So I encountered the 3D puzzle in BG3 (trying to avoid any spoilers) and fell in love with it's design and concept (even though the concept is far from new) and I'd absolutely love to introduce something resembling it into my DnD game (I use FoundryVTT for reference). Obviously, I know the 3rd dimension would be overly difficult, or not worth the effort even if it were actually possible, so I'm totally down for a 2D representation (which I have documented) but I'm curious as to how to actually implement that in a fun way.
My first thought was to have all "nodes" arranged in a circle with curved lines connecting the correct path (and others) where a player can move along the line from node A, where I have a small blue light, for instance, along to node B, where I change the color of its light to blue as well as the color of the line traversed.... Yeah, it's a little leg work for myself as the DM, but I regularly put in way too much time and effort into my games. lol
Another thought just occurred to me, and that is to have 4 statues of different races & classes with detachable heads at the start, and the end have identical statues without a head, and have something like a headless bust of some sort that the head has to be passed along to. I’ve got pretty intelligent players, so I could even have something like four riddles that describe, say, a human turning into a wood elf (possibly mimicking the reincarnation of one of the players during a time when four of them were reincarnated as different races… though that would seem like it was very specifically created for these four characters… which it would have been. And I’m still debating on what this puzzle leads to as well. Though… the players are going to be battling an Elder Brain Dragon relatively soon… some of you may see where I’m going with this…
I'd be curious if anyone has any different or better ideas on implementation or mechanics, or even design in general. Thoughts?