New use for Intuit Direction a friend of mine proposed.

[RangerWickett]

Please forgive his poor formatting.

So if you spend a minute to try to retrace your steps or whatever, and roll successfully, you can correctly recall how to get where you were trying to go.
This would be something you can take 10 or 20 on, unless you're being chased or somesuch.
DC = 5 X (# of rooms away you want to try to remember)... it's possible to forget what the adjacent rooms are, but bloody unlikely.
+1 to the roll for every time you follow a route from where you are to where you're getting.
Success means push the fast forward button rather than going a-b-c- etc.
Failure means push the fast forward button but the heroes get lost.
This would be replacing the current state, where 1) the players might be better at remembering directions than their characters... like a recent case where the goblin was the one who remembered where everything was. (never mind that he has the highest intelligence in the party) and 2) people say "I go to the cave, now I go to the back of the cave, now I go through the portal, now I cross the bridge..."

 

[willpax]

I would applaud ways to make intuit direction more useful.

I'm not sure that checking room by room is quite the right mechanic. You might make it "fork by fork"--that is, for every time there is a significant choice of direction, the DC for remembering the entire route is slightly increased (perhaps by +1 per option available).

You might require checks after a sleep--if the check fails, the group is disoriented and must rely on memory (int checks) to find significant landmarks. Having been caving before, I can attest that you can easily lose your bearings.

As an aside, do many people allow written out maps even though none of the characters have paper or ink or light to write by? If writing maps were made slightly more cumbersome, this skill might be more desireable.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I'd much rather change intuit direction so that it does what it says, allows someone to intuit direction, not concentrate for a freaking minute and then get incorrect information. And so that you can attempt rerolls at it with DM permission.

"Are we still heading north"
"Roll intuit direction"
"Success"
"Yes, you're still heading north"

"Are we still heading north"
"Roll intuit direction"
"Fail"
"No, you're going east. After about an hour you cross over a fast-flowing river that flows perpendicular to your path"
"Hey, doesn't that river run east-west? I must have been wrong with my last intuit direction. Can I try again?"
"Sure, since you've now got an extra point of reference"
"Success"
"OK, you work out that you must still be heading north"

Whereas currently, you'd NEVER be able to correct your bearings, nor could you use it to navigate effectively. It just looks like they took the old 2nd ed rules (deliberately designed, it seems, to be useless) and used them verbatim.