GMing an actual maze

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

Hey folks,

I'll begin with a little anecdote, but the real question is bolded below.

I was just thumbing through the old Book of Challenges today, looking for something to toss at the group tomorrow, and I saw an encounter involving a maze filled with displacer beasts. This immediately made me think of the most recent module I ran , the Barrow of the Forgotten King (fun mod, by the way). In it, there's a magical maze that the characters somehow navigate, and it's populated by critters both helpful and otherwise.

After about two minutes of descibing the maze, and starting to map it out, I just said "you know what, screw this, 3 hours have passed, you finally worked your way through this maze."

I think there's probably a more elegant solution to this problem. How do you run your groups through mazes, giving the players a real sense of being lost and in a bit of danger, without boring them to tears with "do you go left, right, or straight?" for an hour and a half.

This might even have to address the larger problem of how you map out dungeons etc. Is it a player or a DM responsibiilty?

Any input is greatly appreciated!


Happy gaming!

 

[Rabelais]

My players have correctly supposed that to defeat a maze you only have to turn right every single time. Eventually it brings you out the other side.

Kind of takes the fun out of it. Fewer unadorned mazes now. Hello teleport traps.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

My players have correctly supposed that to defeat a maze you only have to turn right every single time. Eventually it brings you out the other side.

Kind of takes the fun out of it. Fewer unadorned mazes now. Hello teleport traps.

But how do you present them in the game? Do you describe each turn? Do you map it out?

 

[Uder]

Mazes generally aren't fun, from the point of the players or the DM. We have a fairly inexperienced DM who hasn't learned this, and damned if he didn't try to run us through the mazes in Rappan Athuk by drawing out the maze on the battlemat and making us walk through round by round. We just about rebelled, but he persisted until we hit the inevitable teleport traps. Wheee. What fun. Now we're scattered without our wizard. RA was decent fun up until then, but we had a general "unfun" revolt, and I doubt we're going to ever finish the module.

Use mazes at your peril, no matter how iconic they may be in fantasy literature. The last time I used one, I simply mapped the entrance and exits, then required intelligence rolls (this was a LONG time ago... 2nd edition game) and pure luck to figure out how long it took and where players exited. If I ever use a maze again I've been thinking of just handing it out as an actual puzzle. The players would have to physically draw their route through the maze (in pen!) while I timed them, and then I'd adjudicate it based on how long they took and the actual route they drew.

My players have correctly supposed that to defeat a maze you only have to turn right every single time. Eventually it brings you out the other side.

This is generally true, unless there is a "free-floating" section within the maze. Of course, this just makes a maze even more dull and frustrating, so what's the point?

 

[davidschwartznz]

Topologically and narratively, a maze is just really long, twisted hallway. If it doesn't have interesting rooms branching off it, its going to be about as interesting as a straight, doorless passage. In other words, in most cases, a maze should be used to divide encounters, not as an encounter in and of itself.

 

[Agamon]

Mazes. Ugh. Here's how I run them: note the corridor entering the maze, note the corridor leaving the maze, then ignore everything in between. A small maze-like area with an encounter that utilizes the environment to make it more fun is okay, anything else is not worth the unfun headache.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If someone has figured out a great way to run a maze, I sure haven't heard about it, in almost three decades of gaming. It's frustrating, because, yeah, they should be part of gaming, thanks to Theseus and the minotaur, but they just seem to suck, whether in tabletop or computer RPGs.

About the last time a maze was fun for me was in "Adventure" on the Atari 2600, but that was because there were cool secret areas off the mazes that I knew were there somewhere. Plenty of other people just hit Reset whenever they got stuck in one of the mazes, though.

 

[Thunderfoot]

WOW!!!
How times have changed! I can remember the old days when a maze meant fun had by all...
So let me give a few tips that may help to alleviate the boredom, hopefully you can discover the fun of a twisting hallway.

First, read some mythology - the original maze the labyrinth, was not a static set of hallways, but shifted as you negotiated. Frustrating, yes, challenging you bet, fun...maybe, the minotaur always seemed to be the reason for the fun, and if the minotaur takes the treasure to the center of the maze, its all the more reason to negotiate it. So the real tips is to make the maze needed, not just something to stick in. Rumors of the maze and the treasures hidden within should be enough to have adventurers running with their armor around their ankles to get in.

Second, build some templates - drawing a static maze on a battle mat and then forcing your players to walk through...lame. Laying out a board that has sliding tiles that not only track the maze changes but visually display the mayhem...priceless. It requires a little extra effort, but its worth it. As an alternative, to add frustration value and really make the players think, just draw the hallway on the battle mat and keep track of the party on your sliding board in secret...the resulting map the players draw is quite humorous to look at a few weeks later...make sure you can unlock the doors to your car and make a quick escape on the night you play it. For an example - Ravensburger games has a game called Labyrinth that used this principal and is a great resource for research and inspiration - I highly suggest looking into it.

Third, ditch the technical readout and schematic description and focus on the fluff. The point of a maze it to be confusing, If it isn't, then you have failed. It is meant to be a challenge, if it isn't you have failed. If your description of this challenging confusing place is "you see a hallway 30 feet long with a turn to the left and the right...which way do you go?", please turn in your DMG and request that your players pelt you with d20s until you are bleeding and bruised and will never, ever do that again. The description should be less hallway length by hallway depth by turn this or that and more feel. For example:

*** "This hallway forms into a bending turn. As you round the bend you feel nauseous, and your sense of direction feels skewed. The lights from your torches begin to dim and your darkvision and low-light vision fail beyond the boundaries of your light sources. The air grows thick and the sounds from the halls echo, first from the left, then the right, all around you and yet, too distant to be discernible. You feel eyes upon you, breath on the back of your neck, but there is no one there. As amble forward the hall ends in a wall, as you turn around expecting the hallway to lead back the way you came, it appear that it now veers off to the left. From somewhere in front of you, or maybe behind you, a low guttural laughter, interspersed with a snort sends chills racing down your spine..." ***

The key is roleplaying and story-telling. If you are focused only on the combat aspects of the game, then leave mazes to other people; they will only be an exercise in boredom. If you run the description correctly, add some mode music or sound effects, dim the lights as you play, the effect can be chilling and even provoke that sense of fear that a well run labyrinth is meant to achieve. A well planned, balanced and though out labyrinth could (and probably should) be an adventure all by itself with very little added to it. Of course, a really good maze as part of a much larger dungeon sprawl is also pretty good, especially if that maze is a single level of a multi-level sprawl and the entrance(s) and exit(s) are just stairs.

- side note - Having rooms reachable only by certain sets of stairs (that are just as random as the hallways) in the labyrinth, is a good way to hide those all important magic items or large treasure caches. Nice bonus if the players find them. You can make them even more random by adding them into a chart for your tiles and then roll to see which tile you add to your sliding board.-

A maze CAN BE FUN!!!! No, really, they can, but they are only as much fun as you make them. They require a ton of work, but the effect can be memorable. Hey, it worked for Homer.
Hope this helps and Happy Gaming!!!

 

[Drowbane]

Unadorned mazes are dull and boring and best skipped over... however "the Maze" can still be quite enjoyable. In a way, its (or one of) the original dungeon model.

 

[SiderisAnon]

Mazes Are About The Story

You can have a lot of fun with a maze, but only if you play it right.

I agree with Thunderfoot that what is fun about a maze is the story. If the point of a maze is that the bad guy can get through it because he knows the path and you have to track him, then it probably should be reduced to a few rolls and some encounters along the way -- but only mechanically. The story, the storytelling, the description, the mood you set as the DM, that is what makes the maze really fun.

However, mazes can also be all about what is going on inside of them.


Let me paint you a simple picture: Large hedge maze which cannot be overcome magically. The party has to spread out through the maze, playing hide and seek both with their quarry and their enemy. Their quarry is one or more members of the royal family who they are here to rescue. Their enemy is a group of assassins, also spread out through the maze, who are trying to take out the royals and if need by the meddling PCs. This is not about drawing a map on the table. Heck, you don't even need a map. This is all about hit and run encounters, glimpses of various people at the intersections of rows up ahead, and running around corners only to loose the person you were chasing or the one who was chasing you. Done right, this could be a very dramatic encounter.

If you want to go totally movie, have the cumulation be a fight at the center of the maze at a large fountain or a gazebo or statue garden or some other interesting location.



I have, in fact, run a maze that was not only a blast but which the one player I still have from 10 years ago still talks about the adventure to the newer players. I couldn't tell you why they were in the maze or what they were after, but I remember how horribly wrong it all went for them. This maze I really did draw out, but only because there was a pattern to the traps so you could learn to avoid them. (Which unfortunately, the party never noticed, but that was part of the fun, honestly.) There were dozens of encounters in there. There were hallways where gravity worked differently. There were traps that did horrible things to you. And I generated it all on the fly, working from a piece of scratch paper with three lines on it. (But I kept consulting a folder, so they THOUGHT there was a map.)

By the end, the rogue was crawling point. The cleric was walking slowly behind him and healing him regularly. The others were in a paranoid haze waiting for something else to attack.

I really don't remember what the adventure was about or why they didn't just leave. I know there was a story there. However, I do know that the maze was an absolute blast for both the DM and the players and it's still talked about a decade later.

So, yeah, mazes can be fun, but only if you do them right and only if you sculpt them to what your players will enjoy.