Rogue Trader is about as far removed from Dungeons & Dragons as you can get in terms of theme and mechanics, but PCs still find themselves in the damndest places and it's always fun, as a GM, to try and stump your layers with a little brain teaser. Right now, I'm running my players through "Whispers on the Storm" and the party has just reached Cog. For those of you who don't know, Cog is a big Adeptus Mechanicus industrial complex. I don't want to spoil the adventure for anyone, so I'll just say that there is a lot of room to add a little bit of flavor here and there and I plan on making my group run through a series of mental challenges that will include a 5x5 Knight's Tour puzzle , a Tower of Hanoi , a memory puzzle similar to Simon and the classic

Now, I'm tweaking these here and there to give them a distinct 40k flavor (for example, the 5x5 Knight's Tour will involve pressure plates and a servitor that only walks in a certain pattern), but I think they'll offer a pleasant and unexpected challenge to the game and give my players something else to do besides shoot things and worry about their profit factor.

With all the exploring that Rogue Traders and their crews do, what other puzzles could you see being worked into an RT game? How would you give them the 40k treatment?

Have you ever played Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect ?

In both ways, Bioware has players solve the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. In both cases their implementation of it has problems:

- The puzzle just doesn't fit with the rest of the game. It's just a self contained room where you need to solve the puzzle to continue, with no explanation why the puzzle is even there.

- They dump the rules on players. Probably because the rules are part of the puzzle.

- In Mass Effect the puzzle, and solution, were widely known, partly because the same puzzle was in KOTOR.

- In KOTOR, an alternative solution (use your lightsaber and grenades to blow open the door) can't even be attempted.

So, some tips:

1 - Have a good reason as to why the puzzle is exists. For example, having a puzzle being the lock for a door instead of a key or password is a bad idea because it requires serious stupidity on the part of whoever designed it, unless they want random people to open the door ...

2 - Design the puzzle so that the players can pick up the rules as they go.

3 - Avoid using existing puzzles. An existing puzzle means that players might already know the solution. If your players are smart, watch out for one of them memorising lots of existing puzzles in case you use them.

4 - Think about alternative solutions the players might try. Two examples:

- If there is a door locked by a logic puzzle, why should players waste their time trying to solve it when they could instead just cut through the door ?

- In your Knight's tour example, what would stop the players disabling the servitor then pushing the pressure players themselves ?

You could block these solutions easily, but then you are quite obviously railroading the players.

Agree with the problem of players familiar with a gordian knot solution. Puzzles are better deployed as part of a believable scenario.

Adding time limits to a task can radically change the nature of it. The players can cut through the door easily enough but it will take them 30 mins with a las cutter. The nearest plasma cutter is on their starship, hours away. The fortress vault the puzzle gaurds is on the verge of being destroyed/buried/loot by rivals/ and time is short. You can really make this tense by using an egg timer or other timer that counts down. Forces your players to get their act together quickly.

Build the puzzles into the back ground. e.g. Crazy old man knows something about a co-ordinate/lost treasure ship/pleasure world/macguffin but is well known to be mad. He doesn't accept payment in coin, but instead asks riddles. This is quite a mythic idea, the guardian asking riddles of the questing heroes. not suitable if a PC is a telepath.

Right of passage puzzles, where the puzzle is explicitly set to test the PCs wits, rather than get him past a door/area can work. Tech-priests might use tests like this to test logical reasoning. Navigators might do the same under extreme adverse conditions to test their mettle under warp like conditions, etc. success is rewarded with greater prestige/access to secrets/further initiation into mysteries,etc...