Re: [Bookclub] [Late] Puzzles in _John's_Fire_Witch_

[cerutti@together.net (Neil Cerutti)]

Sean T Barrett posted:
>In article <slrn8h3f48.7f.cerutti@fiad06.norwich.edu>,
>Neil Cerutti <cerutti@together.net> wrote:
>>  1. If you cross the pit before finding the magic card, you
>>  are stuck. This has been accounted for by placing the card in
>>  the same spot as the batteries, which you must have found by
>>  that point.
>
>Oh, that's why I didn't get anywhere in JFW.

Perhaps the puzzled-plot gave a more skewed view than I thought.
It didn't occur to me that you needed to know how the card worked
before you would know to take it with you across the pit.

>>  John effectively gives the player more information than I
>>  they are entitled to (don't carry many items and you won't be
>>  able to jump the pit more than once)
>
>"It will be chancy" hardly meant "you'll only be able to do it
>once". I can see why it would be intended to mean that, and why
>a player could take it that way, but it's a bit arbitrary, and
>wasn't how I took it. (I took it as meaning: save here, you
>idiot.)

I got confused. You are correct. You don't get the message that
you will be unable to jump the pit again until after you jump it
for the first time.

>>Find 6 deadly sins:
>>
>>  Extremely easy, especially if any time at all was spent early
>>  in the game poking through John's crap. It does require a
>>  small leap to figure out what the devil means by "collect the
>>  sins".
>
>Does this require you to restore since you can only cross the
>pit once? Or is there some other way back across?

If you figure out how to use the card you can teleport around the
map to the crystal grottos.

>From reading your description, I question whether the spread of
>available puzzles at each moment is good design, since so many
>are unsolveable at any given moment.  This has always been my
>central problem with many adventure games--especially commercial
>ones, since it tends to put you out of problem solving mode (the
>problems may not be soluable) and instead into try-stuff-mode...
>which quickly leads to using everything on everything else.

Yes, that's another thing the puzzle-plot can't account for. It
doesn't say anything about which puzzles are *available* for
futile solving attempts.

Anybody know a better puzzle-plotting system?

-- 
char NeilCerutti[]= "cerutti@together.net";