Solving This Exact Design Problem Is Why I've Been Toying With The Idea Of A GM-less Horror Game Where

Solving this exact design problem is why I've been toying with the idea of a GM-less horror game where the details of the monster are revealed via playing cards as the players encounter the monster in increasingly dire situations.

The card system would be inspired by Sleepaway's Lindworm events, but each encounter would then be logged into a Monster Sheet that documents what the players have learned about the monster so far.

if you want to make your players roleplay out the process of trying things on the monster to learn its weaknesses in a challenge game, it behooves you to invent a monster they don't know about.

them playing dumb until you arbitrarily decide they've experimented enough to be allowed to try what everyone knew was the correct answer going in is not a satisfying play experience for anyone

All good points here, but I also wanted to add on that there has been some flanderization of this nugget of advice. I remember when this hack was first being passed around, it was a much more nuanced take. It was something along the lines of "if you have a riddle or puzzle and if the Players devise a reasonable solution that was not your intended answer, reward their problem solving and let them pass".

Somewhere along the dreaded content creation chain it was warped into the subject of your post. But it wasn't always that way. At one point, it was just applying the rule of cool to puzzles.

My least favourite GMing "hack" that gets passed around is "make puzzles/riddles with no fixed answer, and then whatever answer the players guess, make that the right answer."

If the game I'm running is going to have riddles, it's because I have players at the table who... like riddles? And for those players, the fun of a riddle is the moment where it clicks and you get the satisfaction of figuring it out. Which just isn't likely to happen if the riddle is just some vague, evocative nonsense that validates whatever guess they make.

So, presumably, this hack is for making riddles for a table full of only people who do not like riddles. Which invites the question, "why are you making riddles for a table full of only people who do not like riddles?" Do you just feel obligated to?

I guess if so, then here is my hack for you: I absolve you. You are no longer obligated to include riddles in your game of people who don't like them. Go forth, my child, and riddle no more.

So I just discovered that elephants can communicate via seismics!

And now I want to design a fantasy proboscidea species for my world that are intelligent, nonverbal, and communicate with said seismic waves. Maybe they can even harness magic this way!

BotW? Nah, I'm on that CotW shit

Chicken

Of

The

Woods

I made tacos :)

They were very tasty

One of the strangest things about writing a TTRPG in the Horror genre is that many of the typical trappings of TTRPG design get flipped on their head. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that you're not writing to fulfill a power fantasy.

I've run into this phenomenon a few times while working on my wild west horror rpg. Here are two of the most relevant incidents:

1. Started the game with traditional Classes. Switched to a table of flawed character Traits. Turns out, giving the Characters flaws was way more interesting than giving them skills and abilities. Instead of answering the question "How does this character solve problems?" it's more entertaining to answer the question "How does this character create problems?". So I've opted to let the Players themselves answer the former question, but only give tools for the Players to expand upon the latter question.

2. Up until recently, the Players could harness the magic of the setting whenever they wanted, as long as they sacrificed something for it. While the sacrifice concept does narratively fit into the rest of my game, I've found that Players having unregulated access to magic meant that Players could reasonably "chop-finger-off-ex-machina" anything the GM throws at them. I want the Horror of a session to have some staying power, and it'd be best if the Players interacted with a specific narrative thread to harm a Horror instead of having a catch-all rule for interacting with the setting's magic.