As part of my interest in Non-Violent Encounter Design, these are RPG adventure seeds or encounters rooted in logic, behavioral phenomena or algorithmic thinking. They don't necessarily eschew violence altogether, but clever ideas will far outperform violent or linear ones.
I had intended to write more of these but it's been over a week since I've posted anything and I'm doubtful I'd have come back to this draft otherwise so here ya go, two good ones, one that I only picked the phenomena but never actually wrote, and one that's probably too complicated and also probably needs to be couched in more RPG terms so it doesn't look like a grade school math problem.
- A seer proclaims that among three caves, one contains treasure and two contain aggressive dragons. There is no reason to prefer any one cave over any other, however, after the party decide to investigate one of them presumably at random, the seer provides another message just before they head out, that one of the two caves that they did not pick certainly contains a dragon. Each cave involves a laborious and dangerous Crawl, and if a dragon is provoked, it will cause havoc and likely destroy the opening to the treasure bearing cave, so they only get one chance to find the treasure. Which cave should they investigate?
Monty Hall Problem: If the party sticks to their original decision, there is a 33% chance they found the cave with the treasure because they picked randomly among 3 caves. However, if they switch to the other cave after the seer eliminated one of them, there is now a 50% chance they found the cave with the treasure because they picked randomly among only 2 caves, so they are better off switching. This one may look familiar... - There has been an outbreak of monstrous wild boars eating crops, livestock, and causing destruction and mayhem. The wild boars are too numerous and too crafty to be wiped out by brute force alone, not even the entire army could do so without burning down the whole countryside. The king has established a high bounty on the wild boars, where hunters can return the tails of boars to collection centers for reward. However, in the time since the bounty began, many tails have been collected for reward, yet the boar problem is as bad as it's ever been. The party have been sent to investigate how the boars are reproducing so quickly.
Perverse Incentives: Some unscrupulous "hunters" have begun to breed the boars in order to farm the tails for profit- not only obfuscating and failing to solve the underlying problem, but actively exacerbating it when inevitably some bred boars escape. Getting to the bottom of this will not solve the wild boar problem, but at least it will reveal that the bounty policy is broken. - Four Card Problem
- The Dark Lord is building an army, where the devil summoners' invocation requires that they count the sum of all numbers between 1 and the total number of devils they intend to summon. The grand council of war wizards are trying to summon a counter-army of valkyries with the same invocation, but there are more devil summoners than war wizards and so as it stands, they will inevitably lose the war. However, there are ancient legends of war wizards capable of summoning far greater numbers of valkyries, suggesting there must be some non-linear invocation spell.
Gauss Sum (an easier explanation): With the current invocation spell, to summon 100 valkyries, one would have to count the sum of all numbers between 1 and 100, or 5050. However, the sum of each symmetrical pair will be the same i.e. 1+100=101, 2+99=101, so actually, the invocation can be much simpler. Just take the number of pairs, or in other words, the total number divided by 2, multiplied by the sum of the first and last number, i.e. (n/2)*(first number + last number). With this new spell, a single war wizard can summon hundreds of valkyries in seconds, while it continues to take devil summoners hundreds of seconds to summon only 100 devils.
My players love stuff like this. I started working on this adventure that came from a dream at one point, where the whole idea was that the characters would have to go around saving cats from this effed up plague doctor thing that was capturing them to eat their souls. I spent a few days looking up all kinds of puzzles, stuff like this, stuff from the Professor Layton games, etc etc. The idea was that the characters for whatever reason weren't able to hurt the plague doctor / cat killer but if they freed a certain number of cats, the cats would all band together and do it for them. I still haven't actually run anyone through it, it's just a bunch of notes and stuff at the moment! I might well use these four if I ever get a chance to finish it off!
ReplyDeleteI created more generic scenarios for these in this post, but ya as I allude to, the Monty Hall Problem shows up in the MRD Module, and a Perverse Incentive shows up in my MRDvol2 Campaign and if I ever do make a formal publication of that it'll probably be in there.
DeleteI think about The Riddler from the 90's Batman The Animated Series, and how interesting a character he was and how those were some of the best episodes of the show. Despite how iconic that version of The Riddler was, there actually were only a handful of Riddler-centric episodes, and the writers later admitted that the reason was that it's just really hard to come up with clever riddles and puzzles lol.
I usually prefer not to have puzzles in the truest sense, for this exact reason, but I find that if you can take these real world phenomena that are kind of intuitive once you understand them, but may not be immediate obvious, it can work really well and not require a crazy amount of effort.
Good luck with the cats! I'd have to think about it more, but maybe you could do something with the Fibonacci Sequence? Every time they rescue a cat it adds to the sequence, which creates some kind of metaphysical spiral, ..., profit? The significance of the Fibonacci Sequence and Golden Spirals in nature or the universe is sometimes overstated, but algorithmically Fibonacci Sequence is cool because there are several ways to write a Fibonacci Sequence algorithm iteratively, recursively, or dynamically, and it can be useful for understanding algorithms and Big O Complexity, but even if you don't go to that extreme with it algorithmically, I dunno, could be clever.