on the pad, immediately jump off it, and wait for the upper pad to come to you. Then get on that one, and itll take you upwards, to there are where you want to go

2. A room in a dungeon is hidden behind a fake wall. Obtaining a map of the dungeon will reveal this room which the players cannot see, allowing them to go about figuring out how to smash the wall down. and enter that room

3. A map of a dungeon is in some foreign language the players cannot read (basically just make up words, or use fucking Icelandic or some shit), but the map identifies objects (like, where there is a chair or something, it says the word for chair) which, by deduction, will enable the players to learn specific words in that language, which if they are clever enough & take notes, will help them interpret some letter or something later in the game

>>52563896
>basically just make up words, or use fucking Icelandic or some shit
Hvernig vogar þú þér!?

>>52563940
maybe Filipino for you specifically, i guess

or literally just write nonsense, as long as they can understand that "eaifaegiaengaiegna" means "table", etc

>>52563896
>3. A map of a dungeon is in some foreign language the players cannot read (basically just make up words, or use fucking Icelandic or some shit), but the map identifies objects (like, where there is a chair or something, it says the word for chair) which, by deduction, will enable the players to learn specific words in that language, which if they are clever enough & take notes, will help them interpret some letter or something later in the game

I like it, especially as a dungeon-wide conceit. You could people the entire place with fragments and so long as they mean the same things it can tell the players all sorts of things about what they might find and the people who lived there before them. One useful thing to flag to put the players on to it could be a partially decoded translation left behind by a previous explorer.

>>52566943
>

They way im doing it, im gonna give them (physically) an old note early in the game that says "Dõhja jaoks Nordrim on saladus tuba üle mügi. Sissi see saladus tuba on suur aare! Kuid ka ohtlik!!!". Seeing how theyll get it physically, theyll know its of some significance

then, much later, im gonna give them a physical map of a dungeon that theyre about to enter, and the map will be scribbled with notes written by some unknown character, and a lot of the words on that note will be there, as well as a bunch of other words. For example, "tuba" means "room", and "othlik" means "danger". Every room with some hostile element will have the word "othlik" written with a lot of exclamation marks behind it, which, yknow, hopefully theyll get the idea of what "othlik" means after seeing that every room they enter with that written on it will have danger

but i was just thinking of doing it as a way of discovering an optional treasure (the note reads "North of Nordrim is secret room above mountain. Inside this secret room is great treasure! But also danger!!!), but i might just work on a way of incorporating it in a more lore-manner, just to do something more with the concept