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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5794731" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.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).</blockquote>

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