D&D helped me kick Math's ass this weekend.
My D&D group finally got together last Saturday after nearly a month of being unable to play due to schedule conflicts and the holiday. With the extra time to prepare my DM came up with a moderately complex puzzle that had to be solved in order for the party to claim a very impressive set of armor ( Dragon-hide for those who must know and if you want more go look it up. 3.5)
The armor rested on a post in the center of a 15'X15' square. The former owner had been a warrior and a mathematician. There were 9 5'X5' squares surrounding the center square. OK, it's a giant tic-tac-toe board. All but the center square were set with black and white tiles that the patterns represented numbers. The clue given by the former owner was to "Avoid the lonely pairs" We quickly realized that most of the squares represented prime numbers. Prime numbers, 1 *X =X and that is all the divisors it has. The top 2 left squares were not prime and therefore were the safe path.
Not trusting our logic entirely and wanting to see what would happen, we took some rope and the 2 big tough fighter types held it between them and moved the rope to across the squares and drug the armor on to one of the tiled squares. Which immediately launched jets of flame that would certainly have incinerated one of us but did not harm the armor in the least. The fighter then knocked the armor off the square onto the floor with his 2 handed sword , we waited for it to cool and proceeded to investigate the dungeon.
My DM took it all in stride. I suppose she figured we would focus on solving the puzzle instead of accomplishing the goal. I think people get in that mindset way too easily. We talked about the puzzle later and the realization was that a standing broad jump of 5' is not ridiculous and would probably have worked. In fact I assumed that you had to step on certain squares in some sort of series in order to get to the armor and proposed the rope mostly as a method to see what kind of danger awaited us.
This is exactly why I really enjoy the pen and paper role playing. If this had been a computer game we would have had to figure out the safe path to the armor regardless of the logic. So here is to kicking Math's ass with lateral thinking.
The armor rested on a post in the center of a 15'X15' square. The former owner had been a warrior and a mathematician. There were 9 5'X5' squares surrounding the center square. OK, it's a giant tic-tac-toe board. All but the center square were set with black and white tiles that the patterns represented numbers. The clue given by the former owner was to "Avoid the lonely pairs" We quickly realized that most of the squares represented prime numbers. Prime numbers, 1 *X =X and that is all the divisors it has. The top 2 left squares were not prime and therefore were the safe path.
Not trusting our logic entirely and wanting to see what would happen, we took some rope and the 2 big tough fighter types held it between them and moved the rope to across the squares and drug the armor on to one of the tiled squares. Which immediately launched jets of flame that would certainly have incinerated one of us but did not harm the armor in the least. The fighter then knocked the armor off the square onto the floor with his 2 handed sword , we waited for it to cool and proceeded to investigate the dungeon.
My DM took it all in stride. I suppose she figured we would focus on solving the puzzle instead of accomplishing the goal. I think people get in that mindset way too easily. We talked about the puzzle later and the realization was that a standing broad jump of 5' is not ridiculous and would probably have worked. In fact I assumed that you had to step on certain squares in some sort of series in order to get to the armor and proposed the rope mostly as a method to see what kind of danger awaited us.
This is exactly why I really enjoy the pen and paper role playing. If this had been a computer game we would have had to figure out the safe path to the armor regardless of the logic. So here is to kicking Math's ass with lateral thinking.