And the surviving guard will most definitely answer a 2nd question despite the rules.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Now let’s make it a little harder. You have three guards: one tells the truth, one lies, one answers randomly. The guards understand you, but only answer either “da” or “ja”. One means yes, one means no, but you don’t know which is which. You get to ask each guard one question.
Give them a paradox by encoding the other two's potential responses into the question (similarly to the two guard solution, but this time the random response is included). If they are able to answer, then you asked the random one, because the liar and truth teller have no idea what the random one would answer so can't answer only yes or no without potentially violating their truthiness rule.
This isn't to solve the puzzle but to see what the other two would do in that situation. If I figured out the random one with the first question, I'd use the 2nd to ask the same thing of one of the others. Then, if it's still 2 doors, the two guard solution will work on the last one to figure it out.
But if the first guard asked explodes or something when asked, I think that there wouldn't be enough questions left to find both the random guard (which I believe you have to do first) and the door. Though if you change the question to only ask about one other's answer instead of both, you'll be able to find both the random guard and the safe door.
Though hopefully the whole setup isn't a lie and everyone present is a strategic liar that wants you dead. Imagine doing one of those riddles and when you step through the door you notice both doors lead into the same room whose walls now seem to be closing in and the last thing you hear is one of the guards asking another why riddles seem to get people to let their guard down anyways.
That's funny! but if you want to know how to solve this problem every time, even when asking one single question, just ask this question:
"If I ask the other guy which is the correct path, which path will he tell me?"
No matter who you ask, both of them will point to the WRONG path, meaning the correct one is the one they DIDN'T point to. Here is the logic.
For the sake of argument, let's assume the correct path is the right path. When you ask that question, if the person is the truthful one, he will be honest and say the left path. Because if you ask the liar what the correct path is, he will say it is the left path (which is false). Now if you ask the liar what the other guy will say the correct path is, he will lie to you and say it is the left path (which is also false, the truthful one will tell you it is the right path and not the left).
The liar responds "I don't know"
and also, using "correct path" instead of "right path" will be less confuzzling because english words can have multiple meanings and are the dumb.
You should even specify “path to the castle”, because there isn’t technically a “correct” path.
What is the quest was to die asap. And everyone the party meets just refused to kill them?
This puzzle was used in more than one place than in Labyrinth. I played video games where they had that puzzle (Ultima 6 had that).
yeah, it could be the liar guard's desire or prime directive to send you down the deadly path. to him that could be interpretated as the correct path. especially if these are automatons working off of some machine logic. like, they don't even need to be out to get you, that's totally something that bad code could do on accident.
My favorite take on this:
That last question is ambiguous enough (in this specific scenario) that either answer would work. It's both true that the other guard can't tell her something happened (due to being dead), while the other guard would have said that something did happen if he had been able to. So it's a meaningless question but the wife doesn't know that since she doesn't know the guard is dead.
Which just adds another layer to the joke lol.
This still doesn't accomplish the goal of knowing which door will kill you. All you've done is determine which guard is the liar.
I believe that's the joke. The barbarians intelligence isn't usually very high.
I love playing low Intelligence high Wisdom characters. Because Wisdom governs stats like Perception, Insight, and Animal Handling. So your character will notice things that the rest of the party misses, but often doesn’t have the intelligence to put the individual pieces together.
Once played a high wisdom barbarian. He would notice things like traps or clues, but I would RP it with things like “Hey, why’s that wire stretched across the path? Someone is going to trip over that…” The other players very quickly learned to pay attention whenever I asked stupid questions, because it was usually my way of announcing “I noticed something that the rest of you missed.”
I wish our DM had real-life message to telepathically convey stuff to just one person.
In my group there would be literal zero chance of the others not listening to me if I ever threw a “hmm why is that wire there”, because they would’ve heard the dm either tell me due to passive perception or had me throw a roll and then tell me. So they know it’s a trap no matter if I want to rp it. Every time I get frustrated and question it, there’s this one guy who always has the reasoning and justifying at hand why they would know to do the right thing and to be fair they kind of make sense always, but there’s zero chance he’d come up with that just by my rp line alone without knowing for a fact it’s a trap.
I think that’s the worst kind of meta gaming. They are fully blind to the meta gaming there and just do it by instinct. And when you try and question, they always have a defense ready, even if it’s so wildly specific and unlikely but you can’t really fault it because they’re not stupid, the justifications hold, it’s just that the only way they habitually generate them is because they know what I know despite they couldn’t in-game know.
Like I’ve occasionally just left the thing unsaid in-game out of frustration and just reason to DM that there’s so much going on, my focus instantly switched to another thing and I forgot because I’m not very smart. So we all know there’s a trap but now nobody has told this to the others.
What do they do? The one guy fucking always comes up with some shit like “hmmm be wary, they must’ve laid traps here, hey you with good investigation, please look around and see if there’s one in this specific place for some reason” and the rolls of course often succeed because they always choose to best one to solve that.
But from rp perspective, we’ve walked this path for a while, and this thought only came up now, that it might be trapped? Just right now when you know, outside of the game, that there’s a trap?
I call bullshit and it frustrates me so much, there’s very little chance of anything interesting ever happening in-game because we seldom miss anything or do the wrong things, because “somehow” we always happen to do the right things no matter who notices things in-game or rolls or whatever, no matter how much any of us attempt to rp it, somebody just meta games it without it being explicitly or admittedly meta gaming and gets all defensive when questioned and because they now know everything, can figure out an explanation the DM can do nothing but accept because it makes sense, now that they know to pull the right shit out their ass.
Ugh. It’s not even a big deal, our group is fun and the adventuring isn’t bad, these things don’t happen often enough for it to really affect things, but god do I hate it. This ended up being a rant, I didn’t even know how much I get frustrated with it until I just now read this back. Jesus…
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I mean, the Barbarian asked the one question and didn't gain anything from it. Knowing which one is the liar doesn't... help anymore.
That's why this is a brilliantly played barbarian. They think they are clever but will still have to do things the hard way.
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Alternate solution:
Is there an actual plot to Mimi, or is she just a complete chaos goblin?
Simply goblin
Ask either guard: "If I asked the other guard which door led to the castle, what would they say?" The answer is always the door that leads to instant death; enter the other door.
The third guard stabs people who ask tricky questions.
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I got an unexpected laugh from Rick and Mortys take on this. His answer was "you ever fuck this guys wife?" And watched them fight to the death.
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So the traditional answer here is to ask them to point at the door the other guard will say is safe.
However, I'm curious, does anyone know of any other valid solutions?
"Is the guard that tells the truth standing in front of the safe door?" If they say yes, you go through their door, if they say no then you go to the other one
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Could probably do something clever with XOR.
Is exactly one of the following statements true? You are the liar. Your door is the safe door.
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For years, I had my own headcanon for the Labyrinth movie. In the scene, the young Sarah correctly solves the riddle, passes through the correct door, says "This is a piece of cake!" and then she immediately falls down a pit of doom. This confused me, because she got the answer right. So I reasoned that the guards were both liars, and because they both participated in explaining the rules, they were lying about the rules.
It was only a few years ago that I read in an interview that the Labyrinth (or Jareth) dropped her down the hole because she said it was a piece of cake. It was her arrogance that set her back, not that she got the riddle wrong.
But now it still bothers me that the liar, whichever one he is, helps explain the rules of the scenario. If he always lies, then she can't trust that either of them ever tells the truth. The rules have to be described separately, like on a sign or by a disinterested third party. Or you could phrase it differently, like "One of us will answer your question truthfully, and one of us will answer your question dishonestly." That way you avoid saying that they always lie, and specify that the lie will only be in response to the one question.
Fuck, I've had too much coffee. How the fuck did I get up on this soapbox? Why are you still reading? Go do something productive.
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