The Worst Puzzles

[bayesianMechanist]

So, we've all had That One Puzzle, or maybe Those Several Puzzles, right? The worst of the worst puzzle mindfucks of stupidity and dumb. Why not start a thread so that everyone can bemoan our collective lack of brainitude?

I'll start with /these/ fun examples of sburb's totally fun and not stupid at all puzzles. If anybody else wants to show off some of their ridiculous sburb puzzles, feel free to chime in and post'em.

((If you were on the IRC when I posted these, please refrain from spoiling the fun for everyone else!))

Attachments:

[grimdarkKuru5u]

Mind if I try to 5olve that one? From top to left, 5pace, Light, Time, Mind?

[horrorTerror]

I once saw this puzzle that was so incredibly stupid and mind-boggling that the player and a large amount of the Ring completely gave up for most of the session. Unfortunately, it was main-quest-critical and unavoidable to continue progress. It was really big and involved some form of ludicrously complex boardgame plus videogame plus puzzle mess with several different management computers and contradictory lore references and giant ugly machinery and a lot of it appeared it to be glitching out. There was enough spatiotemporal folding inside to make the Ring look simple and make the Space, Time, and Void players vomit just by looking at it. No, really, it had an official debuff that induced vomiting. It was apparently part of one of the internal puzzles we didn't solve until the end.

If anyone ever rolls something akin to the Land of Machinery and Paradoxes and Puzzles (triple-descriptor glitch. Thankfully, Paradoxes was mostly overwritten by Puzzles. Mostly. Glitchy as hell but survivable apparently) while being a Sage of Mind with Sburb hellbent on making you smarter, be on the lookout for this...THING during your quests.

In an unrelated shenanigan they got corrupted and began speaking with various horrorterrors. Eventually the puzzle came up in conversation and the collective great thinking powers of the Ring devoted a vast amount of their combined intelligence and problem-solving skills to deciphering Sburb's abomination against sanity.

Eventually we just gave up and used large amounts of precognitive scans and fate abilities to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do. That helped us solve the vast majority of sub-puzzles, but there were still several parts, some of which had an obscenely huge Void charge and liked to block cheating-level scrying.

So anyways someone tried to hug the player but she got really pissed and ran away and decided to [Endless Climb] herself for some reason that I do not remember beyond being dumb and possibly emotionally induced. That did not end well. An extensive amount of time and verdancy damage later she came to and proceeded to attempt to forcibly solve that puzzle by hiring the Space denizen to come out of their palace and use denizen damage to excavate it out of the world followed by blasting it with enough corruption to corrupt a goddamn frog. Unfortunately, it had a fuckton of frog imagery and that didn't work to solve its frog door shenanigans, but they were able to throw it into Skaia at the Black King to try and postpone the Reckoning by forcing him to deal with it before beating up WK and army. The Black King somehow managed to bat or launch it back out where it went through the Veil and around Derse, where the Black Queen said something along the lines of "OMGWTFBBQ corrupt puzzle monstrosity kill it with [RED MILES]" and she killed it with [RED MILES].

Which was apparently the correct game solution, opening up the next passageway into a structure made out of bedrock frogs and anti-teleport-precautions (hence why it wasn't something we could just blast into) so she could retrieve a chained-up consort who had her dead replacement guardian's toothbrush.

To this day, we have no idea why Sburb would even do that to someone. It was stupid and a colossal waste of time and a great smear-filled stain on the reputations of many involved.

[Nefer Nightbug]

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Oh man, that must have been awesome.

[horrorTerror]

It was.