D&D puzzles, or "How I learned to stop worry, and love my players foolishness"

I have played dungeons and dragons for many years, often with the same group of friends. I am often the dungeon master, the one organising and running the game for my friends which means I have to sit down, write puzzles and sort out what challenges I'm going to put in front of the players.

Never, in the almost 10 years I have played the game has a group of players ever solved a puzzle in the way I expected. Whether a brain-twistingly cunning or simply straight forward my players have never disappointed me in their ingenuity, cunning and bloody foolishness.

Lets start off with one of the earliest challenges I ever set. The players enter a room with multi-coloured tiles covering the floor and a door the other side of the room. Nine different colours of tile spread randomly over the floor and each coloured tile within a 5ft step of a similar coloured tile. When a player put a foot on the first tile it fell out beneath them.

so what did they do? The Gnome mage simply cast "spider climb" and walked over the walls and ceiling to the other side. The monk, who had invested in a ring of jump, jumped along the tiles, jumping as soon as he touched down to avoid falling with the tiles. And the groups warrior? they tied him to the monk and he was dragged along the falling floor as the monk jumped along it, half hanging over nothingness as the tiles fell away below him.

I cried with laughter as they described their plan to me.

So, what was the solution I had in mind? The floor was alignment reactive. As each party member had a different alignment a different colour of tile would support them. All they had to do was find a colour that would support them and basically walk across. However as only one tile was tested, and not a single person passed the spot tests to notice the tiles that weren't falling out below the monk, and nobody seemed to care that the warrior kept getting stuck on tiles that didn't fall away, they never actually found out about the real solution.

The next best example of player thinking was 

-- ©copyright Mark Langridge