How to make a maze work?

[Hussar]

if your players like challenges and a thinking game. If they simply want to hack and slash and gather loot, then avoid the maze as others have suggested

I'll extract the part that I take exception to. You're basically stating a binary situation. Either your players are "smart" and like "challenges and a thinking game" or they're a bunch of drooling morons (the opposite of smart) and like to hack and slash and gather loot.

OTOH, I think that spending hours and hours on minutia, trying to get your players to exactly map out an imaginary place from your descriptions is a MAJOR waste of time.

I guess it boils down to this: What do you want to get out of the set-up? What does a maze actually bring to the game that any number of other options, such as puzzles, riddles or other ideas which take up far less time, don't?

 

[Hellzon]

If you look hard enough, you can probably find an insult in any post; whether it is actually there or not.

It was particularly easy to find one in yours, honey pie.

 

[Dzyu]

Most players probably know the "I only turn right" trick to follow the wall to the exit. Sure it takes longer, but they know they will find the end.

I designed a maze which wouldn't work with that trick. Tracing the walls would lead you into "dead-end" loops or back to the start. I did this by making the corridors very long and curved, so the maze sort of looked like layered spirals, and the floors slightly inclined leading under and above the other tunnels, often making a left become a right and vice versa.

I gave the wizard a blank paper and a pencil, and I had tiny tunnels for an imp to use to harass them as they maneuvered about.
They couldn't get through the tiny tunnels because they didn't have reduce person spells, though this would've made the maze alot easier, and they didn't have a dwarf in the group, nor high enough levels of dungeoneering/engineering to notice that the tunnels were, in fact, inclined, which would also have helped them to understand the complicated design of the maze.

Oddly enough, the wizard figured he should walk in a zig-zag pattern, and wether by luck or geniality, he found the exit and they beat the imp on more fair grounds before it became a problem.

The players were quite intrigued by the design, and I consider the maze a great success, and might use a similar one in the future. It was only one challenge, thus small enough to not be tedious, but it could be bigger and more another time, though I'd had to work alot more on making it interesting.

For mazes I would definitely use curved or erratic corridors, or teleports, and let the players draw themselves, and definitely give them a few hints or options to defeat the maze more easily. Like the druid could encounter walls of roots only he could traverse to help with exploration, reduce person to squeeze through tiny tunnels and such.

I've also done a maze with spinning parts, which was a decent success, and one with strange phenomenon like reversed gravity where you end up in the roof etc, which was hilarious.

A maze with teleports would also quickly destroy any attempt at the "only right" trick.

Whatever you do, make sure you have hints on how to traverse it, or design that allow for creativity.

 

[ScottS]

4e maze = skill challenge (they used that method in at least one of the LFR mods, and I also did a "mechanical trap-filled maze" from an old mod by essentially ignoring the navigation part and just skill-challenging the trap finding/disarming)

Making the players navigate/puzzle-solve the actual maze to get the PCs past the obstacle seems to be one of those "old-school habits we're trying to break" thingies. (You should really only do one if you know that someone in the group enjoys that particular type of puzzle, and make it short unless the entire party is into it.)

 

[Vorput]

It was particularly easy to find one in yours, honey pie.

Who are you responding to Hellzon? This thread is 2 years old!

 

[MarkB]

4e maze = skill challenge (they used that method in at least one of the LFR mods, and I also did a "mechanical trap-filled maze" from an old mod by essentially ignoring the navigation part and just skill-challenging the trap finding/disarming)

Seconded. Skill Challenges work nicely for a maze, and I've seen them done this way successfully in at least two LFR modules. No need to worry about mapping, and the players' progress is measured in their number of successful skill checks.

You don't even need to use a set number of failures if there's no specific time limit involved - instead, each failure results in healing surge loss for either the participant or the whole party, representing anything from fatigue due to repeated backtracking to damage from traps and hazards.

 

[Hellzon]

Who are you responding to Hellzon? This thread is 2 years old!

There isn't a headdeask picture big enough! (How did I even get here? Must have been a link.)

 

[Dzyu]

Who are you responding to Hellzon? This thread is 2 years old!

Hahaha! I lol'd...

Ahh, the beauty of forums... Who ever checks the date, eh? ^^
I thought it was a cool thread and got all fired up... I like mazes...

 

[Aeolius]

mazes, eh?

 

[Dzyu]

Haha. Then there's the matter of appropriate design and presentation... ;P