How to make a maze work?
- Thread starter KrazyHades
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TheAuldGrump
First Post
Heh, just because it's two years old won't stop me from answering! 
I used a maze just a couple of months ago, to good effect. I cheated to a certain extent - a circular maze with thick walls drawn on easel pad paper, glued to foam core board, then cut out to make something like a jig saw puzzle. Pieces were placed as the PCs came upon them, and left - the players were assumed to be competent enough to find their way back out.
Add four evil black floaties, each starting in a different quarter of the maze, and a central vault. The odds favored meeting up with two of the ghosties separately, with the other two meeting up with the team right in the middle. (Essentially Ghost Touch walls, to keep the beasties from just walking through the walls at the PCs.)
The Auld Grump
I used a maze just a couple of months ago, to good effect. I cheated to a certain extent - a circular maze with thick walls drawn on easel pad paper, glued to foam core board, then cut out to make something like a jig saw puzzle. Pieces were placed as the PCs came upon them, and left - the players were assumed to be competent enough to find their way back out.
Add four evil black floaties, each starting in a different quarter of the maze, and a central vault. The odds favored meeting up with two of the ghosties separately, with the other two meeting up with the team right in the middle. (Essentially Ghost Touch walls, to keep the beasties from just walking through the walls at the PCs.)
The Auld Grump
Ahh, memories.
Our very first d20 product was Campaign Options: Mazes and it was an incredibly interesting learning experience to write a near 100-page book on maze adventures and campaigns. If there was one particular trick (and it works for even regular dungeons, though I've only tried it once), it's to take a large sheet of paper and cut out a circular hole in the middle. That hole represents the range of sight the PCs have. As they move around the map, they can only see what's available in the circle, cutting off valuable information to the players. While they can see some hallways outside the sheet of paper, they cannot tell how to get there. When you challenge the players to get through the maze, it saves on countless dice rolls and makes the matter more interesting to run. Then when you see them going down the same hallway they did before checking for traps that have already been disabled, mission accomplished.
(Especially after players made fun of me for calling on Perception checks non-stop in the campaign. After this, they realized there's nothing wrong with Perception checks...)
This trick is easier to do in 4E as there's no darkvision to muck it all up and I always limited it to 6-8 squares in diameter just to simplify but it cuts down on a lot of rules and forces the players to actually figure it out... with their BRAINS.
Our very first d20 product was Campaign Options: Mazes and it was an incredibly interesting learning experience to write a near 100-page book on maze adventures and campaigns. If there was one particular trick (and it works for even regular dungeons, though I've only tried it once), it's to take a large sheet of paper and cut out a circular hole in the middle. That hole represents the range of sight the PCs have. As they move around the map, they can only see what's available in the circle, cutting off valuable information to the players. While they can see some hallways outside the sheet of paper, they cannot tell how to get there. When you challenge the players to get through the maze, it saves on countless dice rolls and makes the matter more interesting to run. Then when you see them going down the same hallway they did before checking for traps that have already been disabled, mission accomplished.
(Especially after players made fun of me for calling on Perception checks non-stop in the campaign. After this, they realized there's nothing wrong with Perception checks...)
This trick is easier to do in 4E as there's no darkvision to muck it all up and I always limited it to 6-8 squares in diameter just to simplify but it cuts down on a lot of rules and forces the players to actually figure it out... with their BRAINS.
DM just had us in a maze today. Didn't enjoy it for all the same reasons discussed above. It was also exacerbated by the fact it was all 5' wide, so when there was combat it was very challenging to fight effectively.
5' hallways + swarms requiring area effects to kill = many people taking tons of dex damage from the hellwasps and massively draining the resources of the warmage and the psion before we could fight the big-bad.
5' hallways + swarms requiring area effects to kill = many people taking tons of dex damage from the hellwasps and massively draining the resources of the warmage and the psion before we could fight the big-bad.
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