Is there any way to run a maze or labyrinth that isn't tedious or boring?

Is there any way to run a maze or labyrinth that isn't tedious or boring?

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Make the maze not look like a maze

Add David Bowie

Instead of just repeating "You come to a fork, do you choose left or right", populate the maze with other lost inhabitants, sanctioned beings that are intentionally there, and traps or other environmental hazards.

For as shitty of a book as it was, this novel did a great job of describing how weird the Mazes created by the Lady of Pain could be. I recommend reading it if anyone wants to get some good ideas.

This. A maze doesn't have to be a bunch of brick walls, it could be a normal dungeon, or a castle, or even a city scape, where everything is designed to be labyrinthine in nature.

Make it a wrestling ring that happens to be a maze.
TONIGHT, IN MAZEMANIA IV...WILL HUUK HOGAR END THE MINOTAUR LEGENDARY STREAK?

dice rolls to generate the maze as you go

Any examples on how someone would do this?

Not that user, but it makes me think of that Dungeon Dice Monsters offshoot of Yu-Gi-Oh. The dice sort of “unfold” to make the layout of the map. You could probably do something similar to randomize a dungeon in an rpg.

There was actually a fairly interesting lamentations adventure called "the God that crawls" where you were running through the maze like catacombs of a church. The thing that made it especially confiding though, was that the party is being hunted by a monster they have no hope of killing, short of feeding it a 3rd level cleric and hoping no one else gets eaten by it during combat.

I always wanted to use a long abandoned city as maze.
Or a dwarven city that was made into a deathtrap before being abandoned.
But how to make it interesting? Chose directions + traps or puzzles can easily be a bore.
I'm afraid it would work better in a video game.

Give them multiple paths through the maze, with the route determining what sorts of things they meet.

Generate the labyrinth with tiles.

For example, have (n) tilesets in small bags based on depth into the labyrinth, to be changed at the GM's discretion. Whenever one ventures into the unknown the GM draws and places a tile (or rerolled, if the tile will pose some form of problem/if the GM wants). The tiles have different effects with risk/reward levels scaling with depth or setpiece encounters. Keep the setpieces visually vague where possible to facilitate changing or skipping encounters where needed; while a spike pit is rather hard to disguise, a fountain or statue could be used to indicate the location of an encounter or passed off as mere decoration.

For references, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Hand of Fate and Reiner Knizia's Labyrinth most immediately come to mind.

You build up dread and offer a good narrative? I mean it's not like the players are going to starve.

Betrayal at House on the Hill

>I mean it's not like the players are going to starve.
> Not trapping your players until they solve your scenario.

Concept: Labyrinth is a single cursed room.
>Your party comes across a locked chest, to pick the lock the tool need navigate a labyrinth.
>The chest is opened, to get to the treasure inside there is another labyrinth.
>You get whatever small amount of gold was in the chest, and go to put it in your pack, the pack opens to a leather labyrinth.
>The party is exhausted from dealing with all these labyrinths and decides to eat, the food enters a flesh labyrinth.
>The food digests...

youtu.be/GUArcCZFyM4
go to about the 15 minute mark
if you're not using tiles though I recommend coming up with set sizes for the T intersections, dead ends, etc. I use wet erase/battle mat and it got a little wonky but mostly worked. also, I would use the wall separator sparingly, my group rolled it a lot and it got pretty anti climactic
ymmv

In my experience, a good maze/mazelike dungeon should have a good amount of variety to keep things interesting. Don't just say "you can go left or right", make puzzles a part of navigating through it.
For example, one time I ran a dungeon that was a series of chambers that each had unique magical properties, with some sort of puzzle that needed to be solved to advance to the next chamber.
I kept things fresh by mixing straight-up puzzles with puzzle-based combat encounters, as well as environmental challenges. Everyone in the party said that it was probably the best dungeon in that campaign.

Fill it with interesting rooms and riddles.
youtube.com/watch?v=FaaXRHkl3nk

More important is this: every section of your maze should have a "trick" to it that should let the players "solve" that portion of the maze and move onto the next, giving them a sense of accomplishment and progress.

Make it "lived in" and as atmospherical as exploring real life new places, tunnels, abandoned houses or ruins can get. It can have its own world of sounds, like some parts have faint whispers you can hear, or industrial periodic clanks as cogs chane the maze. Have corners or dead ends that look like someone camped there for a while, with leftover tents covered in glowing fungus. Have the maze occasionally break into larger rooms, have unexpected shortcuts with holes on walls, as if something big crashed through (suddenly your party starts thinking walls can get scary after seeing huge holes, especially if they hear strange noises behind them). Have sections of the maze cursed with a supernatural environmental hazard that isnt just traps. Have creatures that live in mazes that are harmless, like glowing cave worms hanging from the ceiling.

Better question is why do you want to run a labyrinth?

Fuck that game and that level was good. Is the sequel any good? I have it, but haven't played it yet.
And I know this isn't /v/, but does anybody know other games like Medievil?

>Is the sequel any good?

It's very good, but it's quite different from the first in terms of gimmicks.

Maze Runner did it pretty cool.
There’s a small community of teenage boys living off the land in the center of an enormous maze with moving walls and the supplies they get periodically. They all wish to leave the maze; it’s the Runner’s job to explore and map out the maze and its patterns so as to form a safe route to the exit.
Halfway through, the MC is told that the leader of the boys (who has been here for like 5 years) and his inner circle have known every possibly maze layout, having already mapped everything within the first year. But the knowledge of what lay beyond the maze was too harsh (post-post apoc and an evil megacorp named WCKD pronounced Wicked) so they just lied to the rest of the kids that they’ll just keep mapping it out.

I agree, fuck that level. Medievil 2 is worth playing, but it's got a bit of a different feel, in a good way.

No, I meant that game and that level were good.

This and the sequel were pretty trash in terms of characters and plot, but the mazes in both were pretty top.

Water is flooding the dungeon. Party has to complete it before everything submerges.

Now not only do they have to logic through obstacles, they have to make strategic choices and be efficient about how they spend their time

What Kind of Magic Spells to use?

I liked Dylan oBrien and the Korean guy

make it more than 3 dimensional, and dont tell your players.

Don't allow the player to make a map.
Thats what I did for a horror game, the player had to find an npc in a cave but their pc's didn't have anything to write a mpa; they found the npc but they now have to escape a monster while remembering the path they took

Make it a maze with no walls

make it amazeing

Top-tier. Include tesseract rooms, where one "room" has 8 separate 3-dimensional "sides".

As a skill challenge (or mechanical equivalent).

The work's already been done for you.

When you look at it like that it seems.. runable?

Have the floor collapse into magic-dissolving lava a minute after someone steps on it. Populate it with ghosts and other creatures which don't actually "step" on anything.

Make it in hyperbolic space. I actually did that one; pic related shows the schematic of "room groups" (geomorphs, in my case), each perfectly square. You need to turn right five times to arrive at the same room group as the one you started from.

... four times, not five times. Also, have an alternate view of the same room group setup.

I think you have to ramp up the horror factor. The party are trapped in this labyrinth like place with a monster that can and will kill them. I'd have it just pick them off one by one as they try to work out how to escape.

Likewise make it more interesting than a maze. An abandoned mine, a fey hedge courtyard, a castles dungeons etc.

Dungeon Meshi or the Running Man.