Hello!

I want to play "The Fell Star" next weekend. Unfortunately I am terrible at designing good adventures myself. So I have to resort to written adventures and/or ask for help here.

The Characters will ultimately search through the mines of a large asteroid. As "The Fell Star" is based on the Saga Edition the encounters are mostly (if not all) combat based, unfortunately (!) . But I want one encounter to be some kind of a puzzle or maze. My idea is that some mining droids which, in the adventure, are programmed to attack the characters, are substituted by light beams which drift in a pattern which must be solved, or they have to do some real hacking (not just dice rolling), or walk a special maze - something along those lines.

If anyone can help or did something similar in the past that would be very much appreciated. Please be as detailed as possible.

Thanks!

How much detail can you (and your players) visualize and track in your heads? With the narrative system like this, that's really the limit. The more complicated you make the puzzle, the harder it's going to be for you to describe it adequately (so that everyone's picturing the same thing) and the harder it's going to be to keep track of relative positioning and actions. That's sort of the opposite of what this system's good at; you'd be better off describing the puzzle in more general terms, let the PCs talk and figure out a possible solution, and resolve it with a single roll.

Puzzles don't need to be complicated to be memorable. I DMed a D&D game years ago where the party had to navigate a trapped hallway covered in 1' square tiles. The tiles changed colors when someone stepped onto the hallway; the whole thing was a giant game of Minesweeper, which we played out on a dry erase board. Similarly, I ran a Star Wars side quest where the party was exploring some of the ruins of Kaleth on Tython. They came to a door that the only way to open it was to reach out with the Force and manipulate the tumblers inside the locking mechanism. Aside from the narrative text, the whole thing was resolved with a single Light side pip. A later door, leading to a room with more powerful items, required three pips so I allowed both PCs to work together.

One way to make a hacking task a bit more interactive than just rolling dice at it is to draw a circuit diagram type image on a piece of paper, cut it up into 9 squares (Or more if you want it to be more difficult) and scramble them up. Then say each success scored on the computers check allows the slicer to switch the position of two adjacent squares, and have them reassemble the image that way. Have enemies appear every round to keep the party busy and create pressure to solve the puzzle quickly.

I would caution to to be careful about things that the players might be good at but the PCs aren’t, or vice-versa.

For example, there was one scenario our GM brought into a game a while back that was basically a “Towers of Hanoi” problem, which is very basic and well-understood in the field of Computer Science, and I have a BSCS degree. But my character would not have known any of the things I did.

Yet, the whole adventure hinged on the PCs being able to solve the problem, and I was the only one at the table who was able to figure it out.

Yes, we got through that problem. But for thirty minutes (or more), the whole game was stopped while all the other players were frustrated beyond belief, and the tech-oriented PCs had no way to solve the problem in-game. After that persisted for a while, I stepped forward and provided the solution out-of-game, but that whole scenario strongly affected the mood of the game throughout the rest of the night.

Let the PCs be able to do things that they should be able to do, without requiring that the players know how to do those things themselves. A guy who is a techie in real life but who is playing a character with an Intellect of “1” and no Mechanics or Computers skill at all shouldn’t have to be the one to solve the problem.

I'd say if you throw the players a puzzle to solve you just let everyone chime in on the solution, you just tie the number of moves they can make to a skill roll so that the character that's most competent at the task still does it in-game.

Ultimately if doing some slicing or some mechanical task is the meat of your adventure you just don't want it to be simply rolling dice at the problem. There has to be some decision making involved for it to be interesting.

Play Fell Star as written. It's good, not great, but your PCs will likely enjoy it. After reading it, I would definitely recommend Escape from smugglers hold instead (fan made) but touches on many of the same things with better execution.

Hey, I got an idea! This is narrative system. Don't give PCs a puzzle, let them give you the puzzle they solved. Tell your players the specs of the puzzle, and make them describe the puzzle. IMO, important thing about puzzles is that they don't stop the flow of the game and are important to story, and any puzzle which requires players to think will stop it. And if puzzle doesn't require PCs to think at all, can easily be unnecessary, but if you take success as given, but possible complications come from die roll (failure means slower solution, threat that PC just cannot understand the solution and thinking about it confuses him and give strain or setback), players can describe the puzzle, and feel victorious, and story flows.

Thanks for all advices! To be honest my players did not pick up the narrative aspect of the system (yet). To be fair I myself did not embrace it as totally as it would be necessary. Then again my players and I like to have visual props and trinkets and all kind of things, e.g. we do like to place minis (the ones from WotC for Star Wars Miniatures) on a map and battle it out.

That all said I'd like to draw a puzzle, maze, electric lock or whatever on a piece of paper which the players have to solve (accompanied by some dice rolling). It might not be in line with the narrative system, but I do know that my player would enjoy it. My take on it is, not only in this matter, to take the best of both worlds and make the most of it.

@Aurin: Do you have a link for Escape from smugglers hold?

It's in this thread (below). Smugglers Run seems like a more interesting location than point nadir, but if I use it I'm. Also ally going to just combine the two.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/234451-does-anyone-know-what-adventure-this-is/

I'd say if you throw the players a puzzle to solve you just let everyone chime in on the solution, you just tie the number of moves they can make to a skill roll so that the character that's most competent at the task still does it in-game.

Ultimately if doing some slicing or some mechanical task is the meat of your adventure you just don't want it to be simply rolling dice at the problem. There has to be some decision making involved for it to be interesting.

That doesn't actually solve the problem. That still leaves solving the puzzle in the hands of the player and their ability to swap things correctly. If the character is rolling multiple successes, but the player is making bad swaps, that is a disconnect.

I get showing them a visually interesting puzzle, but this solution sounds more like the old D&D modules that required the PLAYER to think of the solution, regardless of the background of the CHARACTER. Such as thinking to look behind a bookshelf to find the rotten timber that hides the lever that will open the secret door that none of the players actually know is there (unless they've read or been through the module before).

I think one potential way to resolve this issue is for Successful rolls on the part of the PC(s) that are trying to solve the puzzle, the GM can give them hints.

Maybe those are written on paper and passed along to the player, or maybe the GM takes the player aside and gives them the hint verbally.

Maybe one hint for each net Success, or Advantage? For a Triumph, the GM could offer to reveal the entire solution to the respective player(s) off-screen, and then let them present the solution in-game.

Done properly, hints would allow the PCs to solve the problem based on their skills and talents, while also potentially being of interest to the players.

But a lot will depend on how good everyone is at roleplaying versus rollplaying, and how much the players enjoy solving challenging puzzles that the GM gives them.

If you make this a major roadblock that prevents any further progress until this problem is solved, you seriously risk blowing up the whole game. If the players can’t figure it out, and the PC(s) roll badly, you could just be screwed and not have any other way around to the next scene.

And nobody would be happy about that kind of outcome.