Unusual Dungeon Navigation

[M.T. Black]

Has anyone seen good examples of unusual dungeon navigation done well?

What I mean is this - typically if you walk through the door in the north wall, you end up in a room to the north of your prior location. Has anyone had any experience with a different way of navigating about a dungeon - and in a way that did not completely frustrate the players?

In the Doom video game, you navigate around some levels using teleporters and its quite fun figuring out where everything goes. Is this an idea that works in D&D, in your experience?

Also, do mazes have a place in the game? Or are they too tedious in practice?

 

[Nagol]

I've seen a few over the years. Judge's Guild had a neat tesseract the party had to navigate. Gravity shifts, teleporters, shifting rooms, and traps that provide one-way travel to other sections of the dungeon can all work well for a group that is interested in location exploration.

Mazes don't work that well. Getting through a maze is pretty boring -- there are a bunch of decision points with no real stakes (other than time) and little data available to base the choice on. Some parties will develop a standard operating procedure and exhaustively explore it. Others will adopt a simple strategy that will defeat most mazes like the keep-your-right-hand-on the wall tactic. Others will randomly wander. Others will begin to cut through the maze. So that means the designer needs to include things to find and things to avoid in the maze. Now it looks like a dungeon inside a dungeon so what is the point of the maze again? Sometimes mazes can be thematically valuable or a dungeon inside a dungeon can offer a respite from the sameness of the exterior environment, but common art has generally moved away from the mega dungeon where they offer the most utility.

 

[LordEntrails]

Here's my thoughts.

The tesseract approach is fun and interesting IF and ONLY IF the GM understands it and the players have the ability to comprehend the 3D nature of it. Otherwise players either become frustrated or dismissive.

I have to agree on mazes, usually they seem best approached in a thematic manner only rather than trying to actually "map" or define them. Especially if magic is involved making mapping impossible or unreliable. I don't enjoy those myself because I'm a geometry visualizer (I can see the fantasy world/map in 3D around me) and these 'magical' mazes defy that. It's frustrating.

Teleporters work, and can be fun. You just have to decide how and when the players become aware that such are in action. They need to have some way of being predictable even if random. Some way that once they understand something is unusual, they can figure out what is happening and then figure out hwo to use it or control it to meet their needs.

I do like the idea of a dungeon similar to that presented in the video game Portal. But I haven't tried doing such yet. Such would require good player aids, probably for each step or type of challenge (easily done in a video game, no so on a table). But I also imagine players coming up with "Ok, I shoot through the green hole at an angle so that when it comes out the other green hole it bounces off the red wall and shoots the wizard in the back!"

 

[aramis erak]

One of the 5E playtest dungeons for league play had such teleport issues. I disliked it.