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