D&D 5E Running a Maze: Is there a better way to do it?

[LordEntrails]

[MENTION=6810793]Trurl[/MENTION],
That could work really well. You could incorporate the tesseract or shifting maze ideas by on the backside have a code for each edge, when the party goes off that edge, you look at your code on the back and that tells you what adjoining sheet they then move to. That allows you to shift the connections as you want, and gives them a map of where they are so theater of the mind is minimized.

 

[jayoungr]

Spoilers for Rise of Tiamat!

If you have access to Rise of Tiamat, read the section on Xonthal's Tower. It's a "maze but not really"--the hedges are described as looking like a maze, but actually it's just a series of linked areas centering around one area with a sundial in the middle. How they leave the sundial area affects where they'll end up next. The players have to collect jewels from the other rooms and bring them back to the sundial area in order to progress.

 

[delericho]

My big problem with doing a maze is how to present it. Just draw the maze on a giant grid makes navigating the maze trivial. On the other hand, my players and I have weak theater of the mind skills and doing a maze that way would just be frustrating to them.

Have you ever had a player forget the name of an NPC, but remember them as "that guy with the beard" or "the girl with the scar", or similar?

When detailing your maze areas, I recommend trying to give each area a single strong identifier, to help the players distinguish them - "the room with the lion's head", "the room with the fountain", and so on. That kinda defeats the purpose of a maze (where they tend to deliberately look the same to try to throw people off), but in this case will probably make for a more enjoyable, if less realistic, experience.

 

[Rhenny]

I haven't read the whole thread, coming late to the party, but here's the way I ran my last maze part of an adventure.

I created a table of maze events which included non-combat encounters (exploration or interaction) and encounters, traps or strange events. I also created 3 specific locations that I wanted them to find as they traversed the maze (kind of like 3 legs of their journey).

Then, as they explored, I described what they saw and gave them chances to use whatever idea/skill they each wanted to help them get through the maze. If they made their group check (majority successes), they made it through one leg and I ran the first planned location. If they failed their group check, I threw a random encounter (or I picked one of the ones that I thought would work well at that time) and they experienced that.

It worked pretty well and I never even needed to draw out the maze.

This is also how I run wilderness exploration and travel sometimes. I did the same when I ran the Blingdenstone playtest with my group while they were exploring the underdark.

 

[Imaculata]

My personal opinion is that mazes in D&D on their own are boring. So I'd recommend abstracting the hell out of it all, and focusing on actual encounters. What makes D&D fun, is having more choices other than left or right. So if you want to make a maze in D&D fun, add more choices other than what direction to take. Reduce the size of the maze, and focus on the actual encounters inside of it, rather than the lay out. You can abstract the navigation of the maze with skill checks.

I would think of a maze in the style of the movie Labyrinth, where it is more about the journey, with all the characters, traps and puzzles along the way.