I am making a quest for my online roleplay game.
I was hoping to use a variant of the “who has the fish” riddle.
This is the one where “the spaniard does not drink Coors and lives next to the man who smokes Marlboro, the man who smokes Marlboro has an elefant”.
I want to have a number of keys and a number of keyholes. The keys can have descriptions, as can the keyholes. The keys will be obtained in other rooms and brought to the keyholes. I wish to be able to demand three different keys per “go”, and use the above type of riddle to say which keys are required.
My brain has started to fry however, so I am calling on the SDMB for suggestions. Help me make this quest, to protect the realm from the evil guy locked behind the door.
No offense, man, but maybe you can use your OP as a riddle.
I came in here, all ready to rack my brains, and you start mentioning stuff about “who has the fish” and spaniards that don’t drink Coors?
If I get you right, you want the answer to the riddle to be an object that can be used (or symbolize) a key… yes? If that’s the case, just start with an object - say, a comb - and then just come up with something from that (“I have teeth but don’t bite”, or whatever).
The actual riddle isn’t that hard to solve, you just make a grid and fill in the information bit by bit. I want to have a door in my quest, that must be unlocked in order to gain access to the bad-guy inside. I want to use some sort of variant on the above riddle to decide which keys are needed, or which keyholes they need to be put into. For those of you who are Harry Potter fans, Snaps potion riddle in the first book is also a variation on this theme. That link might not work…
Since the people playing this game are a bunch of horrendous cheats, I would like to be able to be able to introduce some random variables into this so that they 1. can’t just tell eachother which keys/holes to use, and 2. can’t just make a script to try all the combinations. This “anti-cheating” mechanism is however secondary, I need to work out how to build the actual riddle first.
What you describe is a logic problem, rather than a riddle. All that you need to do is have your five keyholes and five keys with various attributes. Then:
Plot your grid as it will look when completed (ie. keyholes on y axis, keys on x axis, attributes in middle). Then pick out positive and negative statements that denote where they are (ie. the gold key does not belong in the red keyhole; the red key opens a lock of a different colour). Throw in some red herrings and away you go!
If you want to make it more challenging mix in some clues that require outside knowledge. Instead of giving clues like “the German drinks Budweiser and lives next door to the man with the pet cat” give clues like “if Katherine Hepburn was the first actress to win two Oscars then the Michelob drinker is English.”
Not that this will help any, but years ago I ran a dungeon like what the OP is describing, only I used “The Lady or the Tiger” scenarios.
This is the only part I remember—the players enter a room with 2 doors. A magic mouth appears and says “The sign on the door of the lady is true. The sign on the door of the tiger is false.” The first door has a sign that reads “The lady is in this room” and the second door has a sign that reads “The lady is in this room.” The players figure it out, open the lady’s door, and see her just in time as she exits out a back door. They follow, and enter a similar setup to the first.
The first is cake, but the remaining rooms got more complex. Some rooms would have 3 doors. One tiger was a giant pussycat who just wanted to be petted. One lady was actually a 10th level assassin.
Of course, the players had to put in their own wrench in the works. One of them figured out the puzzle, opened the lady’s door, then opened the tiger’s door and jumped in the lady’s room and closed the door as the tiger ran out into the hallway and mauled all the stragglers.
