Creating a Maze - But not a Big One

[SpikeFightwicky]

Howdy folks,

So I have a dungeon themed on hunger and excess and for the penultimate room, I want to have a mini-maze (intestines). Nothing too drastic. However, I currently have a 55ftx55ft room (slightly bigger than the "Maze room - 49" in Tomb of Annihilation). So what would be a good style of layout? The entrance is in the upper middle, and the exit is in the upper west corner. I'd like a few straight corridors, as the obstacles will include deathlok whites fused into the walls, who can aim down the corridors, and incorporeal undead that can move through the walls. Additional traps will involve acid coming down from the ceiling if... something is touched, or pressed, or whatever... (ideas welcome!). I don't want Minotaur style maze where it's 100% twisty corridors, but it would have long hallways at certain parts.... again, similar to Room 49 in ToA, but a bit bigger and more maze-like. Not sure if the description makes sense :smallyuk:

Any ideas?

Thank you!

[Segev]

I’ll try to find my favorite maze I ever made for you when I’m not on my phone.

However, for players in an RPG at a table, I recommend an abstracted maze. Have destination sites (usually rooms) and maze sections.

Every site’s exits lead to one maze section. Maze sections have exits on various rooms and adjacent maze sections. Each maze section has a DC to navigate it, probably running off of survival or dungeoneering.

Each roll is some period of time (probably 5 or 10 minutes). If they fail the roll or aren’t looking for somewhere in particular, they wind up at a random exit (or in the same section again). If they succeed, they get to the exit they have in mind.

Successful deliberate navigation to a destination gives a circumstance bonus of +2 to all future rolls following the exact same path.

[SpikeFightwicky]

I’ll try to find my favorite maze I ever made for you when I’m not on my phone.

However, for players in an RPG at a table, I recommend an abstracted maze. Have destination sites (usually rooms) and maze sections.

Every site’s exits lead to one maze section. Maze sections have exits on various rooms and adjacent maze sections. Each maze section has a DC to navigate it, probably running off of survival or dungeoneering.

Each roll is some period of time (probably 5 or 10 minutes). If they fail the roll or aren’t looking for somewhere in particular, they wind up at a random exit (or in the same section again). If they succeed, they get to the exit they have in mind.

Successful deliberate navigation to a destination gives a circumstance bonus of +2 to all future rolls following the exact same path.

Yeah it seems abstract might be a bit better. Roll20 kind of makes everything very obvious!

[Segev]

Yeah it seems abstract might be a bit better. Roll20 kind of makes everything very obvious!

And there's a huge difference between mazes played by looking down on them and mazes played by running through them. You CAN run a maze that they look down on and make it tricky by making them make snap decisions, but it always feels forced.

This old thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?519073-how-to-make-a-maze-labyrinth-interesting) has more discussion on mazes in general, and I gave a more detailed description of abastracting a maze in post 24. The maze I mentioned before is on page two, but I'll also still post it here:

https://stormlord.us/Images/No%20Dead%20Ends.png

[LordCdrMilitant]

I have done mazes by keeping my side/the unexplored areas of the entire maze secret, and describing the corridors they move through and the junctions they meet. That way, they can keep track and solve the maze, but also get the idea of running the maze without having a top-down view of it.

[Man_Over_Game]

Yeah it seems abstract might be a bit better. Roll20 kind of makes everything very obvious!

There is a free function to hide/reveal areas to the players, done by dragging areas to reveal with a rectangle-drag with your mouse. It solves that problem pretty easily, although it can be a bit tedious.

[jjordan]

However, for players in an RPG at a table, I recommend an abstracted maze. Have destination sites (usually rooms) and maze sections.
Yeah, abstract is the way to go, in my opinion. You can alter Segev's basic approach in a number of ways.

You can set a DC for navigating the maze and a time period and allow them to make a check (individual or group) at the end of each time period to see if they succeed in navigating the section.

You can assume they can navigate the maze and it's just a matter of time. Set a DC and have them roll and subtract time from the task if they exceed the DC and add time to the task if they fail the DC.

If random encounters are a function of time (roll every X minutes) then the longer they spend in the maze the more danger they face.

I did a bramble maze surrounding a dungeon and it had three 'layers' and players had to successfully navigate each layer to reach the dungeon in the center. If they rolled bad enough on their navigation they went back a layer. It went well, they worked as a team, made smart choices, got a little lucky on their rolls, and ended up following a twig blight through the last two layers.

[FabulousFizban]

concentric circles

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I like the abstract maze idea with rooms and sections between them.

I'd also argue though that 55 by 55 foot is pretty small, small enough to be run as a literal maze at the table, especially if players are taking notes. Assuming a corridor including walls can be build from standard 5x5ft tiles the whole maze is only 11 by 11 squares. A single 5x4 tiles chamber would take up one sixth of the space inside the maze. A 5x4 room, two 3x4 rooms, an8 tile corridor and two 5 tile corridors together take up just over half the space in the maze. Add in a dead end or two as well as one or two ways for the characters to get back to places they've already been, and a 4x4 square of inaccessible space to drive anyone who's trying to get a complete map mad, and the map is already mostly complete. I could draw something like that up if you'd like? Then you can add doors and traps (and a tiny little minotaur, maybe like a half halfling half sheep) as you see fit.

EDIT: I did just that. Here's a maze with suggestions for doors (whether they be just regular doors, locked ones or slightly hidden versions) and a single one way slide/portal/wall of goop/something.
https://i.postimg.cc/D0WnVqNY/11x11maze.png
It will probably be a little frustrating to play in a maze like this, especially if the players realize how small it actually is, and how much of the difficulty stems from the format of play rather than the maze itself (this maze would be child's play if you were actually running around in it, not accounting for any traps). But I'd say overall there is some decent potential to get lost, there's enough space for traps and challenges and it is still possible to find the way our based on nothing but descriptions of what the characters see. (Also: be sure to place any challenges you're proud of on the main unskippable paths.)

EDIT: Okay, I seem to have skipped the "supposed to represent the intestines" part, and this part as well:

The entrance is in the upper middle, and the exit is in the upper west corner.

But you know, that second one in particular wouldn't be too hard to fix. The exit is already in the right place...

[Mutazoia]

I guess it depends on how mean you want to be. At my most sadistic I had every 10' of wall actually be a rotating section that turned 90' in either direction, but only once. (They reset after 5 minutes.) Not only did they have to figure out which walls to turn in which direction, but it was very easy early on to end up splitting the party if you were not careful of which side of the rotating section everyone was standing on when you rotated it.

[Duff]

I guess it depends on how mean you want to be. At my most sadistic I had every 10' of wall actually be a rotating section that turned 90' in either direction, but only once. (They reset after 5 minutes.) Not only did they have to figure out which walls to turn in which direction, but it was very easy early on to end up splitting the party if you were not careful of which side of the rotating section everyone was standing on when you rotated it.

Mutazoia's response hilights a key question...
Is the maze a challenge for the players to solve?
Or a challenge for characters?
or is it really just an environment for the interesting monsters?

[Segev]

I found an old example of an abstract maze I made a while back, already on my webspace!

https://stormlord.us/Images/AbstractMaze.png

This one I made and was going to put there when I found it:

https://stormlord.us/Images/AbstractMazeSimplerExample.png

That second one is simpler because you really just need d3s, d4s, and d6s to roll to see where people wind up. The earlier one is more complex, defining odds of finding any particular exit from each maze section.

Define Survival DCs to backtrack/retrace paths you already know, and I think you're good to go.

[LibraryOgre]

I played in a 4e/fourthcore game that had the maze be a game of Memory. 10*10 grid of cards. Each match took a certain amount of time. Find two treasure chests, get some doodads. Find two monsters, get a random encounter. Find some landmarks, get further through the maze. Find ANY minotaur? You got a minotaur to face.

[Kyutaru]

This is D&D so why not a little old fashioned cheating?

A maze with secret doors that lead to other passages. Heck, Labyrinth had one that led straight to the castle. A maze with vertical obstacles to overcome for either shortcuts or intended passage. Climb checks are really useful here. A maze where you need to flip the lever that happens to be on the other side of a boiling pit of tar with nothing but rocks to hop on. A maze with guardians that pose a riddle that determines which door you get to pass through and it's a one-way door. A maze with illusionary walls or walls that fill in as you pass them. The challenge is similar to fighting a monster. Figuring out the rules and what the maze is weak against then beating it at its own game.

My favorite mazes are the ones where the solution was right at the start the entire time. You just didn't realize it.

Oh and then there's Final Fantasy mazes where every room looks identical to the last one. You get lost really fast in these.