Quest without monsters

[Malcadon]

I had done this before. The adventure can take place between dungeons, within a town or city were something bad had happened. For example, using a handmade overlay to turn the big center room into an open plaza, the Heroes ran out of a tavern over the screams of a murdered man. No one knows who killed him, and it is up to the Heroes have to catch the killer before he strikes again. As everyone are run-of-the-mill townsfolk, all one can do is talk to them like NPCs. Different NPCs have different things to say, and the players use what they say as clues to find the killer. Also, the Heroes can search for clues just like treasure, but instead of finding loot (as they are not thieves), they find additional clues. This can be really tricky, as clues can be vague or downright false.

This in-town setup can also be used to pad-out the game, were the Heroes explore a town to buy supplies, and find places or people who can help of hinder them in some way. From the start, they can go to the Tavern to see if they can find the right people, or the Armory to purchase their basic gear. As they discover new people and grease the right palms, they might find more exotic people and places, like the Alchemist to buy potions, the Scribe to buy spell scrolls, or the Mercenary's Hall to hire more muscle. And if they work hard enough, they might find even more exotic people or places, like a mighty Sorcerer with powerful spells to offer, or the shadowy Black Market with a number of unusual items up for sale. You can add all sorts of thing to it, including adventure hooks.

[Diggin]

Another option could be to have doors Slam Shut and Open Up again automatically every 3 turns.

So when a hero enters a room on turn 2 the door slams shut behind him/her at end of their turn
locked rooms might fill up with traps during lockdown, so the heros learn to avoid them or time their move.
ideas for locked rooms:
- evil pittraps start opening and moving randomly all through the room!
- a gasscloud fills the room while the doors are locked. All hero's inside get really stinky and maybe even lose some health
- dreamroom, heros trapped inside might fall asleep, someone will have to wake them up...
- ran out of idea's ! anyone have good ones?
might be alot of work if all doors have to be replaced every few turns, so perhaps just a few doors open&close on schedule. maybe specially marked doors, so everyone knows something funky is going to happen there.

As GM you could tell about the heros hearing a nervous clock that rings louder every second and then at third turns the sound stops and they hear doors slam/creak/do their thing.

[Diggin]

oh oh! the best part is having background music, one with a clock ticking, just for theme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNcWWzjm3Qg maybe a bit too epic for a dungeon but you could set it rather quiet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkY8iF-rsyk click clock wood from kazooie.. too happy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWD7k6TrJ-g im just searching random clock songs on tube now.

[Tott]

You could have some doors open after a riddle is solved, some doors controlled by a lever or pressure plate that one hero holds down while the others go through.. maybe a door that needs a certain spell cast on it. Doors that move based on a certain action, maybe a door opens and closes with each step a hero takes.
You could have a non combat action where players try to roll over a certain number and their rolls are boosted by there mind points.
As with anything though, you would need to keep it simple, the more traps and rooms you have the more time the quest takes. That's bad enough with adults but young children? Think about how many hours your going to be able to keep them at the table for.

[cynthialee]

A combat simulating robot with a 'pain stick'. They go into the room and the robot turns on and asks them if they wish to train in the art of combat. Every time it hits, it inflicts a level of pain. Heroes can withstand as many pain points as they have body points. When they run out of pain points they fall to the ground and need to crawl out of the room. Once they leave the room the pain stops.

[Patroclus]

There are infinite options for puzzles but for a scenario with a mystery to solve I suggest you to use the argument to absurdity (of maths), where you have for example 10 options and you reduces them as you are having false results.
For example, you have 10 rooms and only one spell to activate in the right room.
You have to give characteristics in each room.

For example:
1st room: Blue walls, a table, a number on the wall
2nd room: Green walls, no furniture, a rune on the wall
3rd room: Red walls, a chair, a painted animal on the wall
4th room: Blue walls, no furniture, a number on the wall
Etc etc

Then you find a note that says, “there is no rune in the room you seek”. With that you can exclude the 2nd room and all the rooms with runes.

[Daedalus]

one of the reasons I like roll based puzzles is that I am not as intelligent as the Wizard, I know very little about puzzles and tricks

Thus it makes sense to have puzzles figured out by dice roll.
We don't discuss the ins and outs of battle to resolve a combat as the heroes are much more skilled in this arena than the player. {talking the average Joe here boys, not bagging on your personal combat skills} We use dice to resolve the battle. Why must riddles and puzzles be different than battle? My skills suck at these things but if I have a player character who is supposedly good at these things then the only way to properly simulate would be dice rolls.

The Mansions of Madness boardgame has a nice mechanic to reflect a character's intelligence. The actual player is given a multi-tile puzzle that takes several moves to complete, such as completing a circuit with color coded wires. Each turn, a player is allowed a number of puzzle moves equal to their mind stat. The threat of monsters or other negative events keeps up the time pressure.

[QorDaq]

A couple of ideas you might take from:

I have used tangrams, sudoku, connect four, and similar (but simple), tactile puzzles/ games and such to add another dimension to puzzle solving in gaming. For more complicated things (like the afore mentioned sudoku), what I have done in the past is first replace numbers with runes or other esoteric symbols, then starting from the solution to the sudoku board, work backwards so that the party only has to fill a few spaces in. Print out your nearly complete sudoku board, and make some tokens with the symbols you used on them so that the player(s) can move the tokens around to complete the puzzle

For a five year old (I have one too), ordering colored or numbered objects can be fun too. For example have a series of numbers (Refrigerator magnets or whatever), say from 1 to ten, but out of order. To solve the puzzle put them in correct order, and so on. I can do it with simple words as well. I have done it with dice too, i.e. 6d6 slightly out of order. Simple math with dice can be good too, i.e. "You need to have a total of seven ______. Use two, three, or whatever dice to make the number 7 in order to figure out the combination to the lock".

The point being, practical puzzles are a fun way to break up the action a little, and with kids especially, give them a chance to work on numbering, ordering, reading, and the like in quick but practical snippets. Solving the puzzles could; unlock doors/chests, decipher mystic runes, add bonuses to Mind rolls, or any number of other cool things that can impact the success of an otherwise tedious series of dice rolling without combat.

In your example, I really like that you are drawing ideas from a source that your son can identify with. Good idea.

maj!

Post Script - I almost forgot (did actually), to mention Grimm Tooth's Traps. A series of GM aids (devious ones), printed in the late 80's by Flying Buffalo. Goodman Games did a Kickstarter a while back to reissue the series in a compendium. Not all of the traps are HQ friendly of course, and most are designed with TPKs in mind, however, with a little tweaking there could be some great ideas there for creating non-combat-based logic puzzles.

- Q

[Daedalus]

Here's a trap thread: http://forum.yeoldeinn.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=11&hilit=custom+traps