Recreating the feeling of actually being in a Labyrinth

[Quickleaf]

I'd like to throw a maze/labyrinth at my players. However, if we're drawing out maps as we go along, it's pretty easy for them to backtrack to rooms by pointing, or just looking at the map and following the pretty picture to where they want to be.

How do I get them lost? Failing that, how do I make them work hard to NOT be lost?

The old school mapping technique and the abstract skill challenge both have something to offer. Me, I take a bastardized hybrid approach that's taken several sessions (make that years ) to hammer out. It's meant to challenge both the characters and the players...

1. Think of a puzzle, then layer it inside another puzzle (or two!); think it of like matroshka dolls with one stacked inside the other. Solve the puzzle to escape the labyrinth. Make sure there is more than one answer. Scatter clues around the labyrinth.

For example, I ran a clockwork labyrinth which was malfunctioning, so that it could change as the PCs walked thru it, in order to stabilize the labyrinth the PCs had to reach a central control panel had a series of three teleporter gates each which teleported to a certain side of another gate. However, none of the teleporter gates teleported to the control panel. The trick was the PCs had to solve another puzzle to unlock a gear mechanism which allowed them to rotate the order of the teleporter gates. Then they could go back to the teleporter gates and use them in the right sequence to reach the central control panel.

2. Make up a random encounter table, with several of the entries being navigational hazards/complications.

For example, one of the hazards in my example labyrinth was "Vertigo" in which a shift of the clockwork floor revealed a yawning chasm.

3. Orienteering Checks. Have the group make group skill checks (the type of skill useable and DC is up to you). For each failure roll on your random encounter table. For each success provide a clue to one of the puzzles. Also be generous with auto-successes for clever ideas or useful spells. This provides built-in pacing.

As soon as the party enters the clockwork labyrinth they set to work exploring. Let's say there are 4 players, 2 who get successes and 2 who get fails. That means roll twice on random encounter table and provide two clues.

4. The Map. If you're going to be exploring the dungeon for a long session or several sessions make an appropriate map. If it's just for a short session or part of a session the map is not needed. If you do end up using a map, I suggest incorporating it into one of the puzzles, as something the PCs can discover after reproducing the map. This can really add incentive to exploring the labyrinth.

In the example labyrinth, the way the PCs located the gear which unlocked the teleporter gates was thru a set of coordinates. Once they explored the entire clockwork labyrinth (it wasn't too large), I gave them an 8x11 version. They just had to determine how the coordinate system related to the grid, and they were good to go.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Number of things:

• don't draw the map - let the players to that.
• crazy measurements - the hall way appears to be 30 steps long (dwarf) or 10 fathoms deep, don't tell them
• Portals - nuff said
• Illusions - while the spells work, visual ones can work just as well to mess with character judgement

 

[Celebrim]

I'd like to throw a maze/labyrinth at my players.

The correct answer to this is, "Don't."

Every beginning DM wants throw a maze at the PC's. In a PnP RPG, this almost never works out as well in practice as it does in ones imagination.

The problem is the redundancy of the game play. Mazes of twisty corridors all alike make for an unfun subgame to your RPG. Solving a maze is usually a brute force problem requiring relatively little creativity and certainly little in the way of imagination. To the extent that you can make the game play diverse, creative, and imaginative by putting other stuff in the maze, you can pretty much always improve the maze by keeping that other stuff and getting rid of the maze.

What you should be keeping in mind is that every good dungeon is itself enough like a maze - asymmetrical, unpredictable, filled with unknowns - that you don't need an explicit maze of corridors. If you must have an explicit maze in the dungeon, it's best to resolve it as series of interludes or skill challenges and abstract out the specific path in the maze. Think of the presentation of the maze in the movie Labyrinth. We as the audience aren't presented with much of the endless tedium of navigating the maze, but instead look in on the heroinne when she is facing critical decision points in the maze. The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon that featured Venger's Maze used the exact same approach. I think that is the approach you are best off emulating.

In my game, Navigation is a skill, and getting out of a maze is a simple matter of stating your intention to go back to the entrance and making an appropriately difficult skill check to 'remember the way'.

If you must have a maze with a specific map anyway, make it small. More than 15 or so dead ends in the entire maze is too much. Remember, dead ends are basically empty rooms and your dungeon shouldn't have empty rooms. If it's a trick maze where the real exit is through a secret door in a dead end or a trap door in the ceiling, make sure that the obvious exit at least leads somewhere interesting on its own (deadly is a form of interesting) and make sure that there is a clue somewhere in the dungeon that hints at the secret passage.

How do I get them lost? Failing that, how do I make them work hard to NOT be lost?

Mapping is not easy. If they insist on approaching the maze at a brute force level, force them to draw a map based on estimated distances and directions. If your maze is not based on a square and doesn't have right angles and doesn't conform easily to a grid, they'll probably have a hard time mapping. Make sure you only allow mapping if the PC's have the minimum tools necessary to draw a map.

The usual approach here is to have some sort of magic that makes mapping even more difficult than usual (as used in B2: Keep on the Borderlands).

 

[Squire James]

I'd like to throw a maze/labyrinth at my players.

First, you need David Bowie...

 

[TheAuldGrump]

You may find This Article handy. Cribbed from a Pathfinder adventure, it approaches mazes from the standpoint of time spent, not precise mapping.

The Auld Grump

 

[Niccodaemus]

I'm just curious what the "new school" way of mapping is? You guys don't describe the dungeon and make the players map it?

As for getting people lost, the simplest answer is pivoting walls.

Imagine an X intersection. If you are approaching it, there would seem to be three choices. But a pivoting wall can limit that choice to one or two. When you find your way back to the intersection, unless you are a Dwarf perhaps, you could go a different way without ever realizing you aren't following your own steps.

Another is a round room, with 8 to 12 exits. There are landmarks (skeletons, suit of armor, etc...) by each exit. When players leave the room, goblins come in and move things around.

 

[Rogue Agent]

Likewise. My group tried this once in 2nd Ed. and the communication was off enough that our map and the GM's map looked nothing alike. It felt tedious and frustrating but we never got the sense of being lost like a labyrinth should project.

Once mapping of any kind if taking place -- whether objective through a battlemap or subjectively through verbal descriptions -- you're unlikely to get lost. It doesn't take much accuracy for a map to give you enough information to successfully get you back to the exit.

So, IME, you'll usually get away with it once (at most): If your players go into a sufficiently complex, non-linear dungeon and don't map their progress, then you've got decent odds of them becoming disoriented and lost when they eventually turn around and try to leave again.

The degree to which this is "fun" depends largely on there being some sort of valuable pay-off from being lost. This usually means that the dungeon is meaningfully jaquayed, filled with interesting content, and variable depending on approach.

Beyond that, if you want to get the players "lost" in the sense that they need to puzzle their way back out, you'll need to achieve it in some other way:

- Teleportal effects
- Dungeon layouts that shift
- An exit that shifts, collapses, or disappears
- One-way passages in general

In general, these things only seem to be fun if there is a way for players to "out-smart" or "overcome" the situation. If it's all just random chance, the players usually won't have fun.

Another good way to handle this is to make it a carrot ("there's something cool if you can figure out how to get through this maze") rather than a stick ("you can't leave the dungeon until you figure out how to get through this maze").

 

[DDogwood]

Unless the PCs specifically take steps to do so, why would they be aware of exact distances?
.

Back when we played AD&D, it was assumed that the PCs DID specifically pace out every corridor, search every wall for traps and secret doors, and draw a map. That's why the rules said that characters traveled at 120 feet per minute in a dungeon.

It's also why it's called a "dungeon crawl" instead of, say, a dungeon RUN.

But abstracting things can be a good way to do it, using skill challenges etc.

Another trick that can work with some groups is to give each player a slightly different map of the dungeon ahead of time, along with an incentive to keep the map hidden from other players (hidden treasure, a curse, or whatever). The players will realize sooner or later what's going on, but hopefully not before they've entered the teleporter/elevator/spinning room. Then they have to figure out whose map is accurate (answer: none of them) and they'll at least have some sense of being lost.

 

[Stormonu]

A skill challenge would probably be the best way to handle it.

Some ideas to throw in to make things interesting (all stolen from old modules from over the years):

Teleporters (Lost Caverns of Tsjocanth, Pharaoh)
False walls (various)
Vertical as well as horizontal ascents
Shifting corridors/Moving panels/One-way doors or passages
Mind-confusing magic, gas or drugs (Keep on the Borderlands)
Corridors stretched or twisted by magic (think [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0v2xnl6LwJE&feature=fvwrel"]Escher[/ame]), but appears visually normal (used in Queen of the Demonweb Pits)
Invisible walls (and pits) (Dragons of Hope)

and
Tesseracts (Dungeon #29, Ex Libris)

and
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY5PkidV1cM"]Cubes[/ame]

 

[delericho]

Beyond that, if you want to get the players "lost" in the sense that they need to puzzle their way back out, you'll need to achieve it in some other way:

- An exit that shifts, collapses, or disappears
- One-way passages in general

Actually, this may be the simplest and best solution. If the PCs get cut off from their entry route, then the issue becomes one of finding an alternate exit, rather than trying to retrace your steps.

This also means that keeping a good map is very useful (since you can go back where you came), but it isn't an infallible solution, since going back doesn't take you to safety.

Oh, and it means that all the challenges are ahead of you - there's no stage where the PCs have killed all the monsters and have to retrace their steps through empty rooms to get out - which is prone to getting tedious real quick.

(The films "Sanctum" and "The Descent" provide a model for this - in both cases the entrance to the 'dungeon' gets blocked by flood or rockfall, and so the characters have to find an alternative way out.)