D&D 5E DM resource: on maze generation

[TheCosmicKid]

Do many folks still run their players through literal mazes? I always imagined they became passe in much the same fashion as they did in computer games and interactive fiction ("twisty little passages" indeed).

Once in a blue moon. They are a classic challenge, after all, and it wouldn't do to dispense with them entirely. The last maze I ran was full of mirrors which, naturally, flipped the party into a mirrored version of the maze whenever they passed one. That didn't take them long to figure out. But the twist within the twist was that the north-south oriented mirrors took them to a north-south mirrored maze, and the east-west oriented mirrors took them to an east-west mirrored maze, and then of course in each of those mazes you could flip the other direction to a maze mirrored both ways. So instead of dealing with two mirrored mazes as they thought, they were dealing with four mazes in two identical pairs.

Because I was fully aware that this could get annoying fast, the maze wasn't actually that big. It was more a matter of learning the trick than navigating the maze.

 

[Gradine]

Once in a blue moon. They are a classic challenge, after all, and it wouldn't do to dispense with them entirely. The last maze I ran was full of mirrors which, naturally, flipped the party into a mirrored version of the maze whenever they passed one. That didn't take them long to figure out. But the twist within the twist was that the north-south oriented mirrors took them to a north-south mirrored maze, and the east-west oriented mirrors took them to an east-west mirrored maze, and then of course in each of those mazes you could flip the other direction to a maze mirrored both ways. So instead of dealing with two mirrored mazes as they thought, they were dealing with four mazes in two identical pairs.

Because I was fully aware that this could get annoying fast, the maze wasn't actually that big. It was more a matter of learning the trick than navigating the maze.

I like this and have used a similar concept a few times myself. I refer to them as un-mazes because they aren't, at the core, actual mazes; that is, the challenge isn't derived from navigating from an entry point to an exit point. Rather, the maze serves as a cover for the actual challenge; the puzzle that the players need to figure out; once the puzzle is solved, the "maze" is essentially (or, at worst, trivially) solved as well. The maze then, serves kind of a role between red herring and framing device. Done well, it's a really neat idea.

Sorry; my partner just bought me The Witness which I've been playing through, so I'm definitely in the headspace to talk conceptually about maze and puzzle design.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

In the campaign I'm currently running the players are coming up to an island that is a literal maze of coral, created by a dragon.

But I have some ideas on how to tackle this maze a little differently. I want to give my players the experience of navigating a maze, without going through endless boring empty corridors. So what I want to do, is show the maze as a relatively small abstract series of tiles. Each tile represents a section of the maze, with many corridors, and a challenge. So rather than focusing on navigating each and every corridor, I want to focus on the interesting things that the players encounter inside those sections.

I suspect there will be a lot of role playing and random encounters, instead of a boring crawl through countless dead ends.

There's nothing wrong with the "abstract maze" technique where you just fast-forward to the action. I've used that before too. But I think there is something worthwhile about "empty rooms" too--the constant high of opening doors to see whether something bites your face off. (If people didn't like that kind of latent tension, thrillers/horror movies wouldn't exist, there would only be action movies!)

But you obviously can't spend half an hour describing intersections to the players and making them say, "I go north", "I go south", "I open the door", etc. The Alexandrian talks about game structures, and how "what the characters do" translates into "how the players do it", and maybe what is needed is a prop of some type. If I were a crafty person, I'd make a physical map with stickers that players could pull off to "enter" certain areas of the dungeon, and then I'd have them take turns pulling off stickers. Since I'm not a crafty person, I made this little example instead:



(from https://maxwilson.github.io/Beast/dunGen/)

That's the experience I'm contemplating giving to the players. Only with more stuff of course--I want it to be apparent to them when they're in an area with lots of slimy creatures, and when they hear loud roaring sounds, and when everything is eerily silent, etc. But the key thing is that I want them to experience the repeated high of going up to that intersection or opening that door, and something nothing happens, and sometimes you find treasure, and sometimes you get attacked or something blows up in your face.

 

[Imaculata]

If I were a crafty person, I'd make a physical map with stickers that players could pull off to "enter" certain areas of the dungeon, and then I'd have them take turns pulling off stickers.

A close friend of mine, and fellow DM, did exactly that. He made a detailed maze, and then added paper flaps that the players could unfold, to reveal parts of the maze. I usually just cover bits and pieces of the dungeon up with pieces of cardboard.

But the key thing is that I want them to experience the repeated high of going up to that intersection or opening that door, and something nothing happens, and sometimes you find treasure, and sometimes you get attacked or something blows up in your face.

This is what I want to focus on as well. I'm reminded of the movie Labyrinth. In that movie, the efforts of the protagonist to navigate the maze aren't the most interesting, and the movie kind of skips over a lot of it. Instead it focuses on all the puzzles and characters she encounters along the way. I want to give my players that thrill of encountering something interesting in the maze, but without the tedium of endless empty corridors. So, much like in that movie, I want to skip over most of the navigating (but not all of it) and focus on the encounters.

Lets say for example that the maze exists out of 16 tiles. Each tile represents a section of the maze, with a ton of corridors and dead ends in it. The players state in which direction they want to go and they make a check to see if they can navigate in that direction successfully. I also roll a random encounter for that tile, which may affect their navigation. I then turn over the next tile. Each tile connects to at least one other tile, but sometimes more.