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View Full Version : DM Help How To Do Mazes Right?



Deremir
2017-06-08, 01:24 PM
I, like many, once included a maze in a classic table top game which ended horribly because it basically devolved into a time consuming mapping exercise interspaced by a few encounters. I wrote off mazes as ttrpg taboo and moved on. However, recently my group has started playing online via roll20, and it occurred to me that since I'm no longer requiring the players to map for themselves that a maze might be not only feasible, but a unique and interesting challenge.

So, Has anyone done a successful maze before? What advice can you give? What does the playground think goes into an interesting ttrpg maze experience?

(Here's a pic of the maze I am planning in case anyone's interested)

Top: entrance, Bottom: exit, Left: fake exit, Right: back door to drake layer so they can reasonably fight it in melee/get the drop on it.
Each path is roughly one character wide and about half of the various rooms will be filled with some sort of encounter/creature/treasure/trap
I'm still debating whether or not to have some monster track them through the maze minotaur style.

https://i.imgur.com/hGoGMCk.jpg

erikun
2017-06-08, 06:01 PM
http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon

Please note that I haven't made many dungeons, and haven't used this advice specifically, so I can't verify how good it specifically is. But it does look like fairly good advice.

In general, my first recommendation is to think of a theme: something which can tie the adventure together. Perhaps the cavern or castle is partically flooded. Perhaps it is in the north and there is constant frost. Perhaps bits of the structure are crumbling and falling apart. Perhaps the theme is orcs. Perhaps the theme is wolves. Whatever it is, make it something which can tie it together, and can inspire ideas for you to work with. Note that not everything has to relate to the theme (if you're dealing with wolves, you don't need wolf motifs on the walls) but it helps with deciding on challenges, traps, and just general "flavor" descriptions.

My second recommendation is to think up some fun (or interesting) encounters to put in your dungeon. Try to add some variety, rather than just the same encounter every time. Perhaps the pathway to the dungeon just has orcs and their mounts sitting around by the entrance, which the party can advance. The first room might also have orcs, but there are barricades set up and so they can create chokepoints. The next room might have a high ledge or rafters with archers, which are not immediately accessable. That way, you can still keep with the same "theme" of the dungeon without every encounter feeling the same. Plus, if the party finds a different way into the dungeon - perhaps they snuck in through a window, and can ambush the archer encounter from the ledge themselves - then the players can feel really good about their planning and their "luck" in coming in at an unexpected angle.

I'd recommend against every encounter being set up to ambush the expected route of the PC party, though. Sometimes just walking into a room and having the enemies not expecting the party can be quite fun. Plus, as with the archer example above, "five orcs playing cards in the middle of the room" is an encounter which works well from any door the PCs arrive in.

Other than that, I find that having some sort of interaction between "rooms" in a dungeon is quite nice. Sometimes this can be bad for the PCs, such as an enemy fleeing into another room with more enemies. Sometimes this can be nice, as the PCs can ambush the next batch of enemies trying to act as reinforcements. Sometimes this can be fun, as the fleeing enemy runs into a trap/weak floor and accidentally sets it off. That last bit (where the NPCs are not necessarily aware of every encounter or trap in the dungeon) is something my gaming tables seem to like.


(Here's a pic of the maze I am planning in case anyone's interested)

Top: entrance, Bottom: exit, Left: fake exit, Right: back door to drake layer so they can reasonably fight it in melee/get the drop on it.
Each path is roughly one character wide and about half of the various rooms will be filled with some sort of encounter/creature/treasure/trap
I'm still debating whether or not to have some monster track them through the maze minotaur style.

https://i.imgur.com/hGoGMCk.jpg

I must admit, I am not really clear what the point of this maze is. It seems to just waste a massive amount of time, especially if the party is expecting something in it and ends up trying to explore the whole thing. Almost any party familiar with dungeon crawling and mazes is going to quickly take up a left-hand or right-hand rule, which either means they will start walking in circles and so move to the outer wall, or just follow the outer wall to the left/right sections.

Deremir
2017-06-08, 06:36 PM
I must admit, I am not really clear what the point of this maze is. It seems to just waste a massive amount of time, especially if the party is expecting something in it and ends up trying to explore the whole thing..

The maze is the point. You gave a lot of advice for dungeons in general, but I can do dungeons, I have just historically found mazes to be poor dungeon features for gaming at a table, but now I want to discuss how to do a maze that is fun and gives a unique experience in light of the advantages virtual table tops like roll20 give.


Almost any party familiar with dungeon crawling and mazes is going to quickly take up a left-hand or right-hand rule, which either means they will start walking in circles and so move to the outer wall, or just follow the outer wall to the left/right sections.
So would dissuading the party from taking the left-hand/right-hand rule lead to a better experience? perhaps by making it clear from the begining that a key or some other required item is located in the center?

LibraryOgre
2017-06-08, 06:42 PM
A friend ran a maze a few years ago that was brilliantly done...

We played Memory. (https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Original-Memory-Card-Game/dp/B00000IWDD/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1496965030&sr=8-20&keywords=memory).. or, a version he made for the game.

Each play took a certain amount of time. Non-matching plays represented walking through the maze, getting lost. Matching plays resulted in an encounter... sometimes money, sometimes monsters, sometimes a challenge to overcome. Certain skills or actions would give you bonus cards (a person mapping, for example, meant you drew three cards instead of two, and any pair worked).

Now, he also threw in a couple other things. Any time you got a Minotaur card, you encountered the Minotaur. And, every so often, he'd take a row and shuffle it, so, even if we were keeping track of what was going on, we'd have some problems.

It created a real "Maze" feel, without having to draw a complicated maze. TBH, your maze is easily defeated by using the left hand wall method... it's practically a straight shot.

Psyren
2017-06-08, 06:46 PM
A friend ran a maze a few years ago that was brilliantly done...

We played Memory. (https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Original-Memory-Card-Game/dp/B00000IWDD/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1496965030&sr=8-20&keywords=memory).. or, a version he made for the game.

Each play took a certain amount of time. Non-matching plays represented walking through the maze, getting lost. Matching plays resulted in an encounter... sometimes money, sometimes monsters, sometimes a challenge to overcome. Certain skills or actions would give you bonus cards (a person mapping, for example, meant you drew three cards instead of two, and any pair worked).

Now, he also threw in a couple other things. Any time you got a Minotaur card, you encountered the Minotaur. And, every so often, he'd take a row and shuffle it, so, even if we were keeping track of what was going on, we'd have some problems.

It created a real "Maze" feel, without having to draw a complicated maze. TBH, your maze is easily defeated by using the left hand wall method... it's practically a straight shot.

I have to second this, the worst thing to do in a maze is actually draw a maze. Use some other kind of minigame instead, or a series of Int checks, and keep it abstract. That way it's more challenging, more fun, better on those with poor eyesight, adding encounters anywhere you want is more justifiable, and best of all, you have an easy way to cut it short if the players start getting bored or frustrated.

NichG
2017-06-08, 09:06 PM
I think the trick is to make plotting a course through the maze the challenge, rather than finding your way step by step. What I mean by that is, imagine that the party can actually see the entire maze layout to begin with and also knows something about each location in the maze and how they're connected. If each location comes with a risk or cost - in time, resources, danger, etc - then it can be interesting to figure out the different paths you could take and what you want to face or avoid. So you should start from something that would be interesting or challenging to plot a course through even if the party had full knowledge of the maze layout and room contents and so on.

Then, from that point you can start adding fog of war. But if you add too much fog of war, so that decisions become impossible to make in advance in any kind of meaningful way, it's going to start to become tedious. So I'd actually reserve the fog of war for specific places in the maze, and use props and other things to give the party ways to remove it beyond just going into each tunnel and checking it out. When you use fog of war, I think its important to keep those sections of the maze densely-connected - that is to say, the question should be more about what dangers you blunder into than if you went down a dead end - since that way there will always be a feeling of progress. I'd also liberally sprinkle discoverable short-cuts in those sections - finding an easier way across a section in the future can be a good reward for exploring something you already know the long way through.

For example, the party could start with a map fragment that suggests things about the overall layout, and indicates a handful of abandoned guard posts that would each be likely to have a complete map - so the party can make a choice between navigating blind or going a bit out of their way to get a map from one of the guard posts. Or in a military campaign version of this you could have a mechanic where the party has say 3 forward scouts, who can each check out one route through the maze before the party has to decide which route to actually take and risk their troops to.

But basically, don't make it about confusing twisty paths that turn you around, make it about trade-offs and decisions in the face of partial knowledge.

erikun
2017-06-09, 10:46 AM
The maze is the point. You gave a lot of advice for dungeons in general, but I can do dungeons, I have just historically found mazes to be poor dungeon features for gaming at a table, but now I want to discuss how to do a maze that is fun and gives a unique experience in light of the advantages virtual table tops like roll20 give.
This is because mazes are long, repetitive, and can quickly bog down the campaign if required. Assuming that roughly everything the same danger, due the the party being equally likely to run into everything when they set out, encounters can end up feeling very samey after a short while. And the only solution is really to just keep going, until the party stumbles upon a happy coincidence (find the exit) or explores everything.

Also, mazes have a rather dull solution: just keep walking. As long as the party continues moving throughout the maze and continues to cover places where they haven't been yet, they are ultimately going to arrive at the exit. And this really is the default assumption of what the party is going to do: when the party runs into a dead end, they aren't generally just going to sit down or give up. They're going to keep moving, and covering another place they haven't been.


So would dissuading the party from taking the left-hand/right-hand rule lead to a better experience? perhaps by making it clear from the begining that a key or some other required item is located in the center?
Don't put the entrance along the edge, don't put the exit along the edge, or both. This will eliminate the left-hand/right-hand rule from becoming the obviuos choice.

Although having a maze be there to protect something in the center would make more sense. After all, most mazes are constructed, and so constructed for a reason. Even if the party makes its way from the entrance to the "exit" (really, another entrance) that doesn't mean they've found the thing they are actually looking for, and so they haven't conquered the maze just by leaving it.


Consider it this way: if the party is traveling through a standard dungeon, and the goal (treasure or exit) is in a hidden room which requires a key found elsewhere in the dungeon, then how is that any different from the goals in a maze? The point of the maze, I assume, is to require creative thinking from the party to find the way out - figuring out where they haven't been and where the exit is likely to be. The point of the hidden room is to require creative thinking from the party to locate - figure out that this section which could contain a room has no access, and figure out how to get in. The difference is that the maze can just be brute forced in the most boring way possible to solve (just keep going down new paths) while the hidden room requires some thought. That thought may only be "I smash down the wall with my axe", but at least it requires some originality out of the players.

Plus, the hidden room has a well-crafted dungeon around it. The maze has a very lengthy amount of rather samey material required in order to work.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-06-09, 10:53 AM
Make each corner of the maze interesting and relevant, or full of death traps, this way your amze won't be boring.

This was the way the classic dungeons were done:
http://www.earthlymission.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/classic-dungeons-and-dragons-walkthrough-maps-7.jpg

LibraryOgre
2017-06-09, 11:23 AM
That image was amazing. 13/10, would dog again.

S@tanicoaldo
2017-06-09, 11:29 AM
That image was amazing. 13/10, would dog again.

It's made by Jason Thompson AKA: Mockman, and he has done many D&D Walkthrough Maps all equally amazing. I'm a big fan of his work, google him and take a look, you won't regret.

Mordar
2017-06-09, 01:21 PM
The maze is the point. You gave a lot of advice for dungeons in general, but I can do dungeons, I have just historically found mazes to be poor dungeon features for gaming at a table, but now I want to discuss how to do a maze that is fun and gives a unique experience in light of the advantages virtual table tops like roll20 give.


So would dissuading the party from taking the left-hand/right-hand rule lead to a better experience? perhaps by making it clear from the begining that a key or some other required item is located in the center?

Why is the maze the point?

In the classic labyrinth, the point was that the people tossed in were being sacrificed to the minotaur. The minotaur had home-field advantage (knowing the maze, knowing the people were tossed in) so the point of the maze was to confuse/disorient the people tossed in and make them easier for the minotaur to kill/eat.

In Goblet of Fire we see a maze used to represent a time-based challenge - four people were racing to get to the middle to claim a (booby) prize. Similarly, we've seen Batman have to solve a maze quickly to save the innocent people in the Joker trap before the bomb went off.

In the Saw movie(s) (I don't know this first hand, just what I've heard) we see a maze used for entertaining a third party. People end up stuck in a deadly maze for the amusement of a watcher. They have to suffer through, and perhaps survive, to get their shot at the bad guy.

Finally (though no example comes to mind and that really frustrates me) there is the idea of the maze as a hiding place for a widget. A terribly complex maze featuring all sorts of distractions or hiding places...but with enough time eventually the widget is discovered.

So, is the maze:

Home-field advantage for bad guys?
A timed challenge with badness for coming in second place?
A purpose-placed danger house for the amusement of the owner?
A time sink that is also the resting place of a widget?

NOTE: I intentionally left off "place where people may be left to get lost and starve to death because (a) right/left hand rule and (b) that'd be a dull game even if your game monitors food/water resources.

A combination, of course is possible...but I think without one or more of these, implemented intentionally and with planning, the maze is just a odd-shaped dungeon. Nothing wrong with a dungeon that is built like an ant's nest or rat warren...but that's not a "maze" in my opinion.

So I guess consider the purpose of the maze, along with the history of the maze, and make the design match (both the map and the external factors that make it a maze instead of just an ant's nest).

- M

Bohandas
2017-06-10, 01:37 AM
Almost any party familiar with dungeon crawling and mazes is going to quickly take up a left-hand or right-hand rule, which either means they will start walking in circles and so move to the outer wall, or just follow the outer wall to the left/right sections.

Not if it's multiply connected