When creating your "dungeon" do you really make it a "maze"?

dreaded_beast · Feb 27, 2004

When I used to read the old BASIC DND books, one thing about dungeons was trying to explore a "labrynith" and finding one's way out of a "maze".

In my opinion, this sounds good on paper, but is hard to execute in-game, at least for me it is.

As a new DM, I find that I would rather not deal with the hassle of making a "maze" or a "labrynith" and then having my player try to map it out. I find myself making a fairly small and straightforward dungeon, with a few turns and doors here and there, with some sort of logic to it.

Does anyone still make huge labryniths or mazes to challenge their players (and possibly themselves?)

I'm A Banana · Feb 27, 2004

Mazes are pretty lame, because it takes a while for the chars to slog through them. Unless there's a good reason for a maze, or you're running a dungeon crawl anyway, I usually make them fairly striaghtforward, designed for ease of use for those that live there, with the occasional 'tricky corridor' for places like lairs or treasure hordes, which they'd want to protect more. That is, of course, when dungeons play a role IMC at all...

FireLance · Feb 27, 2004

IMO, mazes are too much trouble for too little pay-off. Offhand, I can't think of any situation where I would want to make PCs navigate a maze.

Beale Knight · Feb 27, 2004

I've got to agree. I'm only just now getting back into DMing a campaign, but the couple of "dungeons" I've used haven't resembled mazes at all.

Under most circumstances a dungeon maze just blows the suspension of disbelief for me. It's not the twists and turns and strangely angled rooms and halls - my new workplace is like that and I don't have any problem believing in it. It's all the dead space between the halls and rooms. So many dungeon maps feature long halls connecting rooms with what must hundreds of square feet of potentially usable space just ignored. Unless someone was building a dungeon by expanding an existing natural tunnel system, I just don't get why they wouldn't keep things as compact as possible.

These:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mapofweek/02catswerdng_72dpi_bni35t.jpg

drive me nuts for those reasons,

These:

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mapofweek/Stout_Stronghold_3_72dpi.jpg

are the style I try to use and design.

reiella · Feb 27, 2004

I personally only have two mazes in my campaign.

One that emulates the madness of Undermountain which comes close to defeating the point of mapping in the first place.

And the other is a maze to better guard an artifact.

The (in game) crafters intended for a maze for their own purposes

, but for the most part, I don't like mapping myself so I swipe other maps, which are not mazes for the most part.

pogre · Feb 27, 2004

Mazes fall under "mapping challenges" for me, which usually are dull for the players. It's one of the things I have dropped out of my dungeons almost entirely.

spunky_mutters · Feb 27, 2004

I generally have to convince myself of an in-game reason to make something mazelike. The closest I have come in my current campaign is some movable walls that a group of kobolds had built to split up and redirect intruders. This made a fairly simple cave into a maze of corridors. Of course the players wisely decided not to chase the kobolds in, so I haven't had a chance to play it out.

For the most part, mazes are just tedious.

Eternalknight · Feb 27, 2004

If you are interested in maze building and running PC's through them, you could check out Campaign Options: Mazes (http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=509&products_id=2318&) by Emerald Press.

Piratecat · Feb 27, 2004

I'd argue that mazes can be fun if the group is running from, or after, someone. "You head out the door. Left or right? Okay, right. You can hear his footsteps somewhere ahead of you, and the sound of him dragging the paladin's stolen holy sword. The corridor ends in a T. Left or right?"

Otherwise, they're a pain in the butt that I never bother to map.

Shemeska · Feb 27, 2004

What Piratecat said, they're a pain in the butt. I rarely have such layout's for "dungeons" in any game I run, they don't make much sense unless it actually is intended to be a labyrinth from the start. If it's a fortress or similar place, they'd be pretty modular in layout or else the owner's own people would get lost too. I'm big on having anything like that have a logical ecology going on inside.

There are no 'you walk into the next room, there is a starving giant in here. He growls at you and lifts his club' to which the players might say, 'But dude, like the last room had all the kobold babies in there, why didn't he eat them? And how is he in here when he can't fit in any of the doors? This is lamer than 'the 1d4 demogorgons we had to fight last week in that random forest encounter'

I don't do random monsters in randomly generated rooms. Everything is mapped and planned out in excrutiating detail. A maze doesn't make sense to me on a few levels and I'd shy away from using them because unless you fully draw it out you're left making random monster rolls. And I dare say I don't like giving up that level of control.

The only time I've ever had a 'maze' was when it was literally one the Mazes of The Lady of Pain in my Planescape campaign that the PC's had been forced to enter from its exterior in the Deep Ethereal in order to find information from one of the maze's original occupants. And even then I didn't fully map out everything, but rather had then perform some intuit direction rolls and based on that describe the terrain, any progress they made in reaching a specific area of the maze they could see rising off in the distance.

[The maze took the form of a portion of Sigil ripped away and spun off on itself, replicated over and over, the streets seemed to lead back to each other upon 'wrong turns', and a black void of a sky overhead where there would normally have been the other side of the ring of the City of Doors.]