Yes, but they did establish that one of the guards is no longer living and that giving barbarians riddles is dangerous for everyone involved.

The answer is stable because the liar will always say the bad door is safe and the truth teller will always say the safe door is safe, therefore the liar will always say that the truth teller will direct you to the danger door and the truth teller will tell you the same.

I tried to add some self-reference to the question to make a paradoxical answer but can’t see a wording that even causes something like “this statement is false”, at least not one about which door to pick.

Only ways I can think of start with the paradox right in the question. Like “If the other guard said, ‘this statement is false’, would you believe him?”

Sucks someone downvoted just for asking questions to better understand this less than straightforward thing. I’ve always believed that if you think something is wrong, you should challenge it, because even if you are wrong, the resulting discussion can help you understand why your previous perspective was flawed, which might then cascade to other things you didn’t realize you were also mistaken about.

How can they both explain it when one only tells lies?

Yeah, it’s impossible to say one way or the other because the setup is underdefined and leaves a lot of room for ambiguity or loopholes.

On that note, don’t beat yourself up or consider yourself stupid because of that. Even though it’s questionable whether it would work or give them room to screw you, I think it was a good creative solution to the riddle that I’ve never seen before. If you came up with that on your own, I’d consider that a sign of good potential. Nurture and refine that, don’t try to beat it down to avoid being wrong ever. (Haha I really hope you’re not like 50 or that might come off as really condescending rather than encouraging).

Like, thinking about it more, I think it can be resolved by changing the “and” to an “or”, at least on the lying side. Though that would open up the truth side to be able to sneak in a lie while technically telling the truth. But there might be another adjustment that would close the loophole entirely and give a solution that doesn’t require a reference to the other guard’s answer.

Careful with that because “the wrong direction and blue” would still be a lie. So would “the correct direction and fluorescent yellow”.

And it has a bunch of assumptions about the sky and their perception and knowledge of it built in.

(Split it up into another comment since it’s a different idea).

Another thing that DMs can do is punish meta gaming with things that go against expectations. Like maybe some secret doors are actually the release mechanism for some damgerous monsters that act as security when someone sounds an intruder alert. Or the listen check is to see if you can hear the siren’s song in the distance as you pass a nesting area.

Maybe the pressure plate is connected to a power source and system to bring the facility the players just entered online, turning on lights and opening doors that are otherwise locked when it’s in mothball mode because the wizards who built it assumed the secret entrance would provide enough security. So while it looks like a trap, it’s just some home automation that would make everything easier. Then if they skip the “trap”, gotta have a scene where they return with someone else who does step on it to leave them wondering if they made a mistake or if they did it the more interesting way.

I need to find a group one of these days, it’s been too long since I’ve played a tabletop RPG and I was a naive power gamer when I last did, so I’m curious about playing a game without min/maxing.

Though the best game I’ve played was with a friend who wanted epic shit like in Devil May Cry. There were no real rules, there were rolls but pass or fail was more of a vibe check than anything specific because the more you described a cool action in detail, the more likely it was to succeed. It was pretty awesome and fun.

For context, DMC features epic scenes like a man-sized entity fighting and beating a skyscraper-sized titan, blocking bullets with swords, and I can’t remember if this is actually in one of the games but even if it isn’t, it kinda shows the level they are on, but I think there’s even at least one scene where a character uses bullets as stepping stones to get within sword range of someone firing down on him from high up.

Yeah, I agree that having a secret communication channel between the DM and players is good because it goes deeper than just meta gaming: there’s also meta meta gaming.

As in you hear a piece of information that your character would have no way of knowing and this piece of information makes the correct tactical option obvious. It might not have been as obvious before, but now that you know, you can’t unknow it (at least not without an even more severe disruption to the game). So does that mean you can’t pick that now obvious option to avoid meta gaming? What if your character probably would have chosen that option anyways? Same thing for trying to do something that would reveal that information to your character, would your character have done it without the information? Should you just pick a bad option now because any good option is meta gaming?

I don’t think there is a good solution once anyone knows about the information. Hell, even your barbarian’s decision to not say anything could be considered meta gaming because you were doing it in response to how the other players were acting and justified it afterwards just like they are doing. Avoiding the meta gaming option is still meta gaming, it’s just from a place of not being able to help but meta game.

It’s like playtesting magic decks against another one of your decks alone. Sure, you can see some things like how well the mana ramp works, how big of a threat you can get on the board relative to your opponents, but when it comes to interactions, you know exactly what spells you should counter or ignore, what might happen if you choose to block or let an attack through. There’s no tactical surprise or bluffing, which can both play a big role in the game.

When I DMed, I liked to have some rolls from the players ready ahead of time, because I found even “roll a spot/listen check” gave away too much information on its own. Pass or fail, it was a signal to start doing some active searching because there’s something of interest in the vicinity. So instead I’d just use the early rolls and cross them off my list as the players made passive sensory checks and only mention anything if the roll was high enough.

Then notes can be passed with the information to those who know it, plus extra nothing notes sent from time to time, maybe with a promised reward if they don’t say it’s a nothing note so the meta gaming that results just wastes time and discourages people just reacting to notes.

That last question is ambiguous enough (in this specific scenario) that either answer would work. It’s both true that the other guard can’t tell her something happened (due to being dead), while the other guard would have said that something did happen if he had been able to. So it’s a meaningless question but the wife doesn’t know that since she doesn’t know the guard is dead.

Which just adds another layer to the joke lol.

Give them a paradox by encoding the other two’s potential responses into the question (similarly to the two guard solution, but this time the random response is included). If they are able to answer, then you asked the random one, because the liar and truth teller have no idea what the random one would answer so can’t answer only yes or no without potentially violating their truthiness rule.

This isn’t to solve the puzzle but to see what the other two would do in that situation. If I figured out the random one with the first question, I’d use the 2nd to ask the same thing of one of the others. Then, if it’s still 2 doors, the two guard solution will work on the last one to figure it out.

But if the first guard asked explodes or something when asked, I think that there wouldn’t be enough questions left to find both the random guard (which I believe you have to do first) and the door. Though if you change the question to only ask about one other’s answer instead of both, you’ll be able to find both the random guard and the safe door.

Though hopefully the whole setup isn’t a lie and everyone present is a strategic liar that wants you dead. Imagine doing one of those riddles and when you step through the door you notice both doors lead into the same room whose walls now seem to be closing in and the last thing you hear is one of the guards asking another why riddles seem to get people to let their guard down anyways.

It’s kinda funny with anime and manga. They use Japanese names for a bunch of stuff like special martial arts techniques or special moves. Not knowing Japanese, the names sound cool and mysterious.

Learning the actual translations, Treebeard is pretty par for the course.

Like from Naruto, Sasuke uses the Copy Wheel Eye (sharingan), Hinyata uses the White Eye (byakugon), and Naruto’s big move is Spiral Sphere (rasengan). Copy Wheel Eye’s upgraded version is called Kalidoscope Copy Wheel Eye.

They aren’t horrible names, but they feel less cool.

Though it would be funny if Saitama has special moves that are just other languages saying “normal punch” or “serious punch”. “Hip bump with moderate vigor” or something.

Edit: fixed spelling of byakugon

There are a bunch of obvious ones for last names. Smith, Tailor, Carpenter, Fletcher, etc from when urban families tended to keep the same profession.

Also, last names that end in “son” like Johnson, Thompson, Ragnarson. It’s just shorthand for “son of John”. Not sure if Ragnarson is a name that has survived to today, but it was the name that made me realize that connection when reading a fiction based on the execution of Ragnar and the subsequent Viking invasion of England by his sons. They were Ragnarsons but he was Ragnar Lodbrok (which just means he was hairy, if he even was a single person and not an amalgramation of a bunch of big Viking names).

Yeah, sorry, I meant for anyone worried about windows crash reports.

Microsoft controls your windows OS.

I’ve wondered for a while if something like this is why Google allowed their bootloaders to be unlocked, because they can get at everything anyways.

And I bet that if that was the case, they’ve backed off that for future phones because of those stories about law enforcement seeing having those phones as suspicious, which could hurt sales, since I bet the majority of pixel users don’t switch operating systems.

Though iirc a system crash report can include a kernel dump, which can contain things like private keys.

Though realistically, Microsoft controls your OS. They could easily add code to allow them to grab whatever they want from your system without any logging (by your system anyways).

That actually makes me wonder if there are any apps that run on both a system and the router that system is connected to to determine if the internet traffic as reported by the system (to the user) is the same as what the router sees as a way to detect anything using network resources but bypassing the normal network stack.

Reminds me of the time my GM buddy wanted lunch at school and offered me 3 capital ships in our SW RPG game if I bought him a taco salad. So I did and then promptly lost two of them in a battle that was more of a cutscene than anything else.

I was pissed but whatever the one ship ended up being fun.

So later, in another game, I did the same for a submarine. Again, same session, we found the enemy on land after searching around in the sub. So we get out and have this epic battle where our characters take out a goblin army or something. Then we go to get back in the sub. “You never said you turned it off, so it’s gone.” So what we breached the surface and all tuck and rolled to get off of it, no roll to avoid getting sucked in to the propellers or anything?

I think that’s about when I just went back to playing magic most of the time at lunch at school.

You could privately talk to your GM and say your character wants to cover all of their bases, so just like batman, spends time strategizing about how to defeat the other party members and making preparations in case they betray the group or him. Like a ring of concentration that also has an anti-magic curse activated when the correct word is spoken in its vicinity for the mage, secretly planted on the body of a mob that your character manages to get to before the party loots.

And then, of course, you’re in a position where you could betray the party and surprise even the GM.

Though a counter argument to what you’re saying is that deception games are a thing and the players knowing that there are enemies in the group doesn’t make those games trivial to figure out. A deception RPG could be interesting to play.

That would have been more cool than whatever unmemorable shit actually happened in that campaign. Only other thing I remember is the GM offering me 3 capital ships if I bought him lunch one day and then promptly destroying two of them that same session, which I actually appreciate in hindsight because it contributed to seeing pay to win games as a waste of time and money. Either the shit “bought” in game can be lost that easily or it just breaks the game into a “just give me money and you, uh, win! That’s the whole game!”

I did this in the very first RPG I played. It was Star Wars and I was playing a smuggler (who thus had a ship). Obviously the GM intended my ship to be used to move the party around. Well, the jedi PC shows up wanting to board my ship as I’m getting ready to leave. I don’t know this guy so obviously the first thing my character would do would be to say that and then turn the turrets on when this strange jedi tried to insist on joining me, followed by promptly flying off so he ended up needing to find another way to our adventure.

No idea why I was like that. The player was pretty much my best friend at the school, too, so it wasn’t anything personal against him. I think I was just trying to hard to do what “my character would realistically do” instead of just playing a game.

Or just luck. Like with lockpicking, it’s possible to bang a keyed lock and pull on it and get lucky with the pins all lining up and it opens. There’s vibration devices that work by doing this constantly until it works. The odds are much lower than 5% (without a vibrator), but dnd is supposed to be fun and exaggerated odds can be fun.

I’ve played a homebrew game that was based on the devil may cry world, where the cut scenes were constantly full of crazy shit, so the GM decided that the crazier the idea you came up with, the more likely it was to succeed, and it was fun. It did really help that he was very good at thinking on his feet and let the game flow more naturally instead of getting stuck in situations where a player succeeding at some random thing they want to do breaks the whole campaign.

For the scenario shown in the OP, a character could get lucky and guess what runes mean. The context could give clues, or maybe one rune looks kinda like something else, is a red herring on its own, but just happens to lead to the correct conclusion in that particular case.

Though it would be fair for the next (unsuccessful) roll to give actual useless red herrings. It’s probably better for the GM to do the rolls for the player so they don’t know if it’s a nat 20. I like this for any kind of information gathering rolls, like spot checks, because it allows players to second guess roll results without it being meta gaming. Also pre-rolling some of those can help, because “roll a spot check” tells the players that there’s something to spot, even if they all fail. And not asking can imply there’s nothing there.

So it’s your fault they had to add a period between firstname and lastname!

Now it’s a race to get a good number like firstnamelastname69 or 112358.