Just Figured Out How to Make Sure the Party imc Explores Every Room in the Dungeon

[tauton_ikhnos]

Left hand rule defeats 90% of mazes. Adventurers never go in those mazes, however - they go in mazes designed by sadistic bastards with too much time on hands. Good tricks are:

1. Surround central area with circular hallway, like moat. Left or right, players will not breach "moat" until they decide to change pattern. Heck, use two.

2. A slope of 1 ft up or down for every 10 ft passage is not highly visible (about 5 degrees), but is sufficient to move PCs up one level after mere 120 ft of walking (with 30 ft long halls, adds up fast). Then have pit trap that drops them into different part of maze, then shuts. PCs will likely assume they are on new level, start map over again.

3. Most good mazes set up something nasty for left-handers and right-handers. Adage is "Left hand wall leads to death; right hand wall leads to pain". Central path should be cluttered, force back-n-forth, and lead to death AND pain, of course .

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Our credo is "good roleplayers always go left". It started when two players - one of them a paladin - started a race for treasure. The usual thing: First one in the room = first dibs, and the other player got his magical longsword that way (and the paladin wanted to have a longsword, cause it's a "paladin weapon"). And then once, when they started running ahead of the party again, and the other player ran left and found the treasure chamber. He told the other one "good roleplayers always go left" and it stuck.

 

[Storminator]

2. A slope of 1 ft up or down for every 10 ft passage is not highly visible (about 5 degrees), but is sufficient to move PCs up one level after mere 120 ft of walking (with 30 ft long halls, adds up fast). Then have pit trap that drops them into different part of maze, then shuts. PCs will likely assume they are on new level, start map over again.

Not true. Doubt me? Get a standard 2x4 (that's 8' long) set one end on a milk crate (more or less a foot). Now you're in the 1ft/10ft ballpark. Is it sloped? Another comparison, a handicap ramps should have a maximum slope under 3 degrees. Can you tell it's sloped?

PS

 

[tauton_ikhnos]

When it is only sloped thing? Sure.

But just walking, when everything else is in agreement with slope? Not really.

Raise your toes 1 in off ground. If you have an average foot, that's about same slope. For most folks that's not noticeable unless they have a visual cue. You can't even do calf raises on that.

 

[Storminator]

When it is only sloped thing? Sure.

But just walking, when everything else is in agreement with slope? Not really.

Raise your toes 1 in off ground. If you have an average foot, that's about same slope. For most folks that's not noticeable unless they have a visual cue. You can't even do calf raises on that.

You can feel the difference, and pretty easily. Try it.

PS

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

The second was all EOD guys and they had their own way doing things. 'We can remote move anything'. These guys would do everything in their power to actually not touch anything that might be trapped. Instead they would use ropes. hooks, anything under the sun, to try and move/open an object. Institutional mindset I guess.

Thullgrim

Heck, my rogue did that and all my military experience is from reading Tom Clancy.

But that's because my character got bundled back to a priest one too many times after touching something. Even his "corpse handling gloves*" didn't help.

I was *so* glad when I got a ring of telekinesis for him.

Brad

* - Layers of leather, iron, lead, more leather, and silk. We never actually statted them out (hrm, maybe that's why they didn't work!), but one would NEVER use them for anything that required fine detail. Think -15 to Open Locks, Disable Device, whatnot.

 

[Impeesa]

There's a hallway between two buildings at my university. It's not sloped enough for the visual cues to give it away unless you're looking for it... just enough that you can feel it.

And on the topic at hand... I tend to favor a depth-first search methodology, with any forks chosen with an intuition-based best-first algorithm. That will get you an exhaustive search of the dungeon, but still likely get you to your goal early on. By contrast, the always-go-left rule is effectively a depth-first search with forks taken left to right. With both, you have to account for looping hallways, but you can still depth-first search a state space with cycles - just treat any room you've been to already as a dead end, and go back.

--Impeesa--

 

[oskar_deepscout]

Our group doesn't seems to have a left/right bias. They are much more concerned with not leaving unopened doors or unexplored coridors behind them. Maybe I've cut off their retreat one too many times and made them paranoid. The end result is that they tend to enter every room.

My group does this as well, but more out of institutional paranoia than anything I had specifically done. They are all old Grognards and are very tactical when in a dungeon.

I like the sloping passages thing, and will have to design a maze where left or right do not get you out

 

[Sialia]

The worst, mind you --bar none-WORST game I was ever in (not the most painful, just the least interesting waste of my life) that I was ever in was written and run by a GM who thought the whole point of D&D was to make the pcs set foot in every square on the piece of graph paper that was his dungeon.

There were no monsters. There were no traps. There were no NPCs. There was no treasure. There was no internal architectual logic to why anybody would ever build a complex as vast and sprawling as a full sheet of graph paper where 1 square equals ten feet. (It was the small squares kind of graph paper.) Every single square was a part of a room--the walls all ran along the thin blue lines and had no aparent thickness. Most of the rooms were quite small. We spent a full four hour slot painstakingly copying onto our piece of graph paper what he had put on his, one room at a time.

Reminds me a bit of the cube farm.com where I used to work, now that I come to think of it. We weren't sure what we were doing there, either.

We wound up similarly homicidal at the end of the experience, too.

 

[barsoomcore]

My group still worries about an iron door they left unopened -- two and a half years ago. They still say, whenever they're faced with an item they need to find or a person they need to track down:

"It's probably behind that iron door we never opened."