Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6092846" data-attributes="member: 4937">No one says there has to be a single way through the maze.  However, this brings up the question of 'why do you need a maze at all'?  If there are multiple entrances and exits, and multiple paths through the maze, what you have isn't a map of a maze, but a map of a non-linear dungeon.  Woot!  This however typically doesn't occur to the novice DM seeking to include a maze in a dungeon because of it is a classic trope of fantasy to have a maze.  Most DM's include mazes with the idea that they add some special interest beyond that of a normal dungeon and that they are equivalent to puzzles or riddles.   Both in my opinion are wrong.  Mazes make poor puzzles since they are solved either randomly or thoroughly and neither is an intellectual excercise, and they are generally inferior to a dungeon in all respects unless they are functionally identical to a dungeon in all respects.If you really must have a Maze in the dungeon, you need to create a design that is fun to play and not merely redundant, actually involves puzzle solving because there are clues to be found, discourages solving it by being thorough (which wastes play time), and avoids the problem of empty rooms.  Even being lost and going the wrong way should involve finding things of interest.Ooops.  My rule, YMMV, but here is the post: <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?14005-Dramatic-Dungeoncrawling&p=212975&viewfull=1#post212975" target="_blank">Celebrim's 1st Enworld Post</a>Obviously it really is less of a rule than a guideline but I think it is a very good guideline.There is a very very big difference between a non-encounter room (that is EL 0), and an empty room.   An empty room is one which has no description or a trivial description and no points of interest to make the room worth inspecting.  They are like a scene in a play which has no relationship to anything else in the play.  A room that has an infrequent encounter to discover (and perhaps some clues about that infrequent encounter to uncover) is definately not empty.   I'm not sure I agree with the guideline that your dungeon should have as many non-encounters as it has encounters (certainly my best designed dungeons IMO don't, though they usually have some), but such a guideline doesn't actually conflict with Celebrim's guideline of: "Avoid having any empty rooms."</blockquote>

Verification