As promised in my previous, and rather downbeat post, I'll now counterpoint my failure with a success. The reward for the unfortunate dungeon, The Paper Maze, was the location of the next leg of the quest. The "Treasure" room contained little of the sort, but it did contain a large table with a detailed map of the island in which were placed two pins. One pin marked the party's current location, the other sat a few days' journey away and was labelled "Argent". Now, the title of the dungeon was a hint (argent is the Latin word for silver) and easily deciphered by one of my players who happens to be a chemist. A degree in chemistry is not required to complete this puzzle. Once they arrived at the location, they were met with a small stone building with an open entryway leading to stairs down and two more lines of those strange runes I previously mentioned. It is at this point that I feel I should mention that the runes I've been talking about are not simply some cut-and-paste from Tolkien, nor an extant written language. I personally developed a system of (mostly) consistent logographs, complete with their own grammatical structure. I did it for fun. That's how I spend my free time. Well, that and actually writing the game. *cough* (I will include details on these runes in a later post)
Anyway, on to the dungeon proper. Descending the stairs brought the party to an ornate metal door. The rogue searched for traps and found a trigger for one. Unable to discern its purpose, he disabled it. Had they simply opened the door, they might have found that it merely unfurled a welcome banner. (These dungeons are clearly designed by a wizard with a sense of humor.) Once past the door, the party enters a very large and very empty room. The only object in the room is a dome-shaped pedestal with six buttons on it. Each button contains two runes. These runes, as the players correctly determined after some experimentation, are an adjective and a creature or weapon. Pressing one button causes it to light up and an illusion of the thing described by the runes to appear in one corner of the room. Pressing a second button causes a second illusion to appear in the adjacent corner. Once two illusions have appeared, they become solid and "real" until they are dealt with. I use scare quotes because the things summoned are not entirely real. The creatures summoned only have partial hitpoints for a creature of their type, and damage that they deal is partially healed after the encounter. The one weapon that can be summoned, a copper sword, simply flies at the other illusion (or the activating player if summoned twice) and deals this same illusory damage. Not all of the summoned things are hostile (as it turns out, three of the four my players encountered were, but that was mostly bad luck). The correct response ended up being to summon two silver dragon illusions who then opened the door forward. All of my players found this puzzle to be particularly fun (even the one who died to unfortunate critical hits, more on that in later posts).
So now that I have a successful dungeon and a failed dungeon, I need to compare and contrast to determine what I did right and what to avoid in the future. So what were the major differences in the planning stage? Well, to start with the obvious, I spent a lot more time planning Argent than I did on the Paper Maze. But I sincerely doubt that planning time necessarily equates to a better dungeon. They both had an interesting theme, and the descriptions of the dungeons were cool, so that also can't be the problem. So, in my mind, the problem comes down simply to the fact that I handled the Paper Maze so poorly as to make an otherwise interesting encounter into an unengaging snorefest. I believe that if I had simply handled it a bit better it could have been very fun. To that end, I plan to try it again with another group whenever I get the chance.
Long story short, don't be dumb. It can only hamper the fun of other players at the table.
-Daniel
Showing posts with label Puzzle Dungeon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Puzzle Dungeon. Show all posts
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
The Paper Maze: Wherein I discuss my failure to design an engaging puzzle
I can think of no better way to start off this blog than by discussing a major failure I had when designing my current campaign. I will begin by giving some backstory for the campaign, continue with an explanation of the failed dungeon and conclude with thoughts on what ought to have been done differently. This post deals with puzzle dungeons, which some people do not think make for good game design or particularly engaging games. However, this post is not about puzzle dungeons in general, but simply a single instance of a particularly bad one.
My current campaign started when an acquaintance of mine purchased a large, castle-shaped DM screen at my local game shop. It's a beautiful set piece on the table, it has racks for miniatures and two of the parapets contain dice towers (one faces out, the other in). It does a wonderful job of keeping my notes hidden, making secret dice rolls and, importantly, really sets the mood. I asked him if he was a big D&D player, since I'd not heard of him playing any RPGs before. He told me that he's never played, but he enjoys collecting the minis, and would like to play at some point. I immediately set to work recruiting four more people (two of whom have been friends since high school) and thus my campaign began. We're using 3.5 D&D in a homebrew setting with custom deities, maps, et cetera. We use old-school style hex clearing and heavy combat as well as a story rife with homage to classic modules.
The dungeon in question came up as part of a quest line in which all of the dungeons are puzzles. This was the first dungeon in the quest, and the hook for the whole line. It was a short dungeon, meant only to break up the over-land travel, and provide more directions for the players to go. It was so short, in fact, that it had only three rooms: the entrance/exit, the "treasure" room and the room containing the puzzle itself. This puzzle wasn't too complicated (the get trickier as the quest line progresses), it was pretty much just a simple maze marked with undecipherable runes. Normally in 3.5, pretty much any text is decipherable (given time and a wizard), but these runes are actually part of a later puzzle, where the players will eventually have to determine their meaning themselves. The interesting part of the maze was that all of the walls were made of paper panels. As is common in D&D, one player immediately tried to bust through one of the panels, which sprung the trap. He was hit with a Maze spell, and was stuck on a pocket dimension for several rounds. The players then proceeded, mostly unmolested, through the maze, only having party members Mazed two or three more times.
As you may have guessed, the failure of this dungeon was that the players had basically no meaningful choices to make. They simply walked through a maze while I described things. Occasionally, dice were rolled to determine if anything interesting happened. I had pretty much reduced their agency to zero, while I narrated the dungeon. Fortunately, only one player complained, and the dungeon was short. I think the only reason that I didn't have five angry players at the table was that my narration was interesting enough that they didn't think about it until after the game ended. Also, the concept of a maze that Mazes you is pretty cool. My failure was not so much in the design of the dungeon, but how I resolved it.
So now I shall end this post with some possible solutions to this problem dungeon. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I could have made the experience better, so here are some of my ideas. I could have made the dungeon more engaging with a large, printed map (so as to avoid having to draw on my wet-erase mat), then had the players pull from a Jenga tower as they moved. A collapsed tower is a Maze. Or I could have had some sort of motivation to keep moving forward, like a (possibly illusory) lava flow, forcing them to make reflex saves to avoid breaking the walls if they move faster than a cautious walk. There are a number of ways I could have made the experience more engaging, but I failed to adequately plan the encounter, choosing instead to focus more on the combat encounters and the worldbuilding details that I will discuss in a future post. Since that session, I have allocated much more of my planning time to ensuring that my puzzles are both engaging and challenging.
This post is already much longer than I had anticipated, so I shall rather abruptly end here. Next time I post, I think I'll describe a much more successful puzzle dungeon, and contrast it with this one to figure out what I did differently.
-Daniel
My current campaign started when an acquaintance of mine purchased a large, castle-shaped DM screen at my local game shop. It's a beautiful set piece on the table, it has racks for miniatures and two of the parapets contain dice towers (one faces out, the other in). It does a wonderful job of keeping my notes hidden, making secret dice rolls and, importantly, really sets the mood. I asked him if he was a big D&D player, since I'd not heard of him playing any RPGs before. He told me that he's never played, but he enjoys collecting the minis, and would like to play at some point. I immediately set to work recruiting four more people (two of whom have been friends since high school) and thus my campaign began. We're using 3.5 D&D in a homebrew setting with custom deities, maps, et cetera. We use old-school style hex clearing and heavy combat as well as a story rife with homage to classic modules.
The dungeon in question came up as part of a quest line in which all of the dungeons are puzzles. This was the first dungeon in the quest, and the hook for the whole line. It was a short dungeon, meant only to break up the over-land travel, and provide more directions for the players to go. It was so short, in fact, that it had only three rooms: the entrance/exit, the "treasure" room and the room containing the puzzle itself. This puzzle wasn't too complicated (the get trickier as the quest line progresses), it was pretty much just a simple maze marked with undecipherable runes. Normally in 3.5, pretty much any text is decipherable (given time and a wizard), but these runes are actually part of a later puzzle, where the players will eventually have to determine their meaning themselves. The interesting part of the maze was that all of the walls were made of paper panels. As is common in D&D, one player immediately tried to bust through one of the panels, which sprung the trap. He was hit with a Maze spell, and was stuck on a pocket dimension for several rounds. The players then proceeded, mostly unmolested, through the maze, only having party members Mazed two or three more times.
As you may have guessed, the failure of this dungeon was that the players had basically no meaningful choices to make. They simply walked through a maze while I described things. Occasionally, dice were rolled to determine if anything interesting happened. I had pretty much reduced their agency to zero, while I narrated the dungeon. Fortunately, only one player complained, and the dungeon was short. I think the only reason that I didn't have five angry players at the table was that my narration was interesting enough that they didn't think about it until after the game ended. Also, the concept of a maze that Mazes you is pretty cool. My failure was not so much in the design of the dungeon, but how I resolved it.
So now I shall end this post with some possible solutions to this problem dungeon. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I could have made the experience better, so here are some of my ideas. I could have made the dungeon more engaging with a large, printed map (so as to avoid having to draw on my wet-erase mat), then had the players pull from a Jenga tower as they moved. A collapsed tower is a Maze. Or I could have had some sort of motivation to keep moving forward, like a (possibly illusory) lava flow, forcing them to make reflex saves to avoid breaking the walls if they move faster than a cautious walk. There are a number of ways I could have made the experience more engaging, but I failed to adequately plan the encounter, choosing instead to focus more on the combat encounters and the worldbuilding details that I will discuss in a future post. Since that session, I have allocated much more of my planning time to ensuring that my puzzles are both engaging and challenging.
This post is already much longer than I had anticipated, so I shall rather abruptly end here. Next time I post, I think I'll describe a much more successful puzzle dungeon, and contrast it with this one to figure out what I did differently.
-Daniel
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