Maze Knights

Re-examining an old design

I’ve been thinking about Maze Knights again.

Maze Knights was a project I was working on before Knave 2e, an evolution of my Maze Rats game that pushed the design in a very different direction. It fell by the wayside as I worked on Knave 2e, and my enthusiasm for it waned as I felt that it wasn’t coming together in the way that I wanted.

But the key feature of Maze Knights is something that still really excites me and has me working on it again. It’s a feature that virtually no other games are exploring: giving each player run a squad of characters to control rather than only a single PC. “Funnel” sessions for RPGs like Dungeon Crawl Classics, Shadowdark and other OSR games are really the only times this sort of thing is attempted, and those games are typically intended to be one-shots. You get four nearly useless level-0 PCs to control, run them through a meat grinder, and see who comes out the other side alive.

But it’s not the carnage and meatgrinding of these games that excites me when I play them, it’s the way that controlling four characters completely changes how you interact with RPG game worlds.

My favorite aspect of RPGs is planning and problem solving, where I have to use the tools and resources I have available to overcome obstacles in unexpected ways. This is the most fun when all the PCs are working together, but coordinating these stunts often runs into a lot of friction. Every player has their own idea of what would be cool to do and they often don’t like one player planning out their actions for them. Some don’t want to play a risky part in the scheme and prefer to play it safe instead.

The advantage of controlling multiple characters is that you can pull off these coordinated feats all by yourself, without having a debate about it. If other players want to help using their characters, that’s great, but it’s not required. It just makes everything so much smoother when you can orchestrate and execute a multi-person plan yourself. Those big teamwork moments that used to be few and far between in normal sessions? You can do them all the time now!

Controlling a squad also makes the world more interactive. When I play in a game, my PC is like a hand that I use to reach into the fictional world and affect it. When you have multiple PCs, you have multiple hands. You can mold and prod the world in many places at once and feel it push back. A charismatic wizard can affect the world differently than a surly thief, so controlling both immerses you into the world at a deeper level, because you can experience more sides of it. In some ways it allows you to be a kind of mini-GM because you can play out whole scenes where your characters each react to a situation differently.

Multiple PCs also means you can have a higher risk tolerance. When you only play a single PC, your whole session is riding on them staying alive. If they die, your story is over, and you have to spend time either sitting out or making a new character from scratch. When you play a team, the death of one character doesn’t slow you down. You’re not discovering his story, but the story of the whole group. While you still want to keep everyone alive, you’re more willing to try risky gambits, which keeps the game exciting.

In sum, controlling multiple characters fits remarkably well with the OSR playstyle. This is something that was more common in early D&D, as a PC would often have any number of hirelings or henchmen at their command, but this has fallen out of favor in recent years. Maze Knights aims to make it a central feature.

So what were the problems with Maze Knight’s original design, and how am I evolving it from here?