LET'S DISCUSS PUZZLE DESIGN!

Puzzles in dungeons are good -- I like my RPGs to have non-battle challenges. Most RPGs don't get by purely the design of their battle systems, so let's not pretend that's the case ( The ones that do, like the various SRPGs, and Pokemon are perfectly fine without puzzles). To me, there's nothing less satisfying than being plopped into a pointless maze, which do NOT feel like exploration or whatever rubbish people like to pass them off as. It's just lazy (Exception: Etrian Odyssey)

But how do you go about designing puzzles, anyway? Real-life can be a great source -- Shigeru Miyamoto losing himself in a house with hundreds of sliding doors, was his inspiration for the original Legend of Zelda dungeons. Another route is directly adapting popular puzzles, brainteasers, etc. to your dungeons, but that's not even trying, is it? (You don't HAVE to have teleporter puzzles -- your game is free to have its own identity, you know!)

It's not an RPG, but Link's Awakening had an interesting part where an NPC told you to find the key in his backyard -- which at first glance looks like a batch of weeds you have to simply cut through, but upon falling through the holes *beneath* those weeds several times, you realise that you need a strategy to get through. THAT design inspired me. It was surprising, and didn't feel imposing (I think many RPGs tend to relegate puzzles to ghettos known as dungeons, which interrupt the flow of the PLOT stuff) and it was consistent with the game world.

Lufia 2 is my other example of good puzzle design in an RPG. Although many of the Lufia puzzles were abstract, puzzles ranged from minor challenges such as walking across dangerous patches of ground to full blown Zelda-style 'puzzle events'. The quantity and variation of puzzles meant that you were always on your feet and there was none of that typical dungeon slog where the focus is dragging yourself through. However, my problem with that game is that the puzzles COMPLETELY overshadowed the combat/plot (I can see why they're remaking it as an action RPG), so there's a problem in itself.

So, what are your thoughts about puzzles? How do you design them? What makes a good puzzle?