I used to design mazes; that is, I still do from time to time when I need them for a world design, but I used to do it frequently, just as mazes, just for fun.  I recall while working at the radio station in the early eighties more than once spending half an hour drawing out a maze on a bit of paper so that some guy on the A.M. side whose name was John (who once drew a cute cartoon of a dragon trying to eat the studio) could solve it in a few minutes.  I had already by then devised a means of creating a three-dimensional maze of sorts, one drawn on paper but requiring the solver to think in levels to solve it.  I once thought to offer designs of that sort to Games Magazine, but never actually had one to offer after I had that thought.

  I did carry the three-dimensional maze concept over to my games, once in a while devising a genuine maze in which to confound the characters, and sometimes doing so in a multi-level format such as the interior of a building.  Such a maze will appear in The Playground in Multiverser:  The Third Book of Worlds, assuming the lost data can be rebuilt (following a devastating hard drive crash) in a timely fashion so that book can go to print.  I’ll point in hope to that as an example (of a maze in three dimensions–it is not of the sort intended to be solved on paper, but from within), and talk about mazes a bit–how to design them, how to use them, how to break them.

  A genuine maze has only one solution; that is, there is only one path through it that does not backtrack on itself, and only one way to reach any specific point within it.  It is a type of puzzle.  Some people are particularly good at solving them; however, it is often the case that such solutions are easily made on paper, from above, as it were, and not so easily derived from within the maze.  That is, draw the maze on a sheet of paper and show it to someone, and if they are good at mazes their eyes will quickly trace the escape.  Put the same person in a high hedge maze, and they have no clue which way to move.  Finding your way through a maze is a very different skill from drawing a path through one on paper.

  Thus creating a maze for your characters to follow can present a challenge to the players of a sort they wouldn’t expect.  How do you find your way through a maze, when you can’t see it except from within, when your view is limited to the path before and behind, the walls to either side, and the short distances down diverging paths?  Obviously, you can map it; but until you’ve found the exit, your map won’t tell you much of anything about the maze except where you have and have not been–and once you’ve found the exit, you don’t really need the map anymore unless you’re planning to return.  The players whose characters are in a maze very much need to devise new skills.  Unless they are extremely connected to their characters, their senses of direction probably won’t help much; unless they can extrapolate a great deal from a little data, their maps won’t help much, either.

  However, it is in the nature of a true maze that it can be solved.  The apparently secret technique with which I solve mazes (apparently secret because so many players are surprised when I use it effectively) is known to me as “left walling”.  In essence, you put your (real or imaginary) left hand on the wall next to you, and you follow that wall wherever it goes.  Because the maze has only one path through, eventually you will come to the other exit, even without a map; the wall to the left must connect the entrance to the exit, no matter how convoluted it is between them.  (The wall to the right works just as well; but do you want to have your right hand committed to touching the wall when you’re lost in a maze that might be inhabited by hostile creatures, particularly if they know the paths and you do not?)  If the maze is three-dimensional, you must remember that “up” and “down” are also part of the direction the wall takes, and you must follow them as well, in a consistent pattern.  That’s really all there is to it.  No matter how complex the maze, by eliminating all the dead ends to one side in an orderly fashion this will get you through it.

  Now that I’ve told you how to solve absolutely any maze out there, what can you do to prevent people from solving your mazes so quickly?  Certainly you can make the maze more complicated; but that only delays the inevitable.  It is unfortunate that, as with my objections to scrambled words back in Aptrusis so long ago, this technique reduces the solving of a maze to busy work, and making the maze more complex only increases the amount of busy work.  It becomes boring after the player has proved his ability to crack one.  The situation is somewhat improved if the maze is an integral part of what becomes the character’s territory, as in that case the player’s intimate knowledge of its paths may become the character’s advantage against his own adversaries; but predicting what parts of your world player characters will claim as their own can get you a job on the Psychic Hotline.  You want to make solving the maze interesting in itself.

  One answer is not to design a maze, but a labyrinth.  Labyrinths may have multiple pathways through them; it is precisely because of this that they are easier to solve from above, but more difficult to solve from within, as passages can wrap back around to their starting points, breaking the left wall and the right wall continuities in ways that mazes cannot.  This is particularly effective if at least one of the two end points–entrance or exit–is not on the outside edge of the complex.  If your characters enter from above or below, you can easily have the left wall break off in a long convoluted set of passages that ultimately circle around the stairs and become the right wall.  Do the same with the facing wall, and you force the players to abandon the walls entirely and look for more effective means of unraveling the riddle.

  You can also incorporate mazes within labyrinths, having sections that can only be transited by a single path.  One reason I’m not worried about the players becoming bored with the maze within The Playground is that it will not be immediately apparent when they are in the maze, as opposed to similar labyrinthine sections of the complex.  Also in that case, since the maze repeats, once they have mastered it once they can use their knowledge of it in numerous ways.

  We offered another potential solution long ago in Screen Wrap:  cheat.  No, I don’t really mean that you should actually cheat.  Rather, I mean that you should devise a labyrinthine section that uses techniques not immediately apparent to the players or their characters which violate the ordinary expectations and the rules and conventions of true mazes.  Have the walls move when the characters aren’t looking (as I now recall they do in Labyrinth at times).  Have magic or technology installed within the corridors that will move the characters without their being aware of it.  Render their maps useless by reorienting everything regularly.  Some techniques for doing so are in that article.

  I had a much simpler solution in one dungeon.  One entire level was a maze; corridors meandered into dead ends in all directions, and characters could spend hours trying to find a way through.  It was a genuine maze; there was only one path that led through it from one end to the other.  Using maze-solving techniques you were guaranteed to get through it.  The complication for the players was that through was not where they wanted to get.  Both ends of the maze connected to the level above, whence the characters came.  The route to the level below, whither they wished to go, was not so apparent.  I had hidden a secret door somewhere in the maze, and they had to locate that door to be able to move deeper into the dungeon.

  I was not entirely cruel and heartless about it.  I put the door on a main corridor, right on the route that had to be followed to get from one end to the other.  I put it on the logical center point of the maze–the place that could be said to be the dividing line between corridors that wandered off the north door and those that wandered off the south door.  (The maze was designed to be challenging from either entrance; I find it best to do this even with pencil mazes, as otherwise players will solve them backwards by beginning at the end.)  Also, the hidden door led to a complex of rooms on the same level.  Thus if the maze were mapped it would be evident that there was an inaccessible space in one section, a clue to the location of the door which must be along one of the adjacent corridors.  In short, the problem facing the players was that it was simple enough (if time consuming) to get through the maze, but that wasn’t a useful outcome.

  I have a design for a board game that creates new maze-like labyrinths each time it is played; the design actually predates my awareness of role playing games, being the first board game I designed, when I was in college.  Part of what makes that game work is the necessity placed on the players to remember information–they can’t map the maze, and they don’t want to reveal it to their opponents.  Mazes and labyrinths have a lot of potential to enhance play, once you know how to use them.  There’s probably a lot more that should be offered in this regard, but these are the basics, and with a bit of practice the rest should come.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.