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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thunderfoot" data-source="post: 3828353" data-attributes="member: 34175">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Hope this helps and Happy Gaming!!!</blockquote>

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