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Strigon
2020-04-24, 12:43 PM
Hey all, I'm looking for your help designing a robust, logical system for exploring undergound ruins that will be visited multiple times.

So, I plan on running an urban campaign in the not-too-distant future, and the city will be built on top of an underground ruined city. Obviously, then, these ruins will be visited multiple times during the campaign. Therefore, I want a system less random than a simple encounter table - so they know when they've visited the same place multiple times, and also so we have a reliable way of tracking how far they are from the exit, for example - but less simple than just a hexmap. The ruins are meant to be filled with twists and turns, so I want to keep some chance of them getting lost, even in an area they've already been through. That can't happen if they can see the whole hexmap in front of them.

The ruins are too big, and mostly uninhabited, so it doesn't make sense to have each and every corridor mapped out.

Right now, I'm thinking of working from a hexmap, but only letting the players see their hex, and the immediate vicinity (Online game, so hiding and revealing sections is very simple,) but I'm hoping to design something that adds a bit more chance or uncertainty to the mix.

So, here's what I'm looking for from the system in a nutshell.

Places and rough distances MUST be consistent (IE, section A leads to sections B and F, but never D. This doesn't change next time you visit.)
Uncertainty in outcome, either because of poor rolls or faulty memories. Getting lost is possible, even if you've traveled the route before.
Enough abstraction that a complete map of every room is unnecessary.
Ideally, the system should be simple enough for the players to have a basic grasp of what's happening behind the scenes.
Ideally, the players should be given meaningful choices to affect the outcome of travel.



Does anyone have even a rough idea of what I could do to make this work? I obviously don't expect you guys to build an entire system from the ground up, but if anyone has an idea for a basic mechanic, or knows of another system that does this sort of thing well, I'd appreciate it greatly!

Quertus
2020-04-24, 01:16 PM
Places and rough distances MUST be consistent (IE, section A leads to sections B and F, but never D. This doesn't change next time you visit.)
Uncertainty in outcome, either because of poor rolls or faulty memories. Getting lost is possible, even if you've traveled the route before.

Ideally, the players should be given meaningful choices to affect the outcome of travel.





So, numerous things (including making spot/search checks, 50' of rope, explosives, or intentionally digging / collapsing tunnels) can potentially change the routing, so that A now leads to B and D but not F. Adding in that fact may itself give you some of that player agency you described.

If I were a PC, and my party were the only one able to affect the landscape, and we somehow got lost despite following my map/notes / coloured strings / chalk marks (let alone all three), I would call shenanigans. However, if we were chasing someone *while* running from monsters, and going by memory in flickering torchlight / minimal flashlights? If we're not relying on some shared "Peter Panda" jingle? Yeah, we could easily run into issues.

So… shrug? I guess I'd just rely on player skill: either they tell me something as OCD as I would use, or they have to tell me themselves which turns they take.

Segev
2020-04-24, 02:11 PM
This thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?519073-how-to-make-a-maze-labyrinth-interesting) discussed mazes. In posts #17 and #24, I discuss an idea for abstracting a maze.

The basic idea being that you have a layout of rooms, and then instead of maping out corridors connecting them, you have "maze sections" that they open onto. The first time into any given Maze Section, the PCs roll randomly to see where they wind up, with there being a table for each Maze Section that points to each door that opens onto it and potentially onto other Maze Sections, or even back to itself (for betting lost and turned around within it). Each roll represents some unit of time exploring - maybe 5 minutes for most in-a-dungeon mazes, maybe up to an hour for using a forest or massive cavern system as a "maze" - and thus rolling represents the time it took to get to this new spot.

If you've been along a particular path before, each Maze Section has a skill DC (probably Survival, but something Int-based might work, too) to try to retrace that path. Add 2 to the DC if you're going backwards along a path you've followed. No need to increase DC for longer paths; you just record the paths they followed, and they can use those as their path back. So if they went from "Room 1" into "Maze Section A," and their random walk took them to Maze Section A again, then Room 3, then they entered Maze Section B, which took them to Room 2, and they later found themseves back in Room 1 and wanted to go to Room 2, they could either try exploring a new path, or they could attempt to go through Maze Section A to Maze Section A (a single roll on the skill check to verify they can trace that path), then from Maze Section A to Room 3 (another roll to verify they can make it), and then from Room 3 through Maze Section B to Room 2 (a third navigation roll).

If they want to go from Room 2 back to Room 1 by retracing, they do each of those in reverse order with +2 to the DC. (After doing it successfully in reverse order, they lose the DC penalty.) If they later find a path from Room 2 through Maze Section A to Room 1, they can trace that rather than the longer path they'd found.

Failure to trace a known path means you got lost and roll randomly as if exploring a new way.



The strength of this method is that you can have various key locations with interesting things to find, and not have to worry about connecting them or players actually moving through open world in the right direction. Just roll to see where they wind up when they're in the uninteresting "maze" part of things.

Strigon
2020-04-24, 03:28 PM
So, numerous things (including making spot/search checks, 50' of rope, explosives, or intentionally digging / collapsing tunnels) can potentially change the routing, so that A now leads to B and D but not F. Adding in that fact may itself give you some of that player agency you described.

If I were a PC, and my party were the only one able to affect the landscape, and we somehow got lost despite following my map/notes / coloured strings / chalk marks (let alone all three), I would call shenanigans. However, if we were chasing someone *while* running from monsters, and going by memory in flickering torchlight / minimal flashlights? If we're not relying on some shared "Peter Panda" jingle? Yeah, we could easily run into issues.

So… shrug? I guess I'd just rely on player skill: either they tell me something as OCD as I would use, or they have to tell me themselves which turns they take.

Well, first off, the party won't be the only ones affecting the landscape - the ruins are their own ecosystem, albeit a mosty empty one. People go down there for shady business deals and the like, so there would be other chalk marks and strings, for example. Besides, you've never gotten lost in a city? It happens. And it would happen even more if the streets were tunnels and the city were ruined. Sure, your odds of getting from point to point would improve with experience, but it wouldn't be immediately obvious if you went one tunnel too far or too short. So you carry on making turns that you think are correct, until you hit a landmark that obviously shouldn't be there (or miss one that should). But by that point, who knows how far you've got?
Keep in mind, this is the scale of a city - between tunnels collapsed years ago, and the different levels involved, points A and B could be several miles apart.

I do like that thought for agency, though. You don't need a whole minigame to add depth.


This thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?519073-how-to-make-a-maze-labyrinth-interesting) discussed mazes. In posts #17 and #24, I discuss an idea for abstracting a maze.

The basic idea being that you have a layout of rooms, and then instead of maping out corridors connecting them, you have "maze sections" that they open onto. The first time into any given Maze Section, the PCs roll randomly to see where they wind up, with there being a table for each Maze Section that points to each door that opens onto it and potentially onto other Maze Sections, or even back to itself (for betting lost and turned around within it). Each roll represents some unit of time exploring - maybe 5 minutes for most in-a-dungeon mazes, maybe up to an hour for using a forest or massive cavern system as a "maze" - and thus rolling represents the time it took to get to this new spot.

If you've been along a particular path before, each Maze Section has a skill DC (probably Survival, but something Int-based might work, too) to try to retrace that path. Add 2 to the DC if you're going backwards along a path you've followed. No need to increase DC for longer paths; you just record the paths they followed, and they can use those as their path back. So if they went from "Room 1" into "Maze Section A," and their random walk took them to Maze Section A again, then Room 3, then they entered Maze Section B, which took them to Room 2, and they later found themseves back in Room 1 and wanted to go to Room 2, they could either try exploring a new path, or they could attempt to go through Maze Section A to Maze Section A (a single roll on the skill check to verify they can trace that path), then from Maze Section A to Room 3 (another roll to verify they can make it), and then from Room 3 through Maze Section B to Room 2 (a third navigation roll).

If they want to go from Room 2 back to Room 1 by retracing, they do each of those in reverse order with +2 to the DC. (After doing it successfully in reverse order, they lose the DC penalty.) If they later find a path from Room 2 through Maze Section A to Room 1, they can trace that rather than the longer path they'd found.

Failure to trace a known path means you got lost and roll randomly as if exploring a new way.



The strength of this method is that you can have various key locations with interesting things to find, and not have to worry about connecting them or players actually moving through open world in the right direction. Just roll to see where they wind up when they're in the uninteresting "maze" part of things.

That's an intriguing method, and similar to something I toyed with earlier - though I didn't separate the mazes and rooms so neatly.
I like some of the choices that this could raise - Do we go through maze section A, which we've travelled, but is also connected to this dangerous area? Or do we go through a different section we haven't explored?

Segev
2020-04-24, 03:55 PM
That's an intriguing method, and similar to something I toyed with earlier - though I didn't separate the mazes and rooms so neatly.
I like some of the choices that this could raise - Do we go through maze section A, which we've travelled, but is also connected to this dangerous area? Or do we go through a different section we haven't explored?

Right. And you can do things like let them leave trails so they can follow them back. If the trail is unmistakable and nothing interferes with it, it can even be automatic. But you can also make it just give circumstance bonuses to their checks (they might miss a mark, for example).

And you can key random encounters and wandering monsters based on rooms dangerous areas connected up.

It's also worth noting that you can have maze A connect to maze B, if you want. This is very modular; the biggest thing I recommend is making a loose graph of rooms and "maze sections" and drawing lines between them, roughly positioned on a page so you don't accidentally make it non-euclidean. (Of course, you CAN map a non-euclidean, hyper-dimensional maze with this method, as well. It's a powerful tool for organizing such things. But don't do it unless you intend to!)

Strigon
2020-04-24, 04:23 PM
Right. And you can do things like let them leave trails so they can follow them back. If the trail is unmistakable and nothing interferes with it, it can even be automatic. But you can also make it just give circumstance bonuses to their checks (they might miss a mark, for example).

And you can key random encounters and wandering monsters based on rooms dangerous areas connected up.

It's also worth noting that you can have maze A connect to maze B, if you want. This is very modular; the biggest thing I recommend is making a loose graph of rooms and "maze sections" and drawing lines between them, roughly positioned on a page so you don't accidentally make it non-euclidean. (Of course, you CAN map a non-euclidean, hyper-dimensional maze with this method, as well. It's a powerful tool for organizing such things. But don't do it unless you intend to!)

What I'm thinking of right now is a slight modification on this. Using the basic idea of sites connected to mazes, and rolls to determine where you exit a maze.
Leaving a site is instantaneous and 100% reliable - it takes no time, and you use the exit you intended. Leaving a maze takes an hour, and requires a check if you know where you're going, which can range from hard (given directions, but no experience or map) to easy (gone from this maze to that site multiple times before.)
Fail that check, or if you don't have any knowledge of your destination, and you exit to a random area that maze is connected to.

For simplicity's sake, I'll likely ignore origin into the maze (So, Site A -> Maze A -> Site B will require the same check as Site C -> Maze A -> Site B, but not Site D -> Maze B -> Site B)


Yeah, I like this a lot. It aso allows me to see how close it is to the surface (number of nodes away from the nearest exit), which is a useful tool to check how civilized an area should be.
I can even set up treasure hunts, if the party bites - maybe they only know the sites, but aren't given the directions? And Darkest Dungeon-style long crawls where they need to prepare rations and such for a long trek are a possibility, too.

Thanks very much; I think this will do very nicely!

Segev
2020-04-24, 04:27 PM
What I'm thinking of right now is a slight modification on this. Using the basic idea of sites connected to mazes, and rolls to determine where you exit a maze.
Leaving a site is instantaneous and 100% reliable - it takes no time, and you use the exit you intended. Leaving a maze takes an hour, and requires a check if you know where you're going, which can range from hard (given directions, but no experience or map) to easy (gone from this maze to that site multiple times before.)
Fail that check, or if you don't have any knowledge of your destination, and you exit to a random area that maze is connected to.

For simplicity's sake, I'll likely ignore origin into the maze (So, Site A -> Maze A -> Site B will require the same check as Site C -> Maze A -> Site B, but not Site D -> Maze B -> Site B)


Yeah, I like this a lot. It aso allows me to see how close it is to the surface (number of nodes away from the nearest exit), which is a useful tool to check how civilized an area should be.
I can even set up treasure hunts, if the party bites - maybe they only know the sites, but aren't given the directions? And Darkest Dungeon-style long crawls where they need to prepare rations and such for a long trek are a possibility, too.

Thanks very much; I think this will do very nicely!
Glad to have helped! Hope it works out well! :)